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He’d lied to her, of course. He’s a good liar. Easy as breathing, lying, or at least it used to be.
That’s one more way she’s ruined him.
I’m leaving
For real this time
Can we please talk first
She’s still typing. He’s still waiting for her, the way he’s afraid he always will be.
There are things you should know
Ten minutes. It’s important
You don’t have to say anything I just can’t put this in writing
I’ll go after that
He’d lied to her. There’s no getting over Bradley Jackson. The best he can do is say no to her, to hold on to the shredded cloak of his own dignity.
He pours another drink and calls her instead, hating her as much as he’s capable of and hating himself much, much more.
She answers before the first ring has ended, and he speaks before she can say his name.
“I really, really don’t want to hear from you again,” he says shortly. “So whatever’s so important, just say it. This is a secure line,” he adds after a long pause.
“Right,” Bradley finally says, thick and soft. She clears her throat. “Right, um, so. I just wanted to tell you that I’m leaving.”
“You said that.”
“I’m leaving because I fucked up, Cory. A lot. And I don’t know, exactly, what’s gonna happen next, but the way we left things—it’s just, I’m not coming back this time. And…” She pauses again, a wet sound in his ear, and he almost hangs up right then and there. “I know I’m not gonna, you know, see you when I see you.” Her voice cracks. “I get that, and it’s probably for the best, or. I don’t know. That’s probably smart.”
She takes a deep breath, one that sets the hairs on the back of his neck on end. He remembers her hot breath in the same place, the goosebumps all down his spine, down her arm. Breathing with her in the silence. He reminds himself to breathe again now.
“I, um…I just don’t want to leave it like this,” she continues, sounding pained. “Because if nothing else, I spent years convinced that you hated me, that you thought all of these horrible things about me, and, you know, maybe you should have. You probably do now. But I don’t want you to spend years like I did, thinking—whatever you’re thinking—or believing the things I said. Because I wasn’t thinking, really, when I said those things. When I did what I did.”
Cory runs a hand over the sofa cushion next to him, smoothing wrinkles that don’t exist until he clenches the fabric in his fist. “Which things, exactly?” he asks mildly. “Because you did a lot of things, Bradley. You said a lot of things.”
Bradley sighs. He can picture her huffing out a breath, a strand of hair dancing across her face until she swipes it away impatiently. “Cory—”
“Was it the part where you slept with me? Because sure, I get that. Everyone makes mistakes. I mean, hey, Two Fucks Jackson, right? Well, more like five or six—
“No! I mean, messed up. I know that—”
“Or the part where you knew I was completely fucking gone for you and you used that to investigate me—”
“I was panicking, Cory! Everything was happening so fast—coming back, seeing you, this story—”
She’s getting loud when she abruptly cuts herself off and he does too, breathing hard, needing the moment. He’s still clenching the couch. He clenches his eyes closed, too, his face hot and hurting with it.
“It’s not an excuse,” she says quietly after a moment. Her voice is measured and even, and she sounds honest in a way that makes him feel like she’s full of shit. “But after everything with Hal, I was trying to prove that I could be objective even when it was someone I was…close to. Obviously I took that too far, and I’m sorry for that.”
“Too far?” He laughs in disbelief, loud and horrible, tilting his head back against the taste of acid in his throat. “Bradley, you accused me of orchestrating a man’s death.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—I handled it wrong. I thought—”
Very, very suddenly, he can’t do this with her anymore.
“I know what you thought,” he says tiredly, letting go of the couch at last to run his hand down his face. He moves his jaw from side to side, focusing on one muscle at a time before leaning down to rest his elbow on his knee, his forehead on his palm.
“You’re not a bad person, Cory,” she says, the words coming quick and urgent like she can tell she’s out of time. It lands as a blow, dull for the familiarity: her goddamn earnesty, the way she makes things that aren’t true sound like they are. The way she says all the things he could ever want to believe, and the way he can’t believe any of it.
He digs his palm deeper into his eye socket.
She doesn’t stop. “I need you to know that. I’ve always known that, right from the start. And even when—you know, deep down—I still believed that. I just…”
“Panicked,” he says dully, and she makes a little sound on the other end of the line that he thinks is probably a yes. “Yeah. Well. Glad we cleared that up.”
