Page 72 of Filthy Liar

“Am I wrong.”

“No.” I give him an impish smile. “But yeah, this is the real me, I guess.”

He takes my face in his hands and looks at me, really looks carefully. His gaze rakes over my mouth, my cheeks, and my heavily lined eyes. “Were you a goth as a kid by any chance?”

“Guilty as charged. I never really outgrew it.”

“Fascinating. And yet when you were being someone else, you went ultra-feminine. I like both looks,” he hastens to add. “I likeyou, and however you choose to decorate your face.”

“A-plus answer.”

Dinner is incredible.We take our time with each course, and as promised, we talk about work.

“It’s actually amazing that nobody else has the details on the full scope of those incriminating images and emails. I’m still the only journalist who has the numbers, and most of the names.” I drag in a deep breath. “For a long time, I thought if I got my hands on them, I’m dump them into the public like the Panama Papers. I even had a good name picked out for the release.”

He waits expectantly.

“The Pervert Papers.”

It gets a laugh. That makes me feel good. But then he shakes his head. “But you can’t.”

Nope. “I know. And I don’t want to anymore, either. It’s just, that’s what I thought the scoop would be. So now it feels like dry procedural stories, which isn’t what I do.”

“No, it’s not.”

“If I can make a suggestion,” he offers.

“Please.”

“Go back to your roots. Only one of us managed to get Gerome Lively facing life sentences, and it wasn’t me with my shock and awe takedown of him at sea. You did it by making individual narratives more powerful than anything else. I didn’t know it was you, Ellie, but I was reading Melinda Gray from day one. You’re very good at what you do.”

My chest feels tight. I rub it. “What I do isn’t enough, though.”

“It is. And it will be again.”

“I’m scared of letting those women down, letting down the girls they once were.”

“Nobody is promised justice in this world, but that doesn’t mean we don’t keep trying to make it happen. That’s all they expect from a superhero.”

I sigh.

“Maybe that didn’t help.”

“No, it did.” I take his hand across the table. “I didn’t realize how sad I was about that.”

“You compartmentalize a lot.”

I snort. “Yeah.”

We sit with that depressing thought for a few moments in silence, then he leans in, just as I take a sip of water. “Which brings me to the grown-up discussion about fucking,” he whispers.

I sputter, and water goeseverywhere.“Jesus, I’m glad that wasn’t wine.”

“I need to work on my segues,” he says innocently.

Except that was very deliberate.

My lover is a funny, funny man. “So, fucking, huh? What exactly about my locked-down emotional state would make you want to talk about—oh, I see what you did there.”

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