Maybe he knew, too. Maybe he’d always known, just as she had.
Maybe this was nothing more than another sick game.
But she was tired of everyone else winning. She was tired of hiding, no matter what had spurred her out into the light. She was tired of Jason fucking Treffen and the damage he did.
“I was there.”
Zoe knew she was speaking only when she saw him react to her voice, jerking up and onto his feet as if she’d hauled off and hit him. But it was as though she’d vanished inside herself. Disappeared into that far-off safe space she hadn’t had to access in a very long time. She could see how tense he was then and that terrible darkness on his face, but she actually smiled, because she’d gone completely and utterly numb, and it was better. Much better.
“I remember you, Hunter.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific.”
There was a dark torment in his gaze, in the odd tautness in his body, in the way he started to reach for her, then stopped.
Of course he stopped. She suspected he knew exactly what she was going to say. And who wanted to touch someone like that? She couldn’t blame him.
It was lucky she’d disappeared inside herself, because even that didn’t hurt.
“Sarah and I met at orientation at Treffen, Smith, and Howell when we still thought we were going to be legal assistants,” Zoe said in that remote and chilly way, as if she wasn’t really talking about herself. And in so many ways, she wasn’t. That Zoe had died a long time ago. “She wanted to be a judge someday. I wanted to say clever things in court. We ate lunch together every day, though as time passed, we talked less. That last week we just sat there, because what was there to say?” To his credit, he didn’t look away. But then, maybe he already knew all of this. “She wasn’t the only one who killed herself, you know. She just did it spectacularly.”
He said something and it took her a moment to realize it was her name.
“She always said you were her boyfriend,” Zoe said, because she didn’t care what he said or even how he said it. As if it was painful. “It didn’t occur to me until later that you were already very wealthy at twenty-three. Were you really her boyfriend? Or did you pay more so she’d act like it?”
Hunter went pale, and it was like a kick to the belly that some part of her responded to that, hurt for him.
“I did not pay Sarah to do anything,” he said, in a stranger’s voice. As if he wanted to be pissed she’d suggested it, but it hurt too much.
“Did he blackmail you?” she asked coolly, telling herself none of the rest of it mattered. And it didn’t. He didn’t. He was useful, nothing more. “Because that’s what he does. It’s not enough to run escorts out of a fancy law firm. Not for a saint like Jason Treffen.”
“I didn’t pay Sarah.” Still that dark, awful tone in his voice. “I didn’t pay anyone.”
“I assumed you got fired from your football team because you stopped paying him off.” Zoe held his gaze, and it wasn’t bravado that moved in her then. It was much heavier than that. Much more poisonous. “But that only works if you were one of his johns. If you still are.”
“No.” His voice was low and altered, as if he was forcing it out through steel wool and it was scraping deep marks into him along the way. “That was all me. I was expelled from the NFL purely because I’m an asshole.”
Jason Treffen hung on the wall on the television screen behind him, framing Hunter the way he’d framed Zoe’s life, and she wished she could summon up the anger that usually fed her—the deep, abiding fury that had fueled her all these years. Jason laughed, Jason flirted with the two morning show hosts, Jason played his fucking part the way he always did, and she wished she had access to the rage that had kept her warm and safe and alive this past decade.
But she felt that weight on her chest, pressing behind her eyes, and she felt nothing but sad. So terribly sad she thought it might warp her. Change her. Disfigure her down into her bones, so deep and so permanent that she’d never walk the same way again.
There was always a price. For everything. She knew that better than anyone.
Zoe supposed she shouldn’t be so surprised that after all this time, after all the ways she’d paid and paid, it could still hurt like this.
And yet there it was, tearing her up as if she hadn’t been quite as ruined as she’d thought. As if there was always something new that could be leveled. Razed. Turned to dust.