Just as Jack had suspected, there were more people using battery-operated-friends than not, and they’d simply needed to reach those people with a positive message.

He’d been able to turn things around for business and for Denkler.

Too bad he hadn’t been able to turn things around for Michelle. He was responsible for the mess she was in. Maybe not directly, but it was all on him. She was the collateral damage in a bullet aimed at a choice he’d made for his business.

One week after the story hit, she’d been cleared of any ethics violations, but she’d lost more than half her business. She’d lost all her speaking engagements. Her referrals were gone. The court of public opinion didn’t offer much leeway for someone in her position. Even though she hadn’t crossed any lines, people were only seeing her through one lens now.

The lens of sex.

She was the shrink who was the sex toy mogul’s lover.

Even though she was so much more to him. She was everything.

29

Seemingly Impossible

“I’m very flattered with the offer, Denis. I truly am. But I want you to know what’s been going on here. I don’t want you to get into a situation unaware,” she said, talking to her French colleague early one morning from the comfort of the small kitchen in her apartment. She was brewing coffee before she headed into the office for one appointment. That’s all she had. Shayla. But damn it, she was going to do her best to help a loyal patient. Step one of rebuilding, as Davis had said. In the end, politics was politics. Sometimes the bad guy wins. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do to blunt the damage. You take your blows, and you pick yourself back up. That’s what she was doing.

“I heard some silly chatter about your private life, and I chose to ignore it. I do not judge people by what they do in private. I don’t care what you do behind closed doors,” he said, as she watched the coffee drip into the pot. She wished she could reach across the ocean and hug the man for saying the first evolved thing she’d heard in a long while.

“I appreciate it. But I want to make sure it’s not going to be a problem,” she said, and shared a few more details of all that had gone down.

He paused, and clucked his tongue. She tensed, sure this was the moment when he would rescind his offer. Besides, she didn’t even know if she’d take it. “You were cleared by the ethics board?”

“Yes.” She had Jack to thank for that. The graying man in charge had called her earlier in the week to tell her Jack’s willingness to show up without having been asked, to share all the details, and to take ownership of their relationship had made the decision easy. Even Nick’s attempts to discredit her with the board through spurious claims hadn’t worked, given his persona as a fake client. She took some small measure of victory that she’d won that battle against Clark Davidson, though she was most decidedly losing the war.