“Thanks. Did you check the news?” I move to stand.

She puts a hand up, stilling me, but her eyes are still full of sympathy. “There’s nothing new. Stay where you are. I’ll get your coffee.”

She bustles away, and I lean my head back and close my eyes, listening to her move around the kitchen while I try—dimly, groggily—to come up with some kind of plan for today. The list of people I need to call—the list of people itching for a confrontation with me—seems endless, and even as I try to work through it, my mind keeps going to Reid. It’s odd, how I can hold in my looped heart such conflicting emotions: my overwhelming concern for him, my worry that he’s in trouble, hidden away somewhere and unable to be in touch. But also, my devastation over the things he’s apparently hidden from me—not the work stuff, because it’s clear he had to be secretive about that, but the personal stuff. What he must have told others about the program, about my letters. The way he left me so . . . so exposed to all these revelations.

So unprotected.

He should have warned me. Somehow, he should have warned me.

“Okay,” Sibby says, breaking into my thoughts. “Coffee. Instant oats, extra maple syrup.”

I lift my head and take it from her, notice that she’s poured me a pretty small cup. I know her well enough to know she’s still managing me here—worried about giving me too much caffeine when I’m already this anxious. In spite of all my sadness, I feel my lips twitch with a smile as I take my first sip.

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” says Sibby, sitting beside me, pulling up her feet and criss-crossing her legs. “We get you a second line for your phone today. We’ll call the people you know to give them the new number, but this way, all the random stuff will go to the old one. You can record a new voice mail for it, basically a polite fuck off. I already disabled the comments on your social media, but I think if we . . .”

She rattles off the rest of her ideas, and every single one of them is good. It’s the same way she’d handled things in the first hour or so after she’d come last night—a force of nature with my phone, answering calls and providing the briefest of responses, depending on who was on the line. For clients, a simple “I’m taking messages for her.” For reporters or bloggers or other randoms, a curt “No comment,” followed by her speedy blocking of the number. She’d even called both of my parents, though thankfully, it seems pretty clear my part in this scandal is going to stay local. She’d swept in like a superhero, my most devoted champion.