This could be it, he realizes. If she’s actually leaving, if she really manages to stay away, this could actually be it. He knows down to his bones he won’t follow her if she does. He’s lost her too many times, and there’s not much left of him to lose.
She seems to realize this too.
“Wait, please, I—
He stands up in one swift, jerky motion, and for a moment he’s so fucking furious at her that he can barely see the corner she first kissed him in, steps away, through the red. “Bradley, I can’t keep doing this,” he says, pacing sharply across the room. He sounds more like himself, feels more like himself, now that he’s in motion. His voice rises as he continues. “I wish you the best, I really do, but you’ve said what you needed to say and now I need to go.”
“Damn it, Cory,” she finally bursts out, strangled and fierce and just a little indignant in a way that burns. “Look, I know, I fucking know you don’t owe me anything—” he scoffs, loudly, at that— “but you know what, I’ve burned every bridge in this city and and this entire goddamn industry and yeah, I know that’s on me, okay? I do. But I’m still running back to West Virginia to teach kids how to write headlines about their hometown suicide rates and the county fair, assuming the Feds don’t arrest me first—which is entirely possible, by the way—so I am asking, as someone who was once your friend and who has spent what’s got to be the equivalent of literal years listening to you monologue about everything from what Mia's shoes mean about her mood to the existential burden of having fun, for you to please, please give me just a few minutes and listen to what I am saying.”
Oh, fuck her.
“I did!” He’s across the room before he knows it with his finger pointed violently and uselessly at the cityscape outside. “I fucking keep hearing it, actually. And I appreciate what you’re trying to do here,” he snarls, the lights outside blurring until he’s back in the car with his mother’s house miles behind them, “but you’ll forgive me if I don’t want to hear in excruciating detail the twisted logic that allowed you to think that a good person could do what you thought I did, and let you keep—”
“I didn’t know what to think!” she snaps, the full force of her all at once, any remaining restraint just as lost in the rearview. He’s been waiting for it. It sets him reeling anyway, the way it always does. One foot on the mark, the other a step behind just to stay upright. “I didn’t know what to fucking think, Cory! These last few years? I didn’t—my brother invaded the Capitol to try and steal an election. And I covered it up. You think I saw any of that coming? You think I thought I, we, were capable of that?” She’s yelling now, the sharp edge of every syllable rounded against the next one. “Because I sure fucking didn’t until it was happening! Until we’d done it! And this whole thing—me—all of this started because Mitch Kessler was a serial predator and Alex didn’t know. Alex!”
She takes in a deep breath, and Cory finds himself quite unable to do the same. He’s still staring out at the city. He’s standing very, very still.
“She spent all those years,” Bradley says in a thin voice, “sitting right next to him, and she didn’t know what he was until the whole world did and a girl was dead. She didn’t want to know. And I didn’t want to, Cory.” It comes out in a rush. “I saw your name and I just—I wanted to drop it, right then and there. And of course I didn’t really think—but it didn’t matter whether I believed it or not.”
His body reacts before he can quite process what she just said, his mouth ahead of his mind for once. “What?” The word drops and lands like a bomb, heavy and earthshattering. “How the fuck can that not matter?”
“Because it didn’t fucking matter whether or not it was true!” she yells.
That lands much, much harder.
Cory flexes his fingers, squeezing them into a fist that he manages to stop just before it reaches his mouth. He’s breathing heavily, and so, he realizes after a moment, is she.
“It didn’t matter,” she says again, quiet now. “It just...in that moment, it didn’t matter. I saw Earl’s name and all I wanted right then was to pretend I hadn’t.”
He staggers back to the couch, sinking slowly down. He feels his heartbeat in his head, blood rushing in his ears and leaving his fingers numb and nerveless around the phone.
“Bradley,” he says, with no idea how he means to continue.
She doesn’t let him. “You and I, we were finally—” She cuts herself off to swallow, once, twice. “And it was good.” She sounds so fucking wistful, suddenly, like she’s picking up from another conversation entirely. She sounds wistful, and honest, and so fucking sad. “It was really, really good. And I trusted you.”
