The Fall Girl Read online

  More climbers scrambled onto the summit.

  My window of opportunity was nearing the closing point. Soon we’d have to begin the grueling slog all the way to the bottom to make room for those reaching the peak.

  I shepherded Claire off to the side away from the other victorious climbers. The lush vegetation, including roughly five to six thousand different plant species we had snaked our way through yesterday, was nowhere in sight. All that could be seen were grayish uneven rocks, some large, some not, with crevices that would snap off a foot if given the chance. I imagined this was the closest I’d ever come to walking on the surface of the moon.

  Claire eyeballed me with a quiet determination. “You’re starting to scare me. Are you feeling okay? Are you tired? Is it the altitude? Shall I get our gu—?”

  I put a finger to my lips and shushed her. “I’m okay. I’m just…” I fingered the object in my pocket. “I love you, Claire.” Try as I might, I couldn’t soften my tone or facial expression to alleviate her increasing alarm.

  “I-I love you, too,” she stuttered, baffled by my seriousness.

  I let out a cleansing breath, wiggled my arms, and muttered, “Now or never,” to myself. I pulled the item out of my zippered pants pocket and peered into Claire’s shimmering eyes. This was what I had been most concerned about when I packed. “I had a speech planned. I’ve been rehearsing it since we got off the plane in KL, but now that we’re here and you’re staring at me like I’m a crazy person, all the words have fallen out of my brain. Except for these.” I got down on one knee, feeling the coarseness of the rock through my lightweight rain pants, and displayed the ring, sans the box. “Claire, will you marry me?”

  Claire clapped both hands over her mouth, her eyes wider than I’d ever seen.

  A squeal from a woman who’d made it to the top wasn’t directed at us. As far as I could tell, no one at the top noticed I had just proposed to Claire Nicholls.

  And no one noticed, besides me, that she hadn’t said yes. My mind raced to decide if her reaction was shock or if she was trying to come up with a way to let me down easy.

  “I-I-I,” Claire sputtered.

  “Does that mean yes or no?” I still squatted down on one knee, unable to move.

  “That’s why you’ve been acting so weird today.” She paused. “The past few days, actually. Ever since we landed. Come to think of it, you were acting odd even before we left Denver.” Clarity appeared in her eyes and smile.

  “I didn’t think I’d be this nervous. Not after everything we’ve been through and what we mean to each other. But here I am, on one knee, and my heart is thundering in my chest still waiting for your answer.” I forced a confident smile.

  Claire yanked me up into her arms and kissed me. “Yes, Jamilla Jean Cavendish, a thousand times yes.”

  Chapter Two

  “JJ! I can’t believe you popped the question without telling me beforehand.” Cora, my business partner and close friend going back decades, slapped my arm.

  Claire, Mia, and I had flown in to JFK a few hours earlier. Ian, Claire’s son, would arrive the following day to meet the newest family member. While we were in Malaysia and then China, Ian had been camping in Yellowstone and the Tetons with his father Darrell, a man who had once worked with Claire at Mile High News. It had been a complicated situation to say the least.

  Darrell used to be Claire’s boss, until I’d swept in and become publisher and boss to both of them. Then Claire suddenly quit and became publisher for a small paper in Fort Collins after I fired Darrell, the father of her child. This action caused my life to spin out of control, and my way of coping with it, Jack and Coke, forced Claire to leave me for the second and, hopefully, last time.

  Months later, I had to resign in disgrace after a blackmail attempt. Publishing a painfully honest memoir nudged the American public back into my corner. Who needed tabloids when real life was so much more fascinating?

  Our complicated situation was further proof that blended American families were becoming the new norm. I blamed the TV show The Brady Bunch.

  “Newsflash, I don’t tell you everything.” I bobbled Mia on my hip. At six months, she was much heavier than I’d expected. We’d just arrived at Cora’s five thousand square foot penthouse in Manhattan for a three-day layover, before traveling the remaining two thousand miles to our Colorado home outside of Fort Collins.

  Cora admired the emerald ring on Claire’s finger.

