“Wait. What does Ryan have to do with it?”

She’s uncharacteristically silent for longer than I would like. Just when I am about to start panicking, she speaks. “Very few people knew about this. You didn’t out yourself. You’re dumb, but you’re not insane. Martis was waiting to tell JMP for obvious reasons. Your publicity team has been working overtime to figure out how to release the information within the constraints we set out for them, so there’s no way they’d want to undo all that work. It wasn’t me. I actually care about you. And it wasn’t Casey. He left JMP for a lot of the same reasons you did.” She stops there, but she doesn’t have to say what’s next.

“Ryan didn’t do this.”

“I don’t know if he did, honey.” Oh, great. Now she’s placating me. “But you didn’t see him when you left before. He was…beside himself.”

“And you haven’t seen him with me now. There’s no way,” I insist, but my mind is working overtime. I left him high and dry. To hear him tell it, I took his love of literature with me. I disappeared from his life for five years. And yesterday I told him I lost our baby, which I had kept from him for so long. I did think I heard him get up in the middle of the night last night. Could he have been secretly so angry that he plotted some kind of revenge?

No. No. That’s not like Ryan at all. If he had wanted vengeance, he wouldn’t have brought me tacos or washed my hair or held me while I sobbed in his parking lot. He would have let me fester in my own depression. Or he would have gone to JMP straight away.

“Listen, he’s on his way in,” Trina is saying. “We’re going to talk to him and hopefully set this whole thing straight. Can you get here quick?”

I sigh heavily, wishing I could jump in a time machine and go back five hours to when Ryan and I were snuggled up together, our skin touching at every point of contact we could manage, his leg possessively intertwined between mine as I rocked back to feel him against me.

Scratch that. I wish I could go back five years and do literally everything differently to save everyone from this mess.

“Yeah,” I say, dejected. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I’m led into the conference room at Anastasios by a sweet-looking college kid. She introduced herself as Maggie or Marlee or something like that. And not for the first time in my life, I wish I was better at remembering people’s names in the middle of crisis moments.