And Harry knew this one would be impossible to force back in. The blackmailer had access to his private emails. Who knew how many copies of those files existed, where they were stored, and how many people had possession of them. He could pay the bastard half a million dollars—but there was no guarantee the files wouldn’t be plastered over the Internet.

Either by the blackmailer or by someone else.

He poured the dregs of the scotch bottle into a glass and drained it. A room service cart sat by the coffee table. He should eat. The last time he had consumed this much alcohol had been in his law school days, but after two bites of the roast beef sandwich he had ordered, he wanted to puke.

The walls of the room closed in. He listened to the sounds of the hotel. Doors opening and closing, random footsteps. People who were in transit.

It felt as if he would forever be in transit, a purgatory of wishing he had never come home and wishing he could go home. To the home of his childhood, when he was eight. Before his father had been shot by robbers in the family convenience store, before his family had been rent by the pain and bitterness of a crime that had festered in the bullet wound that severed his father’s spine.

He needed air. Fresh, unpolluted, uncomplicated air.

But he couldn’t leave his hotel room. The media were everywhere.

He couldn’t answer his phone. There were too many questions from his bosses, from his publicist, from the police, from family friends who wanted to know when was Salma’s funeral, how was Mel, was everything okay?

How could everything be okay? What an inane question.

Pressure pushed against his ribs.

His phone buzzed with yet another text message.

And even though he knew it couldn’t be his lover, he looked at his phone.

Because that was the nature of hope. No matter how impossible, how improbable, how implausible, how desperately grim the situation was, hope would make you do something which you knew made no sense.

And yet, you did it.

You hoped.

God dammit.

Ironically, the text message was from his ex-girlfriend Erin. Just checking in. How are you? How’s your father?

In other words: How’s the man whose life you ruined?

He dug his fingers into his scalp but he couldn’t erase the image of his father, lying in the hospital bed, his body shriveled, his eyes manic.

He threw his phone at the wall.

Dad. I’m so sorry. What have I done?

He didn’t even know.