“So I should let him wreck my life?”

“No… I mean, I don’t think that video will wreck your life.” He shifts in his seat. “You can spin it.”

“No. I can’t.”

He grimaces. “I don’t know what to say. You don’t have a choice. There’s no alternative.”

“There’s one other thing.” I square my shoulders, knowing that I’ve reached the moment of no return. “He has another video.”

His long eyelashes flutter. “Another…?”

“A video of you.”

“Of me?”

“He has a recording of you entering his house and breaking into his laptop.” The words come out in a rush. I want to get this over with. “It even shows you breaking into his desk with a letter opener.”

The color slowly drains out of Luke’s face. “Holy…”

“I’m so sorry, Luke.”

“Sorry?” The color that had left his face now appears in two spots on his cheeks. “I told you I didn’t want to do this. I told you it was the wrong thing to do. I said we could get in a lot of trouble. Didn’t I say that?”

“Yes,” I say in a small voice.

He drops his head into his hands and massages his temples. “Unbelievable. This is so unbelievable.”

“I know. I’m so sorry.” I shift my chair around the side of the table to be closer to him. “This guy is a terrible person. I hate that he’s doing this to us.”

Luke grunts in response.

I drop my voice. “If we got rid of him…”

I watch Luke’s expression. Will he go for it? In the experiment from Milgram, more than half of the subjects administered the 450 V electric shock—a dose of electricity which would have proven fatal if it had been real. They didn’t want to do it, but they did it. All because they were told to do it.

He lifts his face from his hands. “I don’t know what you’re suggesting.”

“I think you do.” I pause meaningfully. “It’s our only choice, Luke.”

“It’s not. It’s really not.”

“As long as he’s alive, he’s going to hold this over us,” I say. “You don’t want that, do you? There’s only one way to make sure he can’t destroy us.”

“No. No way.”

“Think about it. What else can we do?”

Luke looks ill. “Please stop.”

“It’s our only choice.”

He slams his palms against the table so hard that all the dishes shake. “I’m not fucking killing anyone, Adrienne, okay?”

I flinch in my seat. I’ve been dating Luke for four months, and I’ve never heard him raise his voice like that before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this upset, but I can’t say he doesn’t have a right to be.