Scandalized

I watch her, unsure what to say other than “Thank you.” I want to say that I’m sorry it exploded the way it did, but if the people who are behind the crimes end up being held accountable, we’ll probably all admit that it was worth it.

“We all have a bit of a mess to sort out,” she says, “but I didn’t want you to wonder whether it was worth breaking it. It was.”

Much like her brother, Sunny has capably read my thoughts. “I know that’s why Alec wanted to fly home to London,” I say. “To make a plan with you about how to handle the fallout.”

“He struggled to leave LA because of his feelings for you,” she says, “and so I felt the need to take charge of this. I’m sure you’ve noticed that Alexander’s tendency is to want to shelter me from the pain of this situation, and I appreciate it. I really do. But I don’t want to be coddled anymore. I don’t want to be protected. And like you said, it’s only so long before my own association with Josef is going to come out.” She picks up her mug again. “So, not that it isn’t amazing to see you for the sake of seeing you, but I have a proposition.”

Thunder rumbles beneath my ribs. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

“Word on the street is you’re unemployed.” She grins. “How’d you like to put your journalist cap back on and help me make some waves?”

Twenty-Two

Sitting across a table from Kim Min-sun, it’s hard to ignore the intensity of her beauty. The newest face of Dior is all angles and precision. She speaks with careful forethought and taps shell-pink nails against her full lips when she’s weighing how to best put something into words. It’s easy to see how she managed to get offers from eight luxury brands in only the past two months. There isn’t another face like hers out there, anywhere.

But then a smile will crash across her features, and the dramatically playful Kim family dimples appear. It’s startling, in those moments, how much she looks like her brother.

“Alexander is six years older,” she says. “He’s always been a caretaker. He would rather die than give the impression he can’t handle something.”

She says all this like these qualities explain everything. Which, I guess, they do. They explain why he feels responsible for the way she was brought up, why he can sometimes be an overprotective drag, and why, on Valentine’s Day this year, he stormed into a nightclub, pulled his sister’s drugged and unconscious body from a VIP room, and sat on a bathroom floor with her in his arms until she was able to stand on her own feet and leave with him.

They explain, too, why he let the press beat him into hiding this past weekend, after a British tabloid posted photos of him escorting a cloaked woman out of the notorious club Jupiter. With Jupiter under scrutiny for being the site of a string of alleged sex crimes, the photos quickly went viral.

“He would rather let the world think that he’d committed a crime than tell the world what happened to me,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to talk about it, but there is no way I’m going to let this destroy the best person I know.”

I watch Sunny read the draft of the article, and then her focus tracks to the beginning, and she starts again, slower now. A three-hour conversation has been distilled down to this: eight thousand words detailing what happened that night at Jupiter, what she remembers, what Alec has told her, what he did for her, and even my connection to their family dating back twenty years—to be emailed out tonight to whoever wins the bidding war. Sunny insists I get paid for my work. I insisted the money be donated to sexual assault survivor funds. Yael reminded me that I’m unemployed, and we settled on donating half. Yael is currently fielding calls in my bedroom from the final contenders: the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, GQ.

Sunny finishes reading and sets my laptop down, her eyes shining. “You did such a good job, Gigi. I can’t believe you did that so fast.”

I can’t, either. “I guess I was motivated. I really need the world to fall over itself to apologize to Alec.”

“Well,” she says, “and to you.”

“I care a lot less about that.”

Sunny smiles at me, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’ve never heard him sound lovesick before.”

“He called me all weekend,” I tell her. “I left the phone he gave me here because I thought he left. I was a mess, too. Everything’s a mess.”

“I really hope you two can work it out.” She studies my face. “He needs this in his life. He has such good friends, but I want him to have a person. A you person.”

I nod, swallowing down the nauseating wave of worry, longing, and regret. “I hope he calls as soon as he lands. Is it going to worry him that you’re here in LA?”

Yael comes in before Sunny can answer, and it’s so disorienting to see her smiling that I can’t look away. She catches my stare and dials it up. “Yes, Georgia, I have teeth.”

“I figured they were sharp and retractable.”

This makes her laugh, and the sound is unexpectedly playful. “Here. This is your contact at Vanity Fair.” She hands me a piece of paper with several lines of her predictably tidy handwriting. “They’re waiting up for the story. It’ll run online at 9 a.m. Eastern and an extended piece can make it into the June issue if you get it to them by noon tomorrow. They’ll handle copyedits but will call you if there’s anything more substantial.”

I have no idea how they’re managing that, but I’m not about to ask. I look at my phone. It’s just after 8 p.m. Even if Alec left midday, it will still be several hours before he lands in London. There isn’t any point waiting up for him.

I open my email. Type in the name Yael handed me, along with a brief message, and hit send.

Yael rocks back on her heels and pats her flat stomach. “I’m starving.”

Sunny stands, stretching. And then she walks over to Yael, puts her arms around her, and stretches to kiss her chin, answering one of the thousand questions I’ve had today. “Then let’s grab some dinner,” she says. “Gigi, you wanna come?”

It feels crazy to turn down the opportunity to have dinner with my childhood best friend and the newly grinning, formerly surly assistant-bodyguard I’ve been dodging for the past two weeks, but no matter how hard they work to convince me to join them, I fear that with this article sent off, my adrenaline will immediately drain and I will actually pass out into my plate. There are many good eats to be found in London, but Mexican food is usually not one of them, so I give them directions to my favorite local taco joint and see them off.