  “It belonged to JJ’s grandmother,” Claire said with a hint of sentimentality. “Go on; tell her the story.”

  I smiled at Claire, unable to refuse. “My grandmother gave it to me on my sweet sixteen, with the words: ‘Find someone who makes you happy and never let go.’” When I was a teen back in the late 80s, my family had been quick to accept that I didn’t like men—not romantically.

  I refrained from sharing the rest with Cora, although I had told Claire the full scoop the night of the proposal. During our freshman year in college, Claire had once admired the ring when I pulled it out of its box the day after my grandmother passed. At the time, I’d only known Claire a few months, but even then, I knew she was the one. I had kept the ring close to my heart since then, praying it would eventually find its way onto the finger it was destined for.

  “Was the proposal romantic?” Cora poured freshly squeezed lemonade from a crystal pitcher into a glass with a sugarcoated rim for me. It must be nice to have a staff of people to take care of all the details, like being able to offer the recovering alcoholic of the group a refreshing drink to combat the heat and humidity of a scorching hot July day in the Big Apple.

  “She popped the question at sunrise, on bended knee, at the top of Mount Kinabalu.” Claire sipped champagne, sitting in a flaming red chair next to the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking Central Park.

  Cora, standing next to me by the white sofa with eye-watering vivid accent pillows, nudged my side. “Jesus, that puts my husband’s proposal to shame.”

  “How did he propose?” Claire asked.

  “After sex. I think the question just burbled out of him, and I said yes before he had a chance to rescind. We’d both been married and divorced—Silas twice before—so I wasn’t expecting all that much.” She hitched one shoulder.

  Claire and Cora laughed, while Silas Matthews Jr. stood on the far side in front of a shockingly white wall, home to the seventy-two-inch television mounted above the fireplace with Bloomberg quietly updating the hedge fund owner on the trading news of the day. I tried to imagine Ian playing in this room but couldn’t.

  Silas glanced up from his iPhone, loosening his pink silk tie. “What?”

  Cora, in her fifties, not that she had one gray hair thanks to dyeing it, rolled her eyes. “Nothing, dear.”

  He continued smiling vacantly, unsure if he was in trouble or not. Since I’d seen him last year, his hair had turned a smidge whiter and his belly had gained some girth. In his early sixties, he was attractive and remarkably had enough energy to keep up with his demanding wife and son along with managing his lucrative business.

  Cora opened her arms. “Give me that baby before I burst. My son doesn’t even want to be in the same room with me these days.”

  “I fear Ian is on the cusp of hitting that age.” Claire beamed at Mia.

  Cora nuzzled the tuft of black hair on top of Mia’s head. “Oh, Ian is such a sweetheart, though. It’s hard to imagine him ever giving anyone the cold shoulder. Sly has been a handful from day one. I still remember the day he tried to give the cat a bath with dish soap after spraying him with pink and purple hair color that was left over from my Halloween costume. I don’t know who was more pissed, the cat or me.” Cora held Mia aloft to peer into her dark chocolate eyes. “What about you? Are you going to drive your mommies crazy?”

  Mia smiled as if she understood the question and was playing coy.

  Cora picked up on it. “That’s what I thought.” She flipped around to
me. “When this one becomes a teenager, say goodbye to your dark brown hair. You’ll look like Obama after eight years in office.”

  “Ha! JJ made an emergency appointment in KL to have her hair highlighted to hide the grays.” Claire grinned like the Cheshire cat revealing a much-guarded secret.

  I parked on the arm of the couch, praying Mia wouldn’t spit up, soiling not just the furniture but the pristine white carpet my bare feet sunk an inch into. “It was a necessity. I’ve been highlighting my hair since I was thirty, right about the time Cora promoted me to management, turning my life into hell.”

  “Poor JJ, having to work for a living like the rest of us.” Cora snuggled Mia so lovingly it was hard to remember this was the woman who’d urged me to do a television interview before seeking medical attention after I fell a third of the way down a volcano in Guatemala. “Speaking of work—”

  “No. I’m on maternity leave.”

