Dante rolls his eyes, he points an accusatory finger at Tess and calls after his stepsister. When she doesn’t respond, he gives chase, but Sash is quicker than he is. Before he can get to her, he loses her in the crowd.
“Fuck”, Dante shouts, spinning around to look in all directions and unable to locate her.
Back at the entrance to the hotel, Tess is waiting.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Dante shouts.
Oliver is crying. He has no idea what’s going on, but he doesn’t like it. Tess moves him from arm to arm, trying to calm him down. Before she can answer, Dante’s phone begins to ring.
They stand there for a while scowling at each other. The phone rings insistently. Oliver wails. Dante shakes his head.
“Are you going to answer that?” Tess says finally.
“You’ll regret this, Tess”, Dante says.
Out of his pocket comes the cell phone.
“This is not a good time”, he barks into the receiver.
In his office headquarters, Alex stands at her desk, a letter out on the surface in front of her.
“I’ve got bad news”, she says. “You’re going to want to hear this.”
“I don’t need any more bad news”, Dante says, his eyes on Tess.
“Someone is blackmailing you, and they want a lot of money.”
“How is this news, Alex? Someone tries to blackmail me every other week. Burn it like we do all of the other ones.”
Tess smirks and shakes her head.
“Not this one”, Alex says. “This one is for real. It’s about you and Sash.”
Dante’s heart skips a beat. The skin on the back of his neck goes cold and the hairs on his arm stand up on end.
“You have twenty four hours to deposit a hundred million dollars into my account”, Tess reads, “or these photos will be sent to all of the national newspapers”, Alex holds up a photo to get a better look at it. “My oh my. What on earth have you been doing, Dante?”
“Fuck”, Dante says. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
There are a number of photos taken from long distance, some innocuous, others incriminatory. Alex’s eyes goes wide as she looks through them, Dante’s body flush with desire, Sash bent over the table in front of him in one, in bed with him in the next. They are grainy, but clear enough to see who they involve and what’s going on.
“I’ll send them to you”, Alex says.
Dante cuts the call.
“Bad news?” Tess takes great pleasure in asking him. In his pocket, Dante can feel his phone vibrate.
“This is not the right time, Tess”, Dante says sharply.
“Clearly”, Tess says. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“Why the fuck did you?” Dante says. He sits down on the steps to the hotel, desperate to try and think clearly. Tess watches him. “What do you want?” he asks her eventually.
“Who is that?”
“No-one”, Dante says.
“She didn’t look like no-one to me.”
“Tess, you and I are over, you need to realize that. I’ve moved on. Get over it.”
Dante takes his cell phone out of his pocket. Scrolling through the images, he can’t work out how they would have been taken. Who the fuck knew?
“Fuck”, Dante says again. “I need to find her.”
Tess watches him get up, go to the edge of the sidewalk and hail a taxi.
“This is it, Dante”, Tess warns.
When the taxi pulls away, she’s shaking her head and passing their crying child from one shoulder to the next, framed perfectly by the rear window.
***
In the restroom of a department store half a block away, Sash sits on the toilet seat, crying softly. In her hands is a recently purchased pregnancy test, the yes/no indicator patch covered by the tip of her thumb.