“That’s not really my thing. I’m more of a violently-struggle-against-the-flow type of person.” Sometimes I did make things harder than they needed to be.
We sat in silence for a moment until she said, “So, just friends, huh? Does that mean you’d be good with him dating someone else?”
“Is he?” The words rushed out of my mouth without my approval. “I mean, if he is, that’s fine. Good for him.” My reaction was totally unwarranted considering he’d told me himself that he wasn’t dating anyone. “As his friend, I would want him to be happy.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said in a singsong voice.
Yeah, neither did I.
But even if I wanted to date him and wasn’t desperately afraid of getting close to him, there still wouldn’t be any way. I couldn’t compete with the kind of women he could date. What did I have in common with the world’s most beautiful actresses and models?
I mean other than the fact that we were all hungry all the time?
“Well, I have to get ready for work.” She put an emphasis on the last word, clearly pleased to have a client again. She took her coffee mug to the sink. “Is there a message you want me to pass along to your newly acquired friend?”
“Nope, I’m good.”
“Maybe I’ll give him a good, rousing speech about how faint heart never won fair maiden,” she mused, rinsing her cup out and putting it into the dishwasher.
“It won’t do you any good. He accepted his defeat and retreated like a good soldier.”
She seemed to consider this. “Or . . . he didn’t retreat. Maybe he’s biding his time and planning to attack from another position.”
Shaking my head, I gathered up my stuff and then went into my bedroom, closing the door behind me. I dropped my purse on my bed and plugged the charger into my phone. I peeled off my dress. I needed a shower, but Shelby would need to use it first.
For her new job.
My phone buzzed again, and I let myself have that moment of hope again before checking. My bank again. They must really want me to go into debt. But this time I bothered to read the first line.
It said SECURITY ALERT.
I opened the message, and it said something about fraudulent activity and to call them as soon as possible to resolve it. My pulse began to beat frantically. I logged on to my banking app to see what was going on.
Zero.
My checking account had been cleared out.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I called the phone number in the text and pushed the numbers in the menu to report fraudulent activity. A woman named Karen answered and asked for my account number. I didn’t know it off the top of my head, although I probably could have gotten it from my banking app.
She asked, “Do you have your debit card? You could read that number to me.”
The last place I’d had my card was in my clutch. I dived for my purse, pulling out the candy bar, my driver’s license, my lipstick, mints, and a thing of tissues.
No debit card.
“It’s gone,” I told her.
“Do you know when you lost it?”
“I had it yesterday.” I specifically remembered putting it in my purse when I was getting ready for the Oscars, just in case I needed it for some reason. And now it was gone. I hadn’t used it in days.
It was then that I remembered the party, how my purse had fallen on the ground when I was trying to read that text from Morgan. “I think I lost it last night at the Vanity Fair party.”
There was a pause. “Did you say the Vanity Fair party? The one after the Academy Awards?”
“Yeah. I was there with Noah Douglas. It was kind of a date.”
Another pause. “Like . . . in your dreams?”
“What? No. I was there.” I realized too late how far-fetched and stupid it sounded, but it was the actual truth.
“Right. And Chase Covington and I were in his villa in Italy.”
Were customer service reps supposed to be this snarky? “He was actually there at the party with his wife. I hung out with them.”
She didn’t respond.
I was completely aware of how crazy this all sounded. “I can send you proof. I have a picture of Noah and me together.”
“Please hold.” She was probably off to have a good laugh with her fellow customer service colleagues.
Dumb elevator music came on, and I wanted to raise my fists and shake them at the world. I’d spent a fantastic evening with one of the world’s biggest movie stars at one of the biggest Hollywood parties, so of course the universe had to balance it back out by letting someone steal all my money.
I thought of the person who had taken my debit card at a party full of celebrities and wealthy people and how mad they must have been when they found out that there was so little in my account.
Shelby called out “Bye!” just before she slammed the front door shut, but I wasn’t able to respond, as Karen came back on the line.
“Juliet?”
“Yes?”
She had me verify some of my personal information to locate my account. Once she had, she read off the suspicious charges to me. There were small purchases at two drugstores first, the criminal probably not realizing they’d spent a good percentage of my “fortune” on ChapStick and Slim Jims. Their next stop was at a gas station and a liquor store, where they’d bought enough alcohol to make an entire frat house blackout drunk. Then once they saw that there was no alert on the card, that I hadn’t reported it as stolen, they went online to a jewelry store website and tried to purchase a six-thousand-dollar pair of earrings.
Which my bank’s algorithms noticed, because I was so broke that they probably would have sent me an alert if I’d ever tried to buy two-ply toilet paper.
When I denied all the charges, Karen told me she had canceled my debit card and would mail me a new one. She then told me that the bank had up to ten days to investigate the fraudulent charges and that once they’d determined they were in fact fraudulent, they had another business day to replace the missing funds.
“But my rent is due in four days,” I told her. I didn’t have however many days they were going to take to give me back my money.
“It could be worse,” she told me sympathetically. “You reported it within two business days, which means your liability is limited to fifty dollars. If you’d waited more than sixty days, your liability could have been up to five hundred dollars.”
“Wait, what? Someone stole from me and I’m liable for fifty bucks?” I know it didn’t sound like much, but it was a lot of money to someone like me.
“Because they used your debit card and it was processed as a debit instead of a credit transaction, it’s not under the same sort of protection, and you do have liability.”
My mom had told me once to always use my bank card as a credit card, and now I was finally understanding why. “But isn’t that why the cards have those chips in them? To force them to input my PIN?”
“Not every vendor has an updated card reader, and there are places that will take a swipe instead.”
I put my head in my free hand. What was I going to do? I felt totally defeated. “Okay. I guess it is what it is.” It didn’t sound like there was a whole lot I could do. I assumed Karen was only doing what she was supposed to do. “Thanks.”