Scandalized

The waitress returns with our drinks and he thanks her, raising his glass to toast mine. “I work in television.”

Ah, there it is. But also: Yawn. I look at his outfit, remember his sleek suitcase. “Let me guess: business development at a new streaming service?”

He laughs and lifts his glass to his lips. “Nope.”

“Contracts attorney?”

“God, no.”

I study him, eyes narrowed. “BBC exec coming here for meetings with American networks about a show?”

Alec pauses with his glass halfway back down to the table. “That’s shockingly close, actually.”

“Really? That’s wild. My roommate, Eden, lives and breathes BBC.”

A tiny grin as he sets his glass down. “Does she?”

“I realize how shameful it is in this day and age to not watch TV,” I admit, “but I’ve been so wrapped up in work that I’ve missed most of what everyone has been obsessed with the past couple years. Tell me what you’ve worked on so I can remedy this. Eden tells me this is where creativity lives and breathes these days and I’m missing out.”

He waves this off. “Television isn’t for everyone.”

“If you work for the BBC,” I say, “she’ll lose her mind.” Alec laughs. “Which show? I’m going to text her. I’m sure she’s seen it.”

He gives me a wry smile. “It’s called The West Midlands.”

I type a quick text. The old friend I ran into? Yeah he said he works on The West Midlands for BBC. You like that one right?

Eden replies immediately with a string of unintelligible all caps. I turn my phone around to show him. “See? She knows that one. How cool.” I tuck my phone back into my purse and sip my wine. “I bet that’s a fun job.”

“It is.” He pauses. “What’s the story you’re writing? Two weeks is a long time to go to London on assignment, I’d imagine.”

“The original plan was a week, but it took an intense turn, I guess. I asked to stay.”

In fact, I begged to stay.

“Intense how?”

I do the internal calculation. I could tell him about the story, gauge whether he might be useful after all. He’s a businessman, clearly well connected. It’s a long shot, but wouldn’t it be wild if this inconvenient layover actually broke the story open for me somehow? The prospect makes me feel more alert. “Okay, let me ask you: Have you heard anything about a club called Jupiter?”

I watch him closely, searching for signs of a mask slipping into place. I get only a tiny thoughtful frown and, after a beat, a little shake of his head. “A nightclub, right?” he says carefully, and I nod. “There was something in the news about it recently.”

“Right.” I take another sip of my wine. “You probably heard about the bouncer who was beat up in an alley behind the club the same night he’d reported incidents of workplace harassment to his superior. He tweeted all about it and detailed how the police did nothing.”

Alec nods. “Okay, yeah, I think I saw something about that.”

“So, that’s all the London news outlets reported about it. Everyone moved on. No one seemed to notice that, about a week later, the same bouncer shared screen caps that someone sent him of a few of the club owners sharing sexually explicit videos in an online forum.” I pause, gauging his reaction. “Videos, allegedly, of those owners having sex with women in the club VIP rooms. But next day, the screen caps were gone. He deleted his entire Twitter account.”

No overt reaction passes over his features. So, Alec isn’t aware of all of this and… actually, I’m relieved. The story isn’t being talked about very much in London, and if he’d heard any of this about Jupiter, it likely wouldn’t reflect well on him. “So, I went over there to cover a really dry international meeting on pharma law, but I volunteered to be the one to go because of this Jupiter story. After I saw those tweets, the whole thing had been hovering in my thoughts for a couple weeks. I thought there was a chance this bouncer knew about some shady stuff happening at the club and got beat up for reporting it to his boss. It felt like he was trying to alert the mainstream media.”

“Right,” he says carefully. “But… you don’t think that anymore?”

Setting my glass down, I work to keep the anger from my voice, remembering the way the bouncer, Jamil, staunchly refused to speak to us once we tracked him down. “Oh, I still believe it. In fact, I know in my bones that someone is threatening him now. It’s why my boss let me stay longer. And the more I learn about what happens in those VIP rooms—the more terrible it becomes—the more I can’t seem to stop digging.”

Alec looks at me for a long, quiet beat. I expect him to ask what I mean, to explain what “terrible” looks like in this context, but either his manners prohibit him from pushing, or he sees the exhaustion ripple through me, because he says only, “Well, then it’s good that you’re working hard on this.”

I need a track change. “We never finished talking about Sunny.”

His expression flickers. Apparently, sex-scandal-to-sister-update is an abrupt transition. I need to get my social skills back in place. “How—?” he starts, and then frowns. “Oh. Yeah. She’s good. You should have looked her up when you were visiting in London.”