She clears her throat and then comes back to the conversation they’d started, the knives and glass and futility of it. “But I did that once,” she continues sharply, “and it ruined everything, not just for me but you, and Laura, and—and who the fuck knows what’s next? I crossed a line with Hal that I never thought I’d cross, ever, and next thing I knew I’m a hundred miles on the other side of it and Claire Conway’s in jail. All because I crossed that line once.” She sounds tired now in a way that he’s never really heard. It makes it hard to picture her face, the face he’s seen drawn and anxious and exhausted but never truly defeated. “And there I was, and suddenly there you were, and it just felt like…it felt like it would be so, so easy to do it again.” She pauses and he lets her, lets the space sit empty for a moment until she admits, “That scared the absolute shit out of me.”
Cory closes his eyes, leaning back until his head is pressed firmly against the wall behind him. It feels grounding. The wall, the floor, his burning eyes. The phone, painful against his ear.
He doesn’t know what to do with this. He wishes that he’d never called her. He wishes that he wished he’d never met her.
“You could have talked to me.”
“Of course I could have!” It’s jarring, a livewire through the dying line, and he’s forcefully reminded that he’s still never seen her defeated. “I should have!” It’s coming quick and shrill like it had in the beginning, when she thought he still had a chance of hanging up on her. “And fuck, I probably—I don’t know, I might have if everything wasn’t going so fast, it was all just happening so fast, me being back and then us, this, and this whole investigation was already, you know, in motion, and suddenly you were being dragged into it and I didn’t have time to think.”
He’s working to keep up with her, a rare feeling that delighted him when he first met her and sparks through him now with an irritating familiarity. “And even if I’d wanted to take a beat or put it down," she continues heatedly, "I couldn’t—that wasn’t an option, I was literally on the phone with Chip. And I don't know what I would've done if it had just been me, if I could’ve stopped it, but it wasn’t, and I couldn’t—I needed to know, one way or another. That I could do this job, that I wouldn't make the same mistakes again even if you really had been involved in all of it. And yeah,” she says, defiance sharpening her voice, “I needed to know whether or not I was wrong about you. Because if I was capable of all of these things I never thought I could be—if I was still capable of that? I don’t know, that scared me too.” She’s tired again, running out of gas but riding on air. “That I could be so wrong, even about the things I was the most certain about.”
He’d pulled to attention while she spoke, straightened his spine and his shirt and the mouth. He needs what she’d needed: a beat, a breath. He’s still in that car and she’s left him far, far behind.
“Bradley…” he says again, hoarsely, but can only gesture helplessly into the empty air.
“No, wait, I’m—sorry.” He can picture her now, her face lined and open and fuck, he thinks, honest. “I didn’t mean to. I just, um, let me make sure I’ve...”
There’s a rough sound, a rustling, and he sits up straighter. “Do you have a script?” he asks incredulously before he can help himself, something fizzing up in him that he can’t quite swallow down.
“Oh, fuck off.” She beats him back easily, and for a crystal moment it’s like it was. “They’re flash cards,” she admits a moment later, and the corner of his mouth twitches. “Not everyone can monologue for ten minutes at a time on the fly. And anyway it’s only because of what I said, I don’t want you to...right.” He hears it again, the papers she must be shuffling, and he remembers what she said, remembers exactly why she made those flash cards in the first place: to say everything she needed to say. To leave him with the right words to be haunted by.
The corner of his mouth twitches again, horribly, and he leans forward again to rest his head in his hand.
“The things I said,” Bradley says, soft and scripted, “I need you to know that I didn’t mean them. It was just what I was telling myself, you know, trying to…I don’t know, prove I could be objective. I was all over the place and I said all these horrible things and went on the attack, because what I said, about you hurting people before they can hurt you—you're not the one who does that. Not when it matters.” That comes out reluctant, an admission that cost her something. “You were right. From the beginning I had a foot out the door, but it wasn't because I was pining for Laura or whatever, it was because I was fucking scared, Cory. And I think part of me was more scared of being right about you than being wrong about you.”
“I’m not that scary, Bradley,” he says very quietly.
She laughs a little, all broken glass. “You have no idea,” she says, tears in her throat that she clears away easily. “Anyway, the last thing—like I said, I just, I don't want you to spend years thinking about those things I said, or thinking…I want you to know the truth. Which is that there’s no one in the world I trust more than you. You’ve been just…you’ve been the best friend I’ve ever had. No one's ever known me the way you do, and you still—you're one of the best people I've ever known, and I love you. I’ve loved you for a really long time, I think. And I'm really, really sorry. I'm so sorry.”
At last, she stops talking.
Silence hangs between them.
