“Is there something I can do to help?”
“No! Go to bed. It’s late.”
In the upstairs hallway, Pip could hear Tom snoring off whatever he’d drunk. She sat on the edge of her bed and typed out an email to Colleen, the latest of many, all of them unanswered.
Yes, me again. I thought of you because I just caught Leila smoking behind the house and it made me miss you. I keep missing you. I know all I do is betray people. But I can’t stop wishing you’d give me another chance. Much love, PT
Emailing drunk was never a good idea, but she went ahead and hit Send.
Her problem was that it was true: all she did was betray people. Almost as soon as her email account at Denver Independent had been activated and she’d clicked on the attachment from Andreas, she’d regretted it. The symphony she’d failed to hear in Bolivia had commenced immediately in Denver. Her fellow interns were ordinary young people, not goddesses or prodigies. The reporters and editors were lumpy and sarcastic, the division of labor gender-neutral, the office atmosphere serious and professional but not remotely cool. Though Andreas liked to tell his interns that every hand was raised against the leaker, to stake his claim to the sympathy accorded underdogs, the Project was too cool and famous to be an underdog. The real underdogs were the journalists. Though much was made of Andreas’s personal penury, the purity of his service, it was the ordinary financial stresses of the journalists, their child-support and mortgage payments, the four-dollar sandwiches they ate for lunch, that reminded Pip of her mother and her struggling neighbors in Felton. After six hours she felt more at home at DI than she had in six months at TSP.
And Leila: lovely in body and soul, motherly in a way that felt sisterly, not suffocating, a Pulitzer-winning journalist whose personal life was even stranger than Pip’s. And Tom: earnest about his work but silly in private, indifferent to anyone’s opinion of what he said or how he looked, his manner as reserved and ironic as Andreas’s was invasive and self-important, his commitment to Leila the more obvious for being unspoken. Pip loved them both, and when they asked her to move in with them she felt as if, after a life of constraints and poor decisions and general ineffectiveness, she’d finally caught a major break.
Which made it all the more disastrously unfortunate that she’d planted spyware on DI’s computer system, pretended to be responsible for finding the warhead pictures that Andreas had given her, and told Tom and Leila a dozen other lies. She’d succeeded in walking back the smaller lies without undue damage or embarrassment, but the biggest lies — and presumably the spyware — remained in place. And now Leila was turning against her, and now Tom, too, was suddenly uncomfortable around her; the two things, taken together, made her afraid that, although she respected Tom too much to have flirted with him or laid her authority-questioning shtick on him, he might have developed a romantic interest in her. Two nights ago, he’d taken her to the theater, and as if it weren’t unsettling enough to be there as his date, he’d lowered his guard on the drive home and asked her personal questions, had seemed distinctly pale when she said good night to him, and had been avoiding her ever since.
There was also the matter of the email Willow had sent her recently. It was newsy and surprisingly sentimental and came with a picture attached, a selfie that Willow had taken with Pip outside the barn. The caption could have been “Alpha Girl with Beta Girl.” But Willow had been party to the fabrication of Pip’s journalistic credentials; surely she knew that encrypted texting was the only safe way for anyone at the Project to communicate with her. So why an email? And why the clunky business of sending an attachment? Pip had been doing her best to forget that she’d opened it at home, using Tom’s private Wi-Fi.
All things considered, she was proud of having drunk only four margaritas with the interns tonight. Between her lies and the tensions in the house, it seemed only a matter of time before she found herself jobless and on the street again, her major break squandered. And she knew what she had to do. She had to betray Andreas and tell Tom and Leila everything. But she couldn’t bear to disappoint them.
By saying nothing, she was protecting a killer, a crazy person, a man she didn’t trust. And yet she was reluctant to lose her connection with him. He’d messed with her head, and it brought her an unwholesome pleasure to mess with his head — to be the person in Denver who knew his secrets and had to be worried about. Without his daily presence to remind her of her distrust, his power and his fame and his special interest in her were all the more conducive to sexual fantasy. He scored zeroes in certain important love metrics but was off the charts in others.
She texted him every night at bedtime and didn’t turn off her phone until he’d texted back. She’d come to think it would have been less bad to sleep with him, less of a moral surrender, than to open the email attachment he’d sent her. Why, why, why hadn’t she slept with him when she had her chance? Running away from Bolivia seemed all the more regrettable now that she knew that his fear of Tom was unfounded. Planting spyware was a pointless and truly vile sin that she could have obviated by staying with Andreas and committing a pleasurable sin.
She had to fight the temptation to sext him a picture of her private thing. She was the latest of those women who stayed loyal to him. The alteration of her brain by wooden spoon was apparently ongoing.
It wasn’t hard to conceal the state of her brain from Tom and Leila, but its alteration was the reason she’d flown directly from Bolivia to Denver without stopping to see her mother. Her mother could be scarily perceptive about her state of mind. No sooner had Pip arrived in Denver than she’d been forced to conceal it from her.
“Purity,” her mother had said on the telephone. “When you told me you couldn’t find anything out about your father in Bolivia, were you lying to me?”
“No. I don’t tell lies to you.”
“You didn’t find anything out?”
“No!”
“Then tell me why you had to go to Denver.”
“I want to learn to be a journalist.”
“But why did it have to be Denver? Why that online magazine? Why not someplace closer to home?”
“Mom, this is the time when I need to be on my own for a while. You’re getting older, I’m going to be there for you. Can’t I have a couple of years where I get to be away?”
“Did Andreas Wolf want you to go to that place?”
Pip hesitated. “No,” she said. “They just happened to have an intern position I applied for.”
“It was the only news service in the country accepting applications?”
“You just don’t like it because it’s in a different time zone.”
“Purity. I’m going to ask again: are you telling me the truth?”
“Yes! Why are you asking me?”
“Linda helped me use her computer, and I looked at the website. I wanted to see for myself.”
“And? It’s a great site, right? It’s serious long-form investigative journalism.”
“I have the feeling you’re not telling me things you should be telling me.”
“I’m not! I mean, I’m not not.”
However sensitive to smells her mother was, she had an even keener nose for moral failings. She could smell that Pip was doing something wrong in Denver, and Pip resented her for it. She’d already denied herself Andreas because of something her mother had said. To live up to her mother’s ideal, she’d behaved more worthily than she’d had to, and she felt she deserved credit for it, even though her mother knew nothing about it. She was in no mood to be lectured.