“What’s going on?” I ask, prodding her to open up. The bartender places my drink in front of me and I take a sip. “It’s been a crazy day already. Did you hear I stepped down as Pride’s manager?”
Baby’s eyes widen. “Oh, god, Marie. I’m so sorry. I know that was important to you.”
I smile and wave it away even though I feel like I’m breaking inside. Pride was the first thing I did for myself. I found them, cultivated my relationship, really put effort and sweat and blood into them, and now walking away is like leaving my own child behind.
“It’s all right, I’ll survive. But just a fair warning, that’s where I’m at right now. Definitely hasn’t been a super easy day.”
“Fuck,” Baby whispers, leaning forward. She drinks down the rest of her wine and groans. “I wish I had good news then but I think I’m about to make your bad day even worse.”
“What’s got you so stressed? I’ve never seen you like this before.”
She glances at the exit again. A man walks from the dining room back to the bathrooms and she tracks him the whole time. I have no clue why she’s acting so paranoid, but an ugly feeling is lodged in my guts.
Bella Baby reported on the Crawford family without batting an eye. She’s dealing with troll armies and her own awful harassment right now. And yet whatever she has to tell me is somehow worse than all that, at least based on how she’s acting.
“Ansell came to me the other day. He asked me to take on some side work doing PR for you and I said sure, since I love you, but mostly because the money was great. He gave me access to his company’s computer systems and you know me, I can’t help myself, so I went… snooping.”
I resist the urge to groan. “You’ve been snooping through Drake Entertainment’s files?”
“I didn’t mean to,” she says but quickly grins. “Okay, yeah, I totally did, but at first it was just to find some stuff I might be able to use for you. Like image assets or whatever I could retrofit to work for your case. I have all these plans on how to combat the trolls the Crawfords hired. But something else was bothering me while I clicked around and I got curious.” She hesitates, clears her throat, drums her fingers on the bar top. “Who wrote that email to you, Marie?”
“I have no clue. I always assumed it was someone that hates the Crawfords. Who else would hire a PI to follow William around?”
“That’s what I figured. Someone with motive. When I was snooping, I had that question in the back of my head. The image files that you sent to me all had a specific extension at the end like they were taken by the same camera, and I started thinking… Well, if someone took other pictures, they’d be saved with that file extension too, right? I searched that string of letters and numbers in the Drake database, and I sort of… stumbled on something.”
“What did you find?” I’m whispering now. I don’t want to hear this, but I know I have to.
“Images. Lots of images. Stuff that wasn’t in the original emails.” She hesitates, shifting from side to side. “Stuff that only the person who hired the PI in the first place would have.”
My body goes cold. “Someone in Ansell’s organization did it?”
Baby nods slowly and touches my hand.
“Marie, Baptist sent those emails.”
It’s like my world goes entirely still. Everything stops and I blink rapidly, trying to understand. Her words echo through my brain and I try to make sense of it but nothing’s fitting together. The pieces won’t connect, like I’m short-circuited.
Baptist sent the emails?
Ansell’s best friend, Baptist?
The guy that seems so nice and charming?
It makes no sense. None of this makes any sense.
Why would he do that? As far as I know, he doesn’t have a connection to the Crawford family, but I don’t really know much about him. I don’t understand why Ansell’s second-in-command, his best friend and right-hand man, would be following William around and why he’d send me emails like that.
I feel like I have a word stuck on the tip of my tongue, or like song lyrics are caught in my brain but they’re not quite the right tune.
It doesn’t add up. Unless…
“Baby, do you think Ansell had something to do with this?”
She grimaces and throws back her wine. She shifts closer to me and holds my hands tightly in her own. Her voice drops lower like she’s sharing a conspiratorial secret. “Listen, sweets, I don’t know anything for sure, okay? I get that you and Ansell are starting to be close and I don’t want to step between that with speculation, and here’s what I’ll say. Baptist is a smart, capable guy, but he works for Ansell. And I doubt much happens around Ansell that he’s unaware of. You know what I mean?”