Eventually, Bradley clears her throat again. “Um,” she says awkwardly, “that was it. So...thank you. I mean, for—”
“Why was Claire Conway arrested?”
“I—what?”
Cory stands again, tapping the fingers of his free hand agitatedly against his thigh. “You said that you covered for Hal, and now Claire Conway’s in jail. How is that connected?”
“I made a deal,” Bradley says, sounding thrown. “I gave them enough at the start to stay out, but they still have me by the leash. They were looking for Claire, and I...I lied at first, bought her time to leave, but the next morning she was in Yanko’s dressing room getting ready to blow the lid off the whole thing on TMS. If I hadn’t called it in, I’d be in jail instead of her.”
“Fuck.”
“That’s why I’m leaving,” she tells him, like she hasn’t just told him everything he needed to know that. “I can’t do this job with a knife at my throat. If I’d had more time, I might’ve figured something out. Or maybe I’d have taken the fall and let her tell the world about the cover up, I don’t know.” He’s half-listening, staring up at the ceiling with one hand on his forehead and a hundred thoughts speeding in all directions across the map his mind is building in real time. “That’s what the old Bradley would’ve done, I think, but it’s like I said…”
“A hundred miles away from the line in the sand?”
She laughs again, rueful. “On the other fucking shore.”
“I know something about that,” he says distantly. Then: “Bradley, you can’t go.”
“What?” Bradley demands, even more confused. There’s something in her voice that makes his stomach leap, something that he builds a bridge right over and leaves behind for now. “Why not?”
“Because,” Cory says, “Fred hired me to kill the story, and he did that because Celine Dumont paid him a lot of money to make sure it never saw the light of day.”
“What?”
“You’d’ve figured it out eventually,” he continues, digging his fingers into his temple where his head is starting to throb. “Figured I might as well get my deal squared away in the meantime, you know, see about building something else to burn down in a year or ten, or at least finish a fucking movie in Los Angeles. I’ve got Jeremy Strong and a car chase and a fucking intimacy coordinator, you’d think that would be enough to get a film made these days, but hey, what do I know, right? Still. Would be nice to have something to show for the last few years besides that mole my doctor told me to keep an eye on, and Stella’s, you know—” he makes a quick, sharp sound in the back of his throat—
“What do you—”
“I wish you hadn’t called, Bradley,” he grits out. “I really fucking wish you hadn’t called.”
When he hangs up, he clenches his phone in his fist so tightly his knuckles turn white. Then he throws the phone across the room.
It lands pitifully on the couch.
Goddamn it, he thinks, furious.
He stands there, staring sightlessly out the window again, and lets himself live in the lie for a few moments.
He can still leave this behind. There are ten ways he can be done with Bradley Jackson, ten times as many ways he can climb back to the top of the world.
He could have Celine’s office back by the end of the year. He could oust Alex, just for the hell of it, shape the world into something a little more palatable. It’s shit, it’s all shit, and no one wants to watch that. Let the world burn while he eats cake and angles the camera away from the fire.
He could finish that movie. Despite all appearances, he’s not out of options. They’re not clear yet but that’s just because he’s been working the UBN path. Once he gets the fuck out of this place, he can reorient. He can fire Kyle. What the hell is he paying Kyle, anyway? He doesn’t need Kyle. He doesn’t need anyone.
He could go to Connecticut. He thinks he should probably go to Connecticut.
He lets himself live in the lie, and then he lets out a deep breath.
Slowly, he moves to pick up his glass. He refills it, each action slow and purposeful. Takes a slow sip and lets it burn. Takes another.
He walks over to the couch and sits down again. He picks up his phone.
Proust’s, 9:15. I’ll give you everything I have. After a moment, he adds, Stop panicking.
I’ll be there, she replies immediately.
The map in his head is starting to take shape. It’s a new landscape. He’s still not quite sure what direction he’s going to take, but she’s at the center. She’s where it all starts, and one way or another, he’s pretty sure that she’ll be the end.
He’ll take that first step tomorrow. He’s tired just thinking about it, tired and angry and weak, horribly weak with something like relief. It floods through him all at once and comes out on an exhale that turns into a laugh and then something else entirely, leaving him shaky and spent with salt on his tongue and horribly full of something like possibility.
I really wish you hadn’t called, he’d told her. He’d lied to her, of course.