  “You didn’t give birth.” Cora handed Mia to Claire. “It would be helpful if you and Claire did some interviews to spread the good news while you’re in town. The publicity would be great.”

  “Sounds good,” Claire chirped much to my annoyance.

  “Wait a minute, you two. I didn’t agree. After the whole Miracle Girl charade of the past twelve months, I’m not sure I want to be back in the limelight. People are starting to forget about me. At least the paparazzi haven’t been popping from behind cars and trash cans.” Of course, after Cora and Silas had played such an instrumental role in the adoption process, I felt slightly guilty brushing her off. I also knew how Cora worked. Hell, she probably agreed to help to exploit the adoption process for good publicity.

  Cora and Claire snickered and exchanged a look.

  Claire leveled her eyes on mine. “It would be good for my paper, not just your company.”

  Mia started to fuss. “I think she’s hungry. I’ll feed her while you two continue to conspire against me.” I took Mia from Claire and said to my daughter, “You’re the only one I can trust now.”

  “Why’d you ask me to marry you then?” Claire folded her arms across her chest, and I had to sneak a peek into her eyes to ensure I hadn’t set off her prickliness.

  Confident she was joshing, I leaned down and whispered in her ear, “You have great tits.”

  She whispered back, “If you want to see them again, you’ll play nice. I need my job.”

  “You drive a hard bargain.” I winked at her. “Come on, Miss Mia. It’s chow time, and I don’t want these media hounds corrupting you before you’re even walking.”

  Claire was the publisher of the Fort Collins Gazette, a small paper in Northern Colorado, and the corporation that owned the paper had been gutting staff in cities all over the United States. Claire’s staff had been hit in the beginning of the year, but it was only a matter of time before the second round after two disappointing quarters. It wasn’t a secret that the higher-ups were hacking away those with the bigger salaries in an attempt to stop the hemorrhaging. Claire was constantly wracked with worry about losing her job, even though we had a small cushion after my book deal. Albeit, that cushion seemed to diminish drastically each day. If only Cora and I could properly launch our new business into the stratosphere, Claire could quit and become a stay-at-home mom—her true calling.

  It didn’t take long for Cora to intrude in the library, where I had secreted myself with Mia. Cora sank into a plush leather chair across from me. Earlier, we’d briefly discussed how my meetings in Malaysia and China went, but Claire was present, curbing the conversation.

  “I wondered how long it’d take you to corner me.”

  Mia sucked on the bottle, oblivious to my formidable business partner.

  “Don’t think surrounding yourself with Claire and Mia will protect you.” She gave her best all-powerful cackle.

  I quirked an eyebrow. “That was weak. What happened to the woman who killed the last surviving WWI widow?”

  “Wow, no one has called me that in years.” Her face registered nostalgia. “I only asked her to pose for a few photos by her husband’s grave.”

  “She was one hundred years old, and it was minus ten degrees outside. Didn’t it cross your mind she might catch a deadly cold?”

  Cora leveled her eyes on mine, blinking the accusation away. “No, it didn’t.”

  “Only the story matters.”

  “You might learn from me yet.” She waggled her brows, sinking deeper into the chair and frantically tapping her fingers on the armrest. “I’ve hired a firm to run a pen test on our internet security.”

  “Are you afraid a group will come after us like Gawker?” Back in 2010, Gawker purposefully poked the bear by challenging hackers to do their best. They did by accessing and publishing thousands of passwords from the site’s database and commandeering one of Gawker’s Twitter accounts to goad the brash management.

  “It pays to be careful. After the debacle involving the Ashley Madison website…” She left the rest unsaid.

  “That’s not why you dogged me to the library, though. What’s really on your mind?”

  She rubbed the creases in her brow. “Money.”

  “Our lack of money, you mean?” I placed Mia on my shoulder so I could burp her.

  “We got a bump with the Fancy Pants story.”

