A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

those women, you might get sacrificed . . . ’ ‘Seriously, are you going to see her again? I wouldn’t if I were you.’ Is she threatening his job if he sees other women?” Caroline put the article down and began to cry in a way that Margot had never seen her cry before. “It’s my fault,” she’d said, snuffling, as Margot handed her tissues. “I brought her in, and then we pushed her too far, too fast. She didn’t get a chance to learn the boundaries.”

“No, it’s my fault,” Margot said, trying not to cry too. “Those text messages are about us, I think. Warnings, maybe, or jokes, or both.”

“What do you mean?” Caroline asked, blinking her bloodshot eyes.

“I told Nicole about the Coven, and she must have told him,” Margot said, hanging her head. “That’s why he hasn’t been responding to me lately. They think we’re insane.”

“You . . .” Caroline stiffened, her face growing flushed with anger. “I’m sorry, you what?”

“She was giving up on parental leave! I just wanted to let her know that we would support her so that she didn’t have to make sacrifices!”

“And you didn’t even talk to me about it first? What the hell were you thinking?” Caroline yelled. “Clearly you weren’t thinking at all.” A news alert on Caroline’s phone interrupted them: Nicole was denying that the texts were threats. She’d said something about trying to protect the staffer from “a bad crowd.” He would be giving a press conference the next day to tell his side of the story.

Caroline grabbed her phone and dialed Nicole’s number over and over again. Each time, the call was sent to voice mail. Caroline slammed the phone on her desk. “Goddammit!” She rounded on Margot. “Do you think the staffer’s going to tell the truth? If he explains it all, we’ll be a laughingstock.”

“He doesn’t have to explain. He could just deny that they were threats, say it was part of a private conversation.”

“You think the media’s going to let that go, when Nicole dangled something about a ‘bad crowd’? No. Unless there’s a more salacious explanation, people will keep digging. And if it all comes out, that’s the end for the Coven and all the work we’re doing, the end of Nevertheless, maybe the end of all our careers.” Caroline clenched her fists, a battle raging inside of her. Then she gave a little sniff. “She’s going down anyway. She can’t take us down with her.”

“Let me help you fix it—” Margot began, but Caroline whirled on her.

“You’ve done enough. I’ll handle it myself.”

So Caroline showed up at the staffer’s apartment that night (scaring the shit out of him) and they had a little chat. Though he’d thought it was love originally, he’d grown disillusioned enough with Nicole to open up to the reporters who were sniffing around. Caroline had been right: the wealth tax had made Nicole a lot of powerful enemies.

But he wasn’t going to lie about Nicole threatening him. That is, until Caroline offered him a bribe of $50,000. Then he was willing to say what he needed to say. He was out of a job, after all. And if nobody else was going to stick to their principles, why should he?

Nicole couldn’t exactly contradict a serious claim like that with some story about witches. Then she would seem insane. She must have realized pretty quickly that protesting, trying to implicate Nevertheless, was futile.

So Nicole had gone down and the Coven had stayed a secret. But after the dust had settled, Caroline had declared that was it. Their original goal—to use their magic to be the queen-makers—was off the table, at least for a long, long time. Things hadn’t been the same between Margot and Caroline ever since.

FORTY-SEVEN

Holy shit,” I said when Margot was done. “You guys did take her down.”

“No, she was going down anyway.”

“And then you made it that much worse with a fucking bribe,” I said.

“Caroline was the only person involved in the bribe. So she’s the only person who you’d have proof did something wrong.” She fixed me with a stare. “If, say, the whole reason that you came to us in the first place was to write an article.”

My stomach dropped. She’d been more than one step ahead of me this whole time.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“The second time we met, I spent almost the whole party talking to Raf about you. He knows you very, very well. He’s shy about most things, maybe, but start him on the subject of you, and the floodgates open.” Dammit, Raf, I thought, and as if she’d read my mind, Margot said, “Oh, he was very good. He stuck to the party line, but still, I learned things. You’re not the kind of person to care so much about being in a club. Certainly not to the point of cornering Caroline in a hallway and blatantly asking her to invite you in.”

I didn’t say anything. “It’s all right,” Margot said. “You didn’t know us then. But now you do.” She tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear, so close to me, and said, in a quiet voice, “I wouldn’t write about us if I were you. I’m not trying to threaten you. I’m telling you the reality. You could sell us out, and sure, it might make a splash for a little while. But that splash wouldn’t last, because you’d have made a lot of influential enemies. Besides, you’d be selling yourself out too. You did break into a judge’s private home.” God, of course that was why she’d brought me with them, why they’d used only my phone to take the photos of the evidence, so I’d implicate myself. “Or you could take over the Coven with me and Caroline like you’re meant to, and we could change the world. What’s one article against the real change that we could do?”

At the doubt on