“Not one cent,” he said. “But then you already know that, right? This is not about the phone. It’s about you keeping your damned mouth shut about what you think you saw the other night, and—”

“I read the text messages,” I blurted. “All of them, or almost all of them.”

“And you had no right to do that,” he hissed. “Those were private conversations between me and Em, and you had no right to read them, but I guess that’s neither here nor there. So how much?”

“Well, I don’t—”

“How much money, Paula? A number. You can’t expect to—”

“A hundred and eighty thousand dollars.”

It just fell out of me. It was the only number in my head, and I said it because I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do.

If there had been silence before, it was deafening now. Maybe it was my imagination, or maybe it was quieter because I’d stopped breathing now that the number was out there.

When a full ten seconds passed without a word from Hooks, I spoke again. “Hello?”

“You really have lost your mind, you know that?”

“Is that…too much?” I asked, and I instantly wanted to kick myself as the question came out of my mouth.

He laughed, the same humorless laugh from before, and I shifted in my seat.

“I have to say, if you weren’t blackmailing me, I’d almost find you cute. Endearing. That is, like I said, if you weren’t such a horrible person. Does your husband know about this?”

The question caught me off guard, and I actually dropped the phone onto the couch. In the dark, I scrambled for it and put it back up to my ear.

“What?” I asked.

“Your husband. He’s tagged in your Twitter photos, Paula. You didn’t think this through. It’s Keith, right? Does he know what you’re doing?”

I was silent, completely frozen, and I realized that he was right—I hadn’t thought it through, not enough. I’d just been moving forward, stumbling along. But the thought—the mere idea—of Keith finding out about what I’d done made it almost impossible to breathe, and I struggled to find the right response.

“I’m going to take that silence as a no,” he said smugly. “So you think I have a lot to lose if my wife finds out where I was on Saturday. You have a lot to lose too. I’ll get you your money, but I’ll get it together when I can.”

There was something about his final words that snapped me out of it. He was trying to bait me, to intimidate me, to make me feel that we were in this together, and I had to remind myself that I was the one who’d seen him.

I was the one who still had his phone with all the text messages.