  Patting Mia’s back I said, “I seriously hate that title. A ten-month investigation into the hypocrisy of one of the most powerful state leaders, who may become a national figure, yet most people will only remember two words: Fancy Pants. Shit, some think it’s a compliment to Stanly Flynn’s bold underwear choice.”

  “You know as well as I, that’s the nature of the business right now. I don’t make the rules. I own them.”

  Not wanting to debate the issue further, I asked, “How’d the talk with Silas go?”

  Her husband was the wealthiest person either of us knew, and he had initially given us a significant lump of cash to invest.

  “We need to look elsewhere.”

  “Is that how he put it?”

  Cora puffed out her cheeks and glanced away. Her refusal to fill me in on the details of the conversation was clear; Silas regarded our start-up as a losing proposition. Cora wasn’t the type to take failing lying down, and her own husband issuing the verdict must have stung like hell.

  I licked my lips, wondering how this stumbling block would complicate our lives. Cora hailed from a newspaper family dating back before William Randolph Hearst. Her family had rubbed elbows with every president since the turn of the twentieth century. They personally knew all the luminaries of every generation from all walks of life, ranging from Einstein to Hemingway to Steve Jobs. While other family members had suffered setbacks when newspapers faced difficult times, not one had flat out bombed.

  “We can’t fail. Not now.” Her words held an audacious promise, causing the lemonade in my stomach to churn.

  While my motives behind wanting the business to succeed—to be able to provide for my family—weren’t as grand as Cora’s desire to outshine her family’s publishing credentials, I was equally determined.

  ***

  Claire and I retired early to Cora’s guest bedroom, mentally exhausted from all the travel and stress of flying a six-month old baby so far. However, neither of us could fall asleep. Mia was in the next room. Cora and Silas were out for the night, attending an art exhibition and then a late dinner and drinks hobnobbing with the rich and powerful of New York City.

  “Is Sly ever home?” Claire asked.

  Cora’s son, Silas the third, better known as Sly, was summering with Cora’s parents in the Hamptons. “Occasionally. I think family vacations counts as their bonding time.”

  Claire shook her head. “I love Cora and Silas, especially after… but their parenting methods are way different than ours. If I could, I’d stay home with the kids.”

  A silence slipped between us as I racked my brain to come up with a way for Claire to be a
stay-at-home mom. The pressure on me to be the breadwinner was all my own doing.

  I lay on my back with an arm under my head. Claire rested hers on my chest. Two of the walls in the guest bedroom consisted of floor-to-ceiling glass. Silas wasn’t known for subtlety about his seven-figure, or possibly eight-figure, yearly income. The view displayed the best of the New York skyline at night. Off in the distance, the Empire State and Chrysler buildings demanded attention.

  “Thanks for green-lighting the interviews,” she said.

  “Throwing in the towel is more like it. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to see your breasts again, and they are magnificent—like Sistine Chapel awe-inspiring.”

  “Not sure the Pope would agree.” Her laugh contained a wisp of guilt. “Maybe I wasn’t playing all that fair.”

  “You think?” I jostled her body with my hip.

  “I know you hate interviews, and considering your line of work, that’s intriguing.”

  “I studied journalism to write about news, not be the subject of feature stories.”

  “Ah, yes.” She massaged my stomach under my shirt. “The battle between news and features. You want to interrogate politicians, dig through government studies about the perils of climate change, and report hard facts on poverty to educate the public, who, in turn, craves salacious gossip about Justin Bieber, the Kardashians, and any other celebrity who’s trending on Twitter.”

  “Trawling through people’s trash, literally and figuratively, makes me feel slimier than a grave robber. Ever since I published my memoir, interviewers are only seconds away from a gotcha question.” I smothered my face with an arm. “Stories like mine shouldn’t be vetted more than vice-presidential candidates. Most of the stuff that’s surfaced since I came forward is frivolous insinuations and judgments, not to mention it’s improperly sourced by blabbermouths. None of it is newsworthy.”

  “So you never dated Rebecca Manning—the Hollywood it girl ten years ago—accidentally outing the star?” Her voice indicated she was asking a question, although she knew the answer.