My stomach has burned away by now. I want to hear this—morbid curiosity and professional investment keep me riveted—but I also want Alec to rush through it just to be done, just to wipe the expression of bleak dread from his face.
“He and Sunny were together maybe a year and a bit before she ended things, and most of it was during the building and launch of Jupiter. There’s a lot Sunny won’t tell me, especially now. But I think the split had to do with how much time he was devoting to the club. That said, I got the sense that he didn’t want things to end with her. We all noticed that he was distraught.”
He adjusts his position on the float and angles his face up to the sky. I stare at his profile, at the carved hollow of his cheekbones contrasted with the plush fullness of his mouth. I feel his face imprinting in my brain.
“Around four months ago, Sunny got her first real blockbuster modeling contract—with Dior,” he says. “It seemed like she went from scraping to book every runway she could to being an absolute supermodel. She was in tube stations and billboards and in magazines. It’s been a huge deal.” For a moment his expression softens, and he looks over at me, grinning. “It’s really cool.”
“I bet,” I say. “That’s huge.”
“Yeah.” Alec moves again, restlessly slinging his arms over the floating pool noodle, leaning his chin on it. “Even though she’d broken things off, she still considered him a family friend, you know.” He swallows and then swallows again, clenching his jaw. Turning his eyes up to me, he says quietly, “This is really off the record?”
“Entirely.” I force my voice past the lump in my throat. “I promise.”
He looks back down at the water. “A couple months ago, another one of my mates from this group, Lukas, was staying with me. He’d moved to Berlin, but while he was in town, he wanted to check out Jupiter to see what Josef was up to. I didn’t much feel like going, but he and a couple of our friends went. A couple hours later, Lukas calls and tells me that Sunny had come in, but he hadn’t seen her in a couple hours, and when he had seen her, she looked already pretty drunk. He thought I might want to come get her.”
I feel like I’ve been punched. “No.”
“Sunny doesn’t drink much because she can’t handle liquor very well.” He goes quiet for a long minute, and I reach over, setting my hand on his back and rubbing lightly.
“We can do this later.”
“No. This is good. I need to do it.” He wipes a hand over his mouth, and the rest comes out robotically. “At first, I wasn’t worried. Like I said, it would be strange for her to drink a lot, but again—she was doing really well professionally. Maybe she just wanted to celebrate with Josef—they were still friends, after all. I went down there anyway, to check on her. Called Josef. No answer. Called Sunny. Her phone was turned off, so I couldn’t even locate her.” He rubs his face again. “I called Lukas, who came to find me, and together we started searching all of the VIP rooms.”
I exhale a quiet “Oh shit.”
“Yeah. We found her. It was a huge party, but it was like my eyes just immediately zeroed in on Sunny passed out on a couch. She was—” He cuts off, shaking his head. “Everyone scattered like roaches when I walked in. I picked her up, found her clothes. Took her to the restroom. She was completely unconscious. I put her…” He swallows, squinting unseeing into the surf, unable to finish the sentence, but I understand that he’s telling me he had to help get her clothes back on. “And I splashed water on her face. We sat there for a long time. I don’t know how long, but people knocked on the door. I turned off my phone. I just talked to her. Told her she was safe and had to wake up. Finally, she woke up enough to walk, but barely. I put my coat over her, walked her out a back entrance, and took her to hospital.”
Again he goes quiet, jaw working.
“She didn’t remember anything about the night. I’m thankful for that, but unless there is video footage, we may never know exactly what happened. Do I even wish for that?” He passes a shaking hand down his face. “She had an exam, of course,” he says. He pauses for a pained beat, and then nods.
This feels like another punch to my solar plexus. “Alec, oh my God.”
I understand why he wanted to do this out here, where he can say it out loud and let it be swallowed by the ocean.
“She was really sick the whole next day,” he says. “They found a cocktail of things in her system—certainly nothing she could have ordered at the bar. Josef called in the morning.” Alec looks at me, and the hollow pain in his eyes is gutting. “He was so worried. Said he didn’t know where Sunny had disappeared to. Naively, I told him what I’d seen in that room, and he was shocked. He was really quite convincing.”
I feel sick.
“To be honest, I wasn’t able to process anything or anyone else once I saw Sunny on that couch. It never occurred to me that he’d seen her in that state. Because if he had, of course he would have helped her, right? His ex? My sister?”
“Alec…”
Alec shakes his head and blinks past me. “Later that day Lukas called me to check in. Needed to talk it out—he was traumatized by it all, too. When I told him about my conversation with Josef, he was furious. He said, ‘Alec, mate, Josef was right there. He bolted the second you walked in.’ He’d been there, Gigi.”
I knew it was coming. I knew it. But it doesn’t make it any easier to hear. “So, when Josef called you, he was trying to find out what you’d seen? What Sunny knew?”
“That’s my assumption, yes.”
We let this horrible truth dissolve between us. “Does Sunny want them to bring charges?”
Alec shakes his head. “It’s been two months. But because she doesn’t remember, because she doesn’t want to be dragged through the tabloids, because she’s justifiably worried about how this would affect her public reputation, and because she went there willingly—she’s very hesitant.”
“I bet you want to kick his ass.”
He laughs once, a sharp sound. “You have no idea.” There is violence in those words; the sounds scrape out from between his teeth. He turns his face away and pulls in a deep, steadying breath. “What kind of a monster can do this—at the minimum witness what happened to Sunny and very likely be the one behind it—and call me the next day playing innocent like that? I felt so incredibly stupid.”
“You gave your friend the benefit of the doubt. That’s not stupid. That’s what good people do.”