Tess felt a flutter of panic as she instantly fell onto the back foot on her first day, feeling both incompetent and unprofessional. Danny Krantz penned the gossip column in New York’s Daily Oracle. Together with Page Six in the New York Post and Rush and Molloy in the Daily News it was one of the juiciest, best-read newspaper columns in the country.
Shit, she silently cursed herself, of course she should have read all the papers, but there seemed to have been so many other things to do that morning.
‘Not yet,’ she replied quickly. ‘I’ve organized for all the papers to be delivered to my apartment, but that won’t happen until tomorrow,’ she said, blushing.
‘It came online at five a.m.’ Patty did not say it in an unkind or accusatory way; it was a simple relaying of fact. She tapped the page. ‘Read that.’
Tess took a swig of coffee as she read the story, wincing both at the strength of the coffee and the gossip item.
Brooke Asgill, fiancée of New York’s most eligible man, David Billington, may look like perfect wife material, but this morning news emerged that Brooke is a home-wrecker.
Tess glanced up at Patty, her expression grave.
Brown University professor Dr Jeff Daniels left his wife of ten years to be with Brooke Asgill when she was a student at the institution. Although the relationship between Daniels and Asgill didn’t last …’ Tess quickly skimmed the rest of the story, reading the last line out loud.
‘Old flame Matthew Palmer, now a doctor at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center says: “Brooke was always hot. I’d be surprised if any man could resist her.”’
Tess shook her head, then looked at Patty. ‘I guess this means our guided tour is off?’
‘I guess so,’ smiled Patty. ‘Instead you’ve got a baptism of fire. Nothing we can’t handle, though.’
Tess didn’t doubt it. She had done all her homework on her contacts at Asgill’s and she could still recall Patty’s impressive CV: Duke University, Harvard Law School, five years at a Wall Street commercial firm, three years here at Asgill’s. She was exactly the sort of person you’d want on your side in a crisis. Tess was glad someone knew what they were doing.
She looked back at the newspaper in front of her and began to feel her old journalistic curiosity creeping back. Interesting, she thought. So Brooke Asgill does have a dark side after all. She almost smiled, before remembering which side of the fence she was on now. At the Globe it was all about exposing people’s misdemeanours; now she was being paid a great deal of money to cover them up.
‘Have you contacted the paper?’ she asked.
Patty shook her head. ‘I called Brooke as soon as I read it. She’s denying it all, of course, but I wanted to get the full facts from her in person. She’s due in the office any minute. In the meantime the story has run too late for the other papers to pick up until tomorrow, although I guess some could go online with it.’
‘Can we get an injunction? Stop it from appearing anywhere else?’ asked Tess, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. Her knowledge of American law was sketchy at best. At work she was used to feeling in control, but here, with efficient Patty in this clean, sweet-smelling office, she felt displaced, out of her depth, and unsure of herself. She didn’t like the feeling, not one bit. Patty was thoughtful for a moment.
‘Well, it’s certainly more difficult for celebrities to sue the media than it is in London,’ she replied. ‘The beauty of the First Amendment,’ she smiled, her icy demeanour softening.
They both heard Brooke before they saw her: a click-clack of heels followed by a sniffle and a sob in the corridor before she appeared in the doorway. Even though she was wearing wide black sunglasses, you could tell she’d been crying from the puffiness of her cheeks.
‘Hi Brooke,’ said Patty, her head cocked sympathetically. ‘I don’t know if you’ve met Tess Garrett before?’
Brooke nodded as she sat down. ‘Briefly, at my party. Sorry about the sunglasses. I look like Gollum this morning.’
Yeah, right, thought Tess. With her long butter-blonde hair, quivering lip, and Tom Ford shades, she looked like a young Jane Birkin on holiday.
‘So. Is any of it true?’ Patty asked earnestly.
Brooke looked desperately miserable and fragile as she looked down at her hands.
‘Yes and no. Jeff Daniels and I dated for about six months when I was twenty-one. Yes, he was one of my tutors at Brown, but we didn’t start dating until a few months after I’d left college and by then he was separated.’
‘Or he told you he was separated,’ said Tess.
Brooke looked up, her green eyes flashing.
‘It wasn’t like that at all,’ she said firmly. ‘He had been separated from his wife for about twelve months before we went on our first date and his divorce came through a couple of months later. There was no overlap at all, none. I’m not a home-wrecker.’
Brooke rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘David’s family are going to go crazy,’ she whispered.
Patty and Tess exchanged a look. They couldn’t really deny it.
‘What’s David got to say about it?’ asked Tess. ‘He’s the important one.’
‘He’s not very happy, as you can imagine,’ said Brooke, wiping her nose. ‘But he says he believes me.’
‘And have you heard from the Billingtons?’ asked Patty.
Brooke shrugged. ‘My phone is probably jammed with messages, but I haven’t been able to face it.’ She turned to Tess, her eyes pleading.
‘How did this happen? I thought the Billingtons were like the CIA; how come they didn’t stop it?’
Tess shook her head. ‘The first they will have heard about it was when someone read a first-edition paper this morning. I suppose you have to know about something to stop it.’
Tess squirmed, hoping that would not seem like a dig. It was obvious Brooke was suffering enough over this without Tess reading her the riot act about keeping her past to herself.
Patty glanced at her watch and then rose to her feet. ‘I want to talk to Meredith and then I’d better go and make some calls.’
At the mention of her mother, Brooke’s face paled. Tess could sympathize; she barely knew Meredith Asgill, but she didn’t imagine this would play out well with her either. There was of course a chance Meredith would try to blame this on Tess, although – according to Sally the receptionist – office hours were eight until five, so strictly speaking Tess hadn’t even started work when the Oracle website ran the story.
‘So what’s the plan?’ asked Tess.
Patty folded her arms in front of her. ‘I can get it taken down from the website but it’s obviously too late for the paper. Good news is that the Oracle publishes a European edition, so I can threaten to sue them in the British courts. That should be enough leverage to make them print a retraction in tomorrow’s paper.’
She looked at Tess meaningfully. ‘Then I’m afraid it’s up to you to do the damage control.’
She spun around on her high heels and walked out of the room. When Tess looked back, she saw that Brooke had picked up the paper and was reading the story again.
‘I can’t believe Jeff would do this,’ she said dejectedly. ‘I guess he needed the money.’
‘Why do you think it was Jeff who went to the papers?’ asked Tess.
Brooke looked up sharply. ‘It must