Beg For Me: Chapter 43

No one gets any work done that day. All everybody can talk about is the scandal.

The office vibrates with gossip thinly disguised as productivity. Reddit threads explode with vague “has anyone seen this?” links and screenshots that mysteriously disappear seconds after they’re posted. Even the senior executives are pretending to be on calls while standing in hallways whispering giddily like teenagers.

By lunchtime, someone’s created a Hartman Staples Lorraine playlist on Spotify. By two, there’s a Google Doc circulating that rates the plausibility of various scandal theories. My personal favorite: Hartman was hacked by a vengeful intern with a major in computer sciences and a minor in revenge.

By three, there’s a memo from legal sternly reminding everyone that gossip, speculating, and unauthorized media sharing will not be tolerated, which is promptly turned into a meme and shared to the company’s unofficial Discord.

I pretend to be busy. I go through all the right motions. I scroll through project schedules and over-analyze spreadsheets I’ve already reviewed half a dozen times.

But mostly, I wait for Lorraine to appear in my doorway, screaming and pointing a finger at me.

She never does.

By five, she’s gone. HR says she left voluntarily. IT says her login was deactivated. Facilities confirms her office has been cleaned out, down to the last paper clip. No goodbye email, no farewell cupcakes, just gone.

Hartman vanishes too. The official story is medical leave, but somebody obviously rifled through his desk and removed anything incriminating because it looks like a tactical strike. The office rumor mill begins to refer to him as Mr. Staple-and-Moan.

I leave at five on the dot, the wedding invitation in my bag a heavy weight I can’t put down.

The wind outside smells of jacaranda and ozone. A summer storm is brewing…or something worse.

In my current state of mind, everything feels ominous. Even the weather.

When I arrive at home, I’m half expecting to be greeted by more chaos. An IRS auditor this time, maybe, or a film crew documenting the slow unraveling of my life for a true-crime series. Instead, I walk into a house filled with the delicious scent of cookies baking and the low hum of female voices.

“I’m just saying,” I overhear my mother grouse from the kitchen as I drop my handbag and keys on the console, “If you’re going to name the baby after a gemstone, it should be something classy. Like Pearl or Ruby. Not Sapphire.”

“What’s wrong with Sapphire?”

“Do you want this child to grow up to be a stripper?”

“Grams, there’s nothing wrong with being an exotic dancer,” Harlow cuts in. “Why are you so judgy?”

I walk into the kitchen just in time to see my mother dramatically put her hand over her heart, as if someone insulted the Queen.

“I’m not being judgy,” she sniffs. “I’m being realistic. You name a baby Sapphire, and she’s got nothing but a pole in her future and a butterfly tattoo above her ass crack.”

Brittany, who’s up to her elbows in flour and bread dough at the kitchen counter, turns to glare at my mother. “My grandma’s name was Sapphire.”

My mother’s chuckle is small and definitely judgmental. “Now I can see where it all started to go wrong. What’s your mom’s name? Topaz Trouble? Diamond Delight? Amber Alert?”

When Brittany looks at me, wounded, I say, “She hasn’t even gotten started yet. If you weren’t already pregnant, I’d advise you to start drinking heavily. What are you making there?”

“Croissants. I thought they’d be nice for breakfast in the morning.”

When she turns back to the dough, my mother, Harlow, and I exchange glances.

I say tentatively, “You’re a baker?”

Brittany nods, kneading expertly. “I love to bake. It’s very calming, almost like meditation. My mind just empties out.”

When my mother opens her mouth to make some snarky remark, I make a slashing motion across my throat and glare at her.

She sticks out her tongue at me. Harlow rolls her eyes and sighs.

At least someone’s on my side.

My mother says to me, “I was thinking of making lasagna for dinner, but we don’t have any ricotta. Maybe you should go to the store.”

I sit across from her at the table and give her my most withering smile. “And maybe you should tell me how your apartment hunt is coming along, Cruella.”

“I can make dinner,” interrupts Brittany, turning around again, her hands falling still. She has a hopeful look on her face, like a new employee eager to make a good impression.

“You bake and you cook?” She hardly seems capable of boiling water without causing a citywide blackout, let alone all this culinary expertise.

To her credit, Brittany doesn’t flinch. “I’m actually really good at both. I was a line cook at this little bistro in Echo Park before I met Nick. French-Italian fusion. People loved my porcini mushroom risotto with truffle butter.”

I can see in my peripheral vision that my mother is making googly eyes at me, but I ignore her. I know she’s hoping to see me draw blood, but I’m not about to get dragged into a conversation about exactly how and when Brittany met Nick.

At this point, it doesn’t even matter.

