He noticed she didn’t deny she was mad at him. She was right to be mad at him. He knew that. He just wished she wasn’t.

“Okay, I should probably call my family now,” she said. “Just so they know this is out there. And so my dad doesn’t yell at a reporter if they call him.”

Oh God, her family. He hadn’t even met her parents yet, and they were going to hate him.

“I love you. Talk to you tonight?”

There was silence for a moment.

“I love you, too, but maybe not tonight. I’m going to try to relax and get to bed early so I’m in good shape for the pitch.”

He wished there was something he could do about that defeated tone in her voice.

“Okay, tomorrow, then. And I hope you kick ass on the pitch.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“I love you,” he said again. But she’d already hung up.

Wednesday morning, Ellie picked Olivia up on the way to their pitch at Clementine.

“It’s not too late to cancel, you know,” Ellie said when Olivia got in the car.

“You know as well as I do that if we postpone this pitch, it would be the same thing as canceling it,” Olivia said to Ellie.

If only the pitch had been scheduled for next week. By then, hopefully everything would have died down some—that’s what Kara had told her, anyway, and she trusted Kara not to bullshit her. But apparently the universe had conspired against her.

She’d seen only a few of the stories about her arrest, and they all seemed predictably titillated by a teenager who broke into her high school twenty years ago. She’d anticipated that—people had always reacted that way, and she’d seen what the media did to other Black women, after all—but she hadn’t realized just how much it would all hurt her. And she hadn’t prepared herself—enough, anyway—for the stories referring to her high school “in the ghetto,” or the one suggesting she’d manipulated Max into a relationship with her. And all of this just because she happened to be a Black woman who fell in love with a famous, attractive white man.