Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Praise for Sara Shepard
- Also by Sara Shepard
- Dedication
- PART ONE
- —
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- PART TWO
- Piper
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Piper
- Eighteen
- Piper
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Piper
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Piper
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Piper
- Thirty-Four
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- What’s next onyour reading list?
No, she told herself. She was overreacting. She was having an episode.
She stood and walked back to the bedroom. She found her phone on the nightstand, all at once determined to know for sure.
She dialed the number for Jenny, one of the PAs on Ketchup. Jenny had been Lauren’s point of contact the few times she’d visited the set and was friendly but distant, seemingly without any personal ties to Graham. “Uh, I think Graham’s in the writers’ room right now,” Jenny said when she answered and Lauren identified herself. “But I can see when they’re going to break.”
“Oh, don’t bother him,” Lauren said quickly, surprised at how calm she sounded. “I was just wondering—there’s this Uber transaction on my credit card, and it could be from Graham—I know he Ubers around LA sometimes, for lunches and things. But I have such mom brain, and I can’t figure out this day from the last. I just want to make sure it’s not fraud, you know?”
“Ohhh,” Jenny breathed in. Nothing like the threat of credit card fraud to lower a person’s guard. “I can look at the schedule, sure.”
“Thank you!” Lauren cooed sweetly, astonished at how easy this was.
Jenny asked Lauren the date, and she was careful to keep her voice modulated as she told her that it was last Thursday, the date of Piper’s attack. Graham was supposed to be on location for his episode, but he’d come back to get her at the police station.
“The charge is for midafternoon,” Lauren added. “It could be a lunch, something like that?”
Lauren heard typing on the other end. Jenny let out a breath. “Uh-oh, Lauren. You’d better call your card company. We didn’t need Graham that day.”
“What?” Even though Lauren had been the one to make the call, even though it had been her intuition that had been pinging, this announcement still startled her so much that she had to sit down. She remembered Graham that morning. He’d been excited to go to work. It had been his episode they were working on.
“What do you mean?” she said in a near whisper.
“I mean we were off that day. We didn’t need any of the writers. Graham definitely wasn’t here.”
Piper
September
You can’t believe your stupidity. There he is, the Asshole, the man you’d left, now a parent in your inner circle. You’ve been so careful, and yet this has slipped by you.