Page 173 of The Exit Strategy

He looks at me with wide eyes. Then he laughs—once, dry, like he’s aiming for humorless but can’t quite master it.

“Fair,” he chuckles.

“I thought so.”

He flips through Natalie’s slide show, pausing on her caption.The cost of one woman’s vendetta.

“She’s desperate,” he says flatly. “She’s trying to profit off the bullshit audience Grace has already built. That’s the only way a post like this serves her. You, my little Spite-Berry, are once again collateral damage.”

I shrug because it’s something I’ve already come to terms with.

“She’s using a photo of her disabled brother for fucking engagement. That tells us all we need to know about the kind of person we’re dealing with.”

“Well, that or when she wrote my number on the stall door at Fenway Park in a black Sharpie and encouraged people to call me for a good time. But yeah, her brother was a dead giveaway too.”

“Jesus, Junie.”

“It is what it is.”

“As a medical professional. I’m—I’m genuinely— I cannot.”

“She’s a horrible human.”

“You do seem to collect those,” he grumbles.

“But her brother is innocent.”

“So were you,” he growls. “The fact that she’s using a vulnerable adult who has not, to our knowledge, consented to being on a public platform as a prop, isn’t a personal grievance. That’s… Junie, that’s not just gross, that’s potentially actionable, depending on what his guardianship status is and who has the right to consent for him. This isn’t Natalie having a bad day on social media, this is her making a choice.”

He hands me my phone.

“Her brother’s going to be collateral damage because of my decisions, Nolan.”

“No. Nope. He’s in this position because of the choices his sister made.”

“I know that, but…” I’ve never even met this guy. I don’t know what he’s like, or if he’s kind. I don’t know if he’s aware that life as he knows it is about to change or if Natalie has any kind of contingency plan in place.

“If I hadn’t?—”

Nolan opens his mouth to argue, but I put my hands up to stop him.

“If I had just thought, for a few minutes, I could’ve made the same choice but with less damage, I could’ve looked into her brother a little more. I could’ve…”

“You could’ve what? Saved him? Protected him?”

“I don’t know, okay? I just know I don’t like how I feel right now. I don’t deserve this, but neither does he.”

Nolan studies me as if I’m a zoo animal.

“I sent the email to take down Natalie. She hurt me, yes, but she hurt Cole, and that wasn’t something I was willing to accept.”

“The question is, why were you willing to accept that she hurt you, but not Cole?”

“I—” His question genuinely stumps me. What did he do, take a bunch of psychology classes in Japan? I scratch at my neck like I can’t breathe. “It’s what I knew, I guess.”

“And now you can unlearn that behavior because that shit isn’t healthy.”

“Yes, okay. Fine. But my point is, I sent that email to take down Natalie, not Marcus.” That’s the point I’ve been struggling with since she tagged me in her post. “Marcus isn’t collateral I’m willing to accept.”