Chapter 14: The Tip Line

By evening the clip had two million views.

I knew because Rafe's phone wouldn't stop lighting up on my grandmother's kitchen table.

He turned it face down, the way Lacey used to turn mine.

I took it back and turned it over again.

The Row Report had changed its headline at four o'clock.

It no longer said THE FLAT WIFE FLEES.

It said, THE SISTER WHO SENT THE VIDEOS.

The top comment, with sixty thousand likes, said, I laughed at her for six years. I'm sorry, Joanna.

I read that one twice.

Then I put the phone in the bread drawer and shut it.

"Do you want to talk?" Rafe said.

"No."

"Okay."

He did the dishes, which were all mine, since he had been in and out of the flat all week and had apparently decided that was a job.

I went down the hall to the little room that used to be Lacey's.

It had a narrow bed, a window onto the air shaft and a closet I hadn't opened in years.

Inside, taped to the back of the door, was a pencil drawing.

It showed a woman bent over a sewing machine with a pin in her mouth.

She had my hair and my shoulders.

At the bottom, in a fourteen-year-old's handwriting, it said, Jo at 2 a.m. Don't wake her.

I sat down on the narrow bed.

I'd stayed up that night because the rent was due, and she had drawn me instead of sleeping.

I didn't cry.

I just sat with the drawing in my lap until my legs went numb.

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