Page 214 of The Art of Almost Losing It
GRAHAM
My siblings crowd around the phone. I join them, slowly, like I’m walking over to a pit filled with monsters. Dani’s sitting stone-still at the table, a look of shock on her face.
It can’t be.
Someone else was kidnapped on that dark street a few weeks ago. There were no videos of me and Dani.
I peer over Hannah’s shoulder.
“Someone had a pet cam on their cat,” she explains as she replays it. “The girl just got home from a long work trip and was checking the camera because she thought her cat got fat, right? And she wanted to know what he was doing?”
The cat, thank God, is blocking half the frame. So you can’t see my car—and yeah, that is my car, because that’s Dani in the background. You only see her from behind. The video’s such poor quality, and she was on the other side of the street, two floors down. But I know Dani. I know what she was wearing. And that’s her.
Do my siblings know? Do they suspect? Does Frank know?
I can’t look at him.
My mom starts crying. “That’s horrible. That poor girl.”
“Maybe it’s staged or some AI video,” I say, though it’s a gamble—Frank could read into it.
“Yeah, Mom,” Ryan comforts her. “It’s probably fake.”
“I mean, it’s so blurry,” Claire says slowly.
Frank just stares at the video.
“Let’s turn that off, Hannah,” Bridget orders. “Everyone is too hungover for this. It’s probably nothing, just clickbait.”
“Look at the caption on the video,” Hannah says. “It’s near where the Italian restaurant was. This happened the night we were at the restaurant.”
“Did you see anything when you drove home? Anything suspicious?” Ryan asks me.
Dani is cutting her bacon up into tiny little pieces.
“I wasn’t…” I shake my head. “I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t see anything. I don’t know who kidnapped that poor girl.”
“I told you.Ifuckingtold you.”
The relief of my oldest brother slamming me into the wall of his office. The sharpness of the corner of the marble bust cutting my face. It’s better than the torture of sitting through brunch then the drive back to Manhattan with my family, the threat of that video hanging over my head.
“You’re going to go to jail.” Grayson looks heartbroken. “They’re going to lock you up in a box, and I’m never going to see you again.” Grayson hugs me to his chest. The way his body heaves—I think he’s about to cry.
“Grayson, Grayson,” I yelp.
“Stop it, all of you.” Aaron’s got his sociopathic insurance-agent face on. “I need you all to calm down, for fuck’s sake!”
“I have Vicodin,” Spencer offers us.
“Honestly.” Aaron sounds disgusted. “I’m getting ready to have you just dose them with it so I can take care of this.”
“Can’t you scrub it from the internet?” Spencer asks Finn. “You’re the software guy, and you know people who could.”
“We run afoul of the Streisand effect by trying to scrub it and bury it—it just brings more attention,” Finn explains. “I think we need to just ignore it.”
“You can barely see anything in the video. It’s blurry in the background. The cat’s blocking most of it.” Aaron nods.
“There are already people online saying it’s fake, that the girl who posted it is chasing likes.” Connor grins. “Give it a few days, and she’s going to get so many hate comments she’ll take it down herself.”
