Chris makes a disgusted noise and growls, “Delete them now.”
“Or what?” Rufus asks, looking bored. “You’ll beat me up?” He tucks the phone away and turns to Susan. “You want me to bury this story? Then give me a better one.”
Taken aback, Susan stutters, “But I don’t—I don’t have anything. What do you want? A story about the restaurant?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, woman, of course I don’t! Didn’t you just date and dump Philip Simms? I’m sure you can give me a little something.”
She’s so repulsed she actually steps away from him, as if he might infect her. She’s aware of Chris watching, waiting to see what she’ll do. “You want a kiss and tell?”
“Of course I do, my dear. It’s my stock in trade.”
Save Lauren’s reputation, or throw Philip under the bus. Susan knows that family should come first—that this should be an easy choice. Philip’s famous; he’ll probably come through this all right. He has paid professionals whose job it is to help people like him ride out scandals. And how big a wave could a story on a blog like Rufus’s create anyway? But the whole idea is so ugly and sordid.
“No,” she says. “Ask for something else. You can have anything you want on me, but not him. He’s a decent guy. He doesn’t deserve it.”
Rufus’s eyes narrow. “Are you sure about that?” he asks, slowly keying in his phone’s password.
But then Chris steps forward and says, “I’ve got a story for you.”
With identical looks of surprise, Susan and Rufus turn to him.
“Do you?” Rufus asks. “Is it a good one?”
“Very good,” Chris answers, swallowing hard. “You could probably ruin me with it.”
“Ooh, intriguing!” Rufus’s eyes gleam.
Susan grabs Chris’s arm and looks up at him, hoping her face says, “No! Don’t play his game. Everything you’ve done! All the people who rely on you! Your whole future! Think about it!”
Chris looks back at her, and she recognizes the look from their London days. She used to see it when he’d had enough of the other young chefs’ bullying and was preparing to take them on, however ugly it got.
“Can we go somewhere quieter?” he asks. “More private?”
“I live just around the corner,” Susan suggests. “Moray Place.”
“Very well, then,” says Rufus. He bows low and gestures to her. “Lead the way, milady.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Time Will Explain
Moray Place is empty, but as a precaution, Susan leads the others to the kitchen, so they won’t be overheard if someone unexpectedly comes home.
“Oh, very nice, very nice,” Rufus comments, looking around the gleaming room. “Your sister’s work? I love the slate floor.”
Chris catches Susan’s eye and cringes.
“Should we get this over with?” he suggests, taking a seat at the table.
“Certainly.” Rufus takes a seat across from Chris, sets his phone on the table, and prepares to press a button to begin recording.
Susan joins them, taking the chair at the head of the table.
Chris inhales deeply and places his hands, folded together, on top of the table. Rufus presses the large red button pulsating in the center of his phone’s screen.
“I killed my best friend,” Chris announces abruptly.
Rufus’s eyes practically pop out of his head. “Did you indeed?” He leans forward. “Please, do tell me more!”
Susan wants nothing more than to smash his greedy face into the table.
Chris closes his eyes for a long moment, rhythmically clenching and unclenching his hands. “When I was working at Elliot’s in London, I started taking cocaine,” he says, looking toward Susan. There’s something in his eyes that seems to be pleading with her. “A lot of us took it—it’s not uncommon among restaurant employees. The long hours, the high pressure—it can be hard to keep up. But you know how these things go: the more you take, the more you start to feel you need.”
Suddenly, Chris’s behavior during the latter part of their relationship makes more sense. The lack of sleep, the manic talking. And she didn’t think it was just the job that he needed to keep up with. He needed to keep going at full speed to help deal with her too.
“It was … not a good time,” Chris continues. “I was half out of my mind. I wasn’t the person I needed to be for other people.” He looks at Susan again, and she shakes her head just a little, wishing she could hug him and tell him that that wasn’t his fault. That he’d done what he could, and she knew that, but she’d expected him to take on too much. “I realized I needed to stop,” he says. “I got rid of what I had, but during a random search at work, something was found in my locker.” He shakes his head, and his lips and hands tighten.
Something was found. Or planted, Susan thinks, remembering the jealousy of the other chefs at Elliot’s.
“I was fired immediately and told that the whole thing would be kept quiet if I agreed never to see … someone again. I told them they could take their threats and shove ’em.”
Susan feels sick. Her aunt did this? Threatened Chris, to keep him away from her, even as she was gently persuading Susan to just give the relationship a little break for the good of them both? And yet, he’d still risked it. He’d risked the career that meant so much to him by trying to reach out to her. And she’d ignored him!
“And for the record, who was that someone?” Rufus asks, with a glance toward Susan, who blushed.
“I’m not going to say, on or off the record,” Chris answers. “It’s not relevant. She ended things with me the night I was fired and so had no bearing on what came after.”
Susan nearly groans aloud. She couldn’t have possibly known how bad her timing was, but … Jesus.
Rufus shakes his head. “Bitch,” he hisses.
“I said leave her out of this,” Chris nearly shouts.
Susan jumps, but Rufus just raises an eyebrow and says, “All right. Moving on …”
“I came back home to Scotland,” says Chris. “Not much for me in London. I was in very poor shape, not sleeping, not eating, couldn’t figure out what to do with myself, sure my whole career was over.” He shakes his head. “Twenty-something drama. Feels like the whole world’s coming to an end. I stayed with my best mate. We grew up together, he and I. He lived next door to us, and his mum was sort of a mum to me after mine left. But he’d fallen in with some rough types. He was getting away from it when I came back. He’d gone legit, was learning a trade, seeing a nice girl, all that. But I, uh …” Chris blinks very hard, glances away, clenches his hands. The silence stretches, long and painful. “I felt like I needed something to help me. I was in a lot of pain.” His lips thin and he looks deeply disgusted with himself. “I knew that he knew people. I asked him to get me what I needed.”
Susan, too, blinks hard, and turns her head away. All this, at least in part, because of her. Because she hadn’t had the decency to have an honest talk with him. To answer her goddamn phone.