I say slowly, “Well, Brittany…if you’d like to make dinner…then by all means…”

My mother pipes in, “But no cream in the risotto. It makes my ankles swell.”

“Not everything is about you, Grams,” says Harlow, causing both me and my mother to chuckle.

“How about Bouillabaisse alla Puttanesca?”

When nobody responds, Brittany explains, “It’s a hybrid seafood stew blending the briny boldness of puttanesca with the Provençal depth of bouillabaisse. I like to serve it with crusty garlic bread.”

My mother turns to Harlow, grins like a shark, and says into the stunned silence, “Puttanesca means prostitute. Would you like a little whore’s fish stew for dinner, dear?”

Harlow looks at me. She looks at my mother. Then she looks at Brittany and smiles. It’s a friendly smile, a genuine one, and one that lights up her entire face.

“Yeah. That actually sounds great. Thanks, Britt.”

When my mother rolls her eyes in disgust, it feels like some kind of victory.

But what kind and for who, I’m not sure.

The scandal at work burned fast and bright, fizzling out almost as quickly as it exploded under legal threats, HR firings, and a revolving door of consultants hired to stabilize morale. Both Hartman and Lorraine vanished like farts in the wind, and the office became quieter than it had been in years.

With no more hammer hanging over my head, resignation seemed pointless. So I’ve stayed on in a sort of limbo, not knowing exactly what comes next.

And when I went to retrieve my resignation letter, it had disappeared.

Courtesy, no doubt, of Carter’s overbearing and morally charcoal brother, Callum.

At home, it’s manageable. Insane and ridiculous, the plot of a masochistic sitcom, but manageable. With nowhere to move Brittany quickly, I settled on the short-term solution of setting up a cot in Nick’s old office until we can find her a permanent place to stay. I sold all his guitars to a collector on Ebay, except for the purple one Carter was so enamored with. That I put into storage, carefully wrapped and boxed.

I don’t ask myself why.

To my secret delight, Brittany has taken over the kitchen, wresting control from my mother with enviable finesse. She complains but eats everything Brittany cooks, then insults her when asking for seconds. With Nick out of the picture, Harlow has adopted Britt as some kind of surrogate older sister and now insists on family dinner every night, which I know is deeply, deeply weird, but I’m going with it.

Stranger things have happened.

As for me, I still haven’t spoken to Carter.

I’ve seen him, however, lurking in a hoodie and steaming up the windows of a piece of shit blue Honda across the street, in front of the house with the yellow front door.

A part of me is in disbelief that he’s really sleeping outside my home as Callum said he would. Another part of me hopes he’s uncomfortable as hell and is living in a world of hurt, stubborn heartbreaker that he is.

But mostly, I just miss him.

I miss how he looks at me. How he makes me laugh. How thoughtful and sweet he is. I miss the way he kisses like he’s starving. The way he tries so hard to please me.

The way he makes me feel like the most beautiful woman alive.

Every morning when I get up, the first thing I do is check to see if the shitty blue Honda is still there. When I part the drapes in my bedroom and peer out the window and find that it is, I breathe a secret sigh of relief while telling myself he’s an absolute jerk and a fool and too much trouble to bother with.

Especially since he’s related to that clan of psychopaths he calls family.

Then I put myself in their shoes and try to think what I’d do if I were them.

If I had all that money, all that power, and what seems to be a supernatural ability to bend the universe—and wi-fi networks—to my will…

Would I be a good guy?

Or would I be like Hartman and Lorraine, scheming, manipulative, self-centered dicks?

I want to believe I’d be good, but I’m not entirely sure. Power corrupts people. Money does too. Combine them with extreme good looks and high levels of intelligence, and you’ve got the makings of legendary supervillains.

But as far as I can tell, the only thing the McCords are guilty of is being insufferably rich.

I’ve scoured the internet for information. Every tabloid story, every LinkedIn profile, shell company registry, and shady message board I could find. There’s nothing on them. Not so much as a dubious donation or an ambiguous NDA. No scandals, no lawsuits, no suspicious offshore holdings or blackmail schemes. Not even the hint of a bribe or a whisper or impropriety.

So either they’re squeaky clean or they’ve ascended to a level of discretion so advanced, it bends the laws of reality.

From everything I’ve seen so far, I’m inclined to believe the second option.

Thinking about it gives me a headache, so I try not to dwell.

Which leaves me here, spiraling into hypotheticals while the man I’m in love with refuses to speak to me but spends his nights breaking loitering laws in some kind of twisted show of loyalty.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think men were imported from some distant galaxy where logic is outlawed and emotional intelligence is forbidden on pain of death.

And they say we’re the irrational ones.

Then the day of the wedding arrives, and every theory I had about Carter and his family gets turned completely inside out.