CHAPTER 54 – Liability (2)

To Eppie, Valorie’s near-silent moans felt agonising until Sir Justin Woodhouse filled the doorway with immense relief.

He approached Vaughan first.

“Madam.”

“Justin.”

Universal’s Creative Director looked at the room—the bandages, the dressing, the general evidence associated with launching a terracotta pot into the stratosphere—and chose silence. A dozen paces later, he reached Valorie’s side.

“I am sorry, Sir Woodhouse,” Valorie mumbled.

Eppie felt a zap of electricity surge through her chest. So you CAN say sorry! Where’s mine?!

Whatever passed between them was brief, without audible words, and inaccessible to someone like Eppie. Val stood. She pulled the blanket from her shoulders and folded it with the neatness of someone raised with an etiquette tutor.

She did not look at Eppie.

Woodhouse turned to Eppie in Valorie’s place.

He gazed at her with immense discomfort, induced by, Eppie surmised, a fairly complete picture of how the evening’s theatre had ended and what role a fifteen-year-old girl in a ripped Givenchy had played.

The man settled on directness.

“Miss Fontaine.” He paused. “Thank you for helping Valorie come to her senses.”

The man was sincere. Eppie accepted it.

“I should also note,” Woodhouse added with a smile, straightening, resuming the facade of the British socialite, “that this changes nothing between myself and Director Curon. We remain competitors in every professional capacity. See you at the Grammys, Miss Fontaine.”

“Naturally,” said Eppie, feeling like she should extend an Austenian hand for Woodhouse to kiss.

Woodhouse eyed her bandaged hands, gave her a precise nod, then held the door open for Valorie. Valorie moved toward the exit. At the threshold, she stopped.

She turned. Not all the way. Just enough. God, that dress is ridiculous. Eppie had to change the direction of her gaze.

Thank you. Maybe Valorie said it. Maybe Eppie imagined it. She didn’t know. All she saw was someone who had some very difficult choices to make, and most likely didn’t have the strength to pull it through, at least not without further encouragement.

Then Val was gone. But that was fine. Come January, they would have five months on Cooper’s chain gang.

Sir Woodhouse bowed. The door closed.

“George, bring us some tea,” Juliana Vaughan had already cleared out a space free from bandages, blood and scattered band-aid wrappers. “Let’s talk.”

George set down the tea, cakes, fresh napkins, and cutlery, then left with the bin of soiled wipes and bloody bandages.

“Chamomile with Rose of Valencia,” Vaughan said. “From a local shop on 5th Avenue. They have their own flower farm.”

Now, it was Eppie’s turn to sit with her bandaged hands between her legs, listening to someone else speak.

Vaughan poured for both of them. She drank her tea hot.

“Was it all true?” she asked. “What you told Valorie.”

Eppie considered the question seriously. She had taken… a little theatrical liberty.

“Everything about Mio is true, about as true as I can know.” Since I was there. “There’s something I haven’t told Valorie, though. Only a few people know.”

“You don’t have to tell me if it’s sensitive,” Vaughan said.

“Mio’s pregnant. She’s due in January.”

Vaughan’s teacup clinked against the saucer. “Jesus…”

“She’s safe, happy, she’s… moved on,” Eppie said softly.

Vaughan replaced the cup. “Does she need help? Financially, perhaps?”

“I took care of it. What matters is her amazing family and community.”

The curator accepted her words as fact.

“As for Simone’s story…” Eppie coughed. “She’s a waitress at a Chinese place associated with the Chens. She works the tables in a short skirt and gets decent tips. The uncles there are apparently very protective of their hei-mei-mei. She’s going to take her two sisters to Disneyland in January. It’ll be their first visit.”

Vaughan absorbed this. “I see.”

She smiled.

“And yourself?”

Eppie inhaled as she gathered her thoughts.

“I have no idea,” Eppie said finally. “I know what Simone told me. She pushed me by accident.”

She stopped. “Then I woke up in the hospital as the person you now know.”

The ancient lamp flickered. Outside, the last of the guests were departing—the faint punctuation of doors and engines and the particular quality of silence that follows a large gathering when it has finally exhausted itself.

“Will Valorie repent?” Vaughan asked.

Eppie thought about the question genuinely. She turned it over in her head, but in all honesty, her bet wasn’t on Val making it to the finish line.

“I think Valorie has to choose to live with her actions, or seek penance,” Eppie said. “Did you know that I confronted William? I told him I had proof. I told him that if he apologised, paid reparations, and went to jail, he could be out when he’s thirty and still living the most amazing life anyone can manage. His response was to consider if I could be pinned against a fence and taught a lesson—at least, that was the look he gave me.”

She sighed.

“As for Val, I don’t know for sure. I think she will choose to live with it. She won’t make things worse, but that’s not her choice to make. Living with the knowledge—is that enough? She has to confront William, and I don’t think she has the head or the heart for it. What I can imagine is William pushing her down the stairs again, only this time, she might not clamber back up. That or, after I do away with William, she’ll just find herself another one. Maybe Grein this time, for real.”

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Because William is a [Usurper of Hope], the kind of creature only Grein could match.

Vaughan sipped her tea. “You will do away with William?”

“I am almost there, in fact,” Eppie explained to Vaughan her plan. Her Mouse Trap. “A bit hypocritical, considering your lesson to me, but it is what it is.”

Vaughan did not argue with her conclusion.

“So, let me surmise,” her mentor said. “You have thus far taken from William the man called Fat Lim Wang, then Simone Goode, and now, Valorie, for better or worse. And you have put into place a public trial so humiliating that death would certainly be preferable.”

“Apparently.”

“And you have done this,” Vaughan said, “over the course of what is, by any measure, a single school term?”

“I also did Neo Antigone, learned the guitar, released two classics, have two more cooking, wrote a Number One, and aced my academic challenges,” Eppie informed her teacher with all the humility in the world.