She Didn't Fix Her Reputation. She Threw It Away novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Night of Shame
Georgie wakes up a national joke, refuses to read the apology on her mother's lawn, sets down the ring, and then Grayson calls with a threat: thirty-one more photos.
My fiancé turned my blackout into entertainment for a model.
Grayson and his friends kept the drinks coming until I couldn't stand.
Then they photographed me on a bathroom floor and sold the pictures to TMZ.
By six the next morning I was a national headline.
"POLITICAL SWEETHEART'S NIGHT OF SHAME."
I watched it on the kitchen TV in my mother's house in Fox Chapel.
The kitchen was full of her campaign staff, and none of them would look at me.
On the screen was me, on white tile, one strap of my green dress torn loose.
My skirt was up around my hips.
Mascara ran down to my chin.
Somebody had covered the worst of it with a little gray square.
The next shot was a meme.
My photo, pasted beside my mother's Senate billboard on the parkway.
PEMBERTON. PENNSYLVANIA VALUES.
Somebody had drawn a red arrow from the slogan to my face.
It had four million views.
I didn't remember the bathroom.
I remembered the club on the forty-second floor, and Grayson's best man's birthday.
I remembered Grayson pressing a glass into my hand.
"Drink up, Georgie. You never let loose."
I remembered the bartender pouring, and Grayson holding up two fingers behind my back.
Doubles.
Every time.
My mother came in at six-fifteen in a navy suit, phone at her ear.
She looked at the TV, then at me.
"Don't cry," she said. "Cameras are on the lawn at noon."
Catherine Pemberton had been attorney general for six years.
She was forty-one days from the Senate.
I had been in every one of her ads since I was eighteen.
The daughter at the diner counter, the girl handing out yard signs.
The sweetheart.
Grayson walked in at seven with coffee and two people from his father's firm.
Ingersoll Strategies ran crisis communications for my mother's campaign.
That was how we'd met.
He kissed my cheek in front of everybody.
He smelled like soap and sunscreen.
"You okay, babe?"
"Where did you go?" I said. "You put me in a car at midnight. Who took those pictures?"
His people went very quiet.
Grayson set the coffee down and gave me the patient smile he used on donors.
"Somebody at the club, probably. Phones are everywhere."
"I was on the floor of a locked bathroom, Grayson."
He leaned in so only I could hear.
"Dad's firm will sell your apology by lunch. Stop making my job harder."
I looked at him for a long time.
He didn't blink.
He looked bored.
One of his people slid a sheet of paper across the island.
My statement.
"I am deeply sorry for my behavior. I let my family and the people of Pennsylvania down. I am seeking help for my relationship with alcohol."
I don't drink.
Grayson knew I don't drink.
Two glasses of wine at Christmas, and he teased me about it every year.
"I'm not reading this," I said.
My mother didn't look up from her phone.
"You'll read it, and Grayson will stand behind you with his hand on your back. Engaged couple, standing strong. Ingersoll says that plays."
"Ingersoll is his father."
"Ingersoll is the best in the state."
At noon I walked out onto the front lawn in a white blouse her stylist picked.
There were nine cameras and a crowd of reporters behind a rope.
Grayson's hand sat warm on the small of my back.
My mother stood on my left with her chin up.
The paper shook in my fingers.
I looked at the first line.
Deeply sorry.
Then I looked up into the TMZ camera.
"I'm not going to read this," I said.
Grayson's fingers dug into my spine.
I folded the statement in half and handed it back to him.
Then I twisted the ring off my finger.
A three-carat oval he had picked out himself.
I set it on the podium.
"I didn't do anything to be sorry for. Ask the people who took the pictures."
Every reporter shouted at once.
My mother caught my wrist and kept smiling for the cameras.
"If you walk off this lawn," she said through her teeth, "don't bother coming back to it."
I pulled my wrist free.
I walked down the drive, past the rope and the vans and the yard signs with my face on them.
At the gate I looked back once.
Grayson was slipping my ring into his pocket.
Nobody came after me.
I caught the bus at the bottom of the hill with forty dollars and my phone.
My phone wouldn't stop buzzing.
Texts, calls, news alerts, strangers who had found my number.
I didn't open any of them.
Then one notification was different.
A private Instagram account I'd followed for three years.
Grayson's best man.
Eighty-seven followers, just the boys.
New post.
A yacht deck in hard sunlight, champagne glasses up.
Grayson, his best man and two of their friends, all grinning.
In the middle, in a red bikini with her legs crossed, sat Saskia Meijer.
The Dutch model his firm had flown in for a tourism campaign this summer.
The one Grayson called "a child, honestly, Georgie, so needy."
She was flashing a peace sign at the camera.
The caption said, "Porcelain dolls look better cracked."
I opened the comments.
There was one from Grayson.
"Whatever you want, babe."
He had called me babe in the kitchen at seven.
The post went up at ten-forty.
While I sat in my mother's kitchen with a statement about my drinking, he was on a boat, celebrating.
The pictures weren't an accident he was cleaning up.
They were a present.
The bus let me off at the end of the Sixteenth Street Bridge.
I walked back out onto it without knowing why.
My phone lit up in my hand.
Grayson.
I answered and said nothing.
Wind roared on his end of the line.
"That was cute," he said. "Very brave. Now listen to me."
I listened.
"There are thirty-one more. The bad ones, no gray squares. You come home tonight and you read that statement. Or Saskia picks which one goes out next."
Behind him, a woman laughed.
I stood at the rail and looked down at the brown water of the Allegheny.
"Georgie? You there?"
I held the phone out over the water.
Then I opened my hand.
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