The Last Thing He Told Me, Laura Dave [graded readers txt] 📗

Think What You Want

“I still can’t believe this is happening,” Jules says.

We sit in the kitchen, at the small breakfast table in the sun nook, drinking coffee spiked with bourbon. Jules is on her second mug, her oversize sweatshirt concealing her small frame, her hair pulled back in two low pigtails. They make her look like she is trying to get away with something, sneaking some more bourbon into the mug. They make her look a little like her fourteen-year-old self, the girl I met our first day of high school.

My grandfather had just moved us from Tennessee to Peekskill, New York—a small town on the Hudson River. Jules’s family had moved there from New York City. Her father was an investigative journalist for the New York Times—a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist—not that Jules had any airs about her. We met while applying for after-school jobs at Lucky’s, a local dog-walking service. We were both hired. And we took to walking our assigned dogs together every afternoon. We must have been a sight: two small girls, fifteen rowdy dogs surrounding us at any given time.

I was a freshman at the public high school. Jules was at a prestigious private school a few miles away. But those afternoons were just the two of us together. I’m still not sure how we would have gotten through high school without each other. We were so removed from each other’s actual lives that we told each other everything. Jules once compared it to how you confide in a stranger you meet on a plane. From the beginning, this is what we’ve been to each other: safe, airborne. Complete with a thirty-thousand-foot perspective.

That hasn’t changed, now that we’re the grown-ups. Jules has followed in her father’s footsteps and works for a newspaper. She’s a photo editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, focusing primarily on sports. She eyes me, worried. But I’m eyeing Bailey in the living room, snuggled into Bobby on the couch, the two of them talking low. It seems harmless. And still, my thought is, I have no idea what harmless looks like. This is the first time Bobby has been over when Owen hasn’t been home. This is the first time when it’s been up to me alone.

I try to check on them while pretending not to check on them. But Bailey must feel my gaze. She looks up at me, less than pleased. Then she stands up and deliberately closes the glass living room door with a thud. I can still see her, so it’s more of a ceremonial slamming. But it’s a slamming all the same.

“We were sixteen once too, you know,” Jules says.

“Not like that,” I say.

“We only wish,” she says. “Purple hair rocks.”

She makes a move to pour some more whisky into my coffee cup, but I cover the mug with my hand.

“You sure? It’ll help,” she says.

I shake my head no. “I’m okay,” I say.

“Well, it’s helping me.”

She pours herself some more and moves my hand out of the way, topping me off. I smile at her, even though I have barely taken a sip of what I already have. I’m too stressed, too physically off—too close to standing up and busting into the living room, pulling Bailey by the arm into the kitchen with me just to feel like I’m accomplishing something.

“Have you heard from the police yet?” Jules says.

“No, not yet,” I say. “And why isn’t someone from The Shop banging down the door? Telling me what to do when they show up?”

“Bigger fish to fry,” she says. “Avett was their primary target and the police just took him into custody.”

She circles the rim of her mug with her fingers. And I take her in—her long eyelashes and high cheekbones, the one wrinkle between her eyes in overdrive today. She is nervous, the way she gets, the way we both get, before we have to tell each other something that we know isn’t going to be fun for the other person to hear—like the time she told me she saw my quasi-boyfriend Nash Richards at the Rye Grill, kissing another girl. It was less that she thought I’d be upset about Nash, who I wasn’t particularly into, and more that the Rye Grill was Jules’s and my favorite place to eat french fries and cheeseburgers. And when she threw her soda in Nash’s face, the manager told her we were permanently banned.

“So are you going to tell me, or what?” I say.

She looks up. “Which part?” she says.

“How this is all your fault?”

She nods, readying herself, blowing out her cheeks. “When I got to the Chronicle this morning, I knew there was something going on. Max was giddy, which almost always means bad news. Murder, impeachment, Ponzi scheme.”

“He’s a peach, that Max,” I say.

“Yeah, well…”

Max is one of the few investigative journalists still at the Chronicle—handsome, smarmy, brilliant. He is also crazy about Jules. And, despite her assurances to the contrary, I kind of suspect Jules feels the same way about him.

“He was looking particularly smug, hovering around my desk. So I knew that he knew something and wanted to gloat. He’s old fraternity brothers with someone at the SEC who apparently had the scoop on what was going down with The Shop. With the raid this afternoon.”

She looks at me, not wanting to continue.

“He told me that the FBI has been investigating the firm for over a year. Shortly after their stock went public, they got a tip that the market listing was fraudulently overstated in connection with the IPO.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I say.

“It means The Shop thought the software would be ready earlier than it was. So they went to market too soon. And then they were stuck, pretending they had functional software when in reality they couldn’t sell it yet. So to compensate, and keep the stock prices high, they began falsifying their financial statements.”

“How did they do that?”

“So they have their other software, video, apps, their bread-and-butter