Page 97 of Hard Evidence
“Did she?How do you know?”
“She left a comment.”
I scrolled until I found it, below a reply that said “OMG, Jessalyn!Are you okay?Blink three times if you need help.”Saylor had posted a meme, a painting of Queen Elizabeth I with the caption “Someone fetch me my dick guillotine, the little one.”
The comment had seventy-three likes, and I began laughing.I laughed until tears rolled down my cheeks, and Justin was looking kind of concerned.
“Should I be worried?”he asked.
“You work construction—how difficult would it be to build a dick guillotine?”
“I mean, I could do it.But I think the bigger problem would be keeping him still.”
Yes, and I already knew how ineffective Benadryl was when it came to drugging a man.
“Plus I’d need a microscope to find it.”Wait, wasn’t there an emoji for that?Oh, it was a magnifying glass.Close enough.I replied to Saylor’s comment and added a laughing-crying face too.
Me:
“In all seriousness, do you want me to have my lawyer write him a letter?”
“That’s real sweet of you, but I don’t think it would help.Ridgeisa lawyer.Even though he’s spouting a bunch of lies, you can bet your ass he read his script twenty times over to make sure it skirted the boundaries of defamation.”
“I don’t care if he’s the Attorney General; you don’t need to stay silent and take this.We could at least give him a warning.”
We.That one word made my heart swell.I wasn’t alone in this anymore.I had Justin, and Ridge was trying to hurt him too.A letter would do no good—Ridge would just laugh and file it in the shredder—but Justin was right about the silence.Ridge presented an image to the world, the one he wanted everyone to see.The abuse, the cruelty, the harm he did happened behind closed doors.Now, once again, he was trying to shape the narrative, and he expected me to comply the same way I always had.
But I was a different person.
Justin had changed me.
He’d shown me support and kindness, and no way was I allowing Ridge’s slander to undo that.
Fuck him.
Fuck him and his reasonableness.
My hands shook as I pulled open the refrigerator and scanned the ingredients.A cold burrito, unsweetened almond milk, ground beef, hot dog buns, a bunch of weirdly small eggplants.
Huh.
Eggplants.I could do something with that.
Fuck him.
I began pulling drawers open.
“Jess?What are you doing?”
“He took everything from me.My education, my friends, my happiness, even my freaking dog.And he took my hobby too.I used to cook because I enjoyed it, and he turned it into a chore.Do we have tape?”
“Tape?”
“Packing tape, electrical tape, painter’s tape.Tape.”
Justin opened a cupboard and handed me a roll of duct tape.I attached my phone to the faucet and checked the picture.Not quite straight, but I could work with it.
“Jessie?”
