Scandalized(34)

“I swear I’ve looked at every photo of Anders online, and haven’t seen any of the two of you together,” I say, confused. “I never came across this connection.”

“Because our friendship is older than either of our careers,” he says. “We didn’t go out together for photo ops. The group spent time together at each other’s homes.” He swallows, blinking past me. “In the way that my family isn’t photographed at home, we all protected our old friends.”

A ball of black tar settles in my stomach. I am dying to know everything Alec knows but am also preemptively devastated over whatever it is that he might share about a once-close friend.

“Also around the time I moved back to England, Sunny began modeling. She was making a small name for herself in the industry. My friends would spend time at my family’s home.” He swallows. “And at some point, Josef and Sunny began dating.”

“Oh wow.” I mentally scroll through my file on Anders. “I had no idea.”

“You wouldn’t. Sunny’s private life is even more locked down than mine.” He nods, dipping his chin beneath the water’s surface. “But this would be maybe two years ago? Of course they’d known each other since Josef and I were at uni together, but he met her when she was thirteen, so that was a little weird.” Alec looks briefly at me, and then away again. “At first they kept it from everyone. Not even the other guys knew. We would all get together for dinner or to watch a match, and he never said anything about it. She was the one who told me, after they’d been together several months.”

“Were you mad?” I ask.

He thinks on this for a few quiet moments, and the water laps up over his chin, touching his lips. He slips beneath the surface of the water, emerging after a moment and swiping the glimmering droplets out of his eyes. “Honestly, I think I was more worried than mad. I’d known him to be a mostly decent person, but he’d had a lot of girlfriends over the years, and he knew that I wouldn’t want for my sister to get wrapped up in someone who might not be careful with his lovers’ feelings.”

“I get that.”

“But whatever, she was an adult,” he says. “Wasn’t really up to me, yeah?” Alec squints behind me, to the waves crashing on the beach. “You probably know that Josef was in a band, the Tilts, that had a hit song before they dissolved.” He trails his fingers in the water and we float in tight silence for a minute, bobbing gently in the ocean. Alec continues to draw shapes in the water, and I wonder if he’s spelling something out. Somehow, even being an actor, he seems like the kind of person who first writes longhand what he wants to say in difficult moments like this.

“But he was the primary songwriter, and ‘Turn It Up’ is still played at nearly every major sporting event in the UK. It’s made him a good deal of money, and Josef invested very well. He channeled some of this income into Jupiter.”

It’s information I already have, but it still feels like a gut punch. “Right.”

He looks at me and reaches forward to absently stroke a hand along the goose bumps erupting on my arm. “When it really grew in popularity, he was there all the time.”

My stomach has burned away by now. I want to hear this—morbid curiosity and professional investment keep me riveted—but I also want Alec to rush through it just to be done, just to wipe the expression of bleak dread from his face.

“He and Sunny were together maybe a year and a bit before she ended things, and most of it was during the building and launch of Jupiter. There’s a lot Sunny won’t tell me, especially now. But I think the split had to do with how much time he was devoting to the club. That said, I got the sense that he didn’t want things to end with her. We all noticed that he was distraught.”

He adjusts his position on the float and angles his face up to the sky. I stare at his profile, at the carved hollow of his cheekbones contrasted with the plush fullness of his mouth. I feel his face imprinting in my brain.

“Around four months ago, Sunny got her first real blockbuster modeling contract—with Dior,” he says. “It seemed like she went from scraping to book every runway she could to being an absolute supermodel. She was in tube stations and billboards and in magazines. It’s been a huge deal.” For a moment his expression softens, and he looks over at me, grinning. “It’s really cool.”

“I bet,” I say. “That’s huge.”

“Yeah.” Alec moves again, restlessly slinging his arms over the floating pool noodle, leaning his chin on it. “Even though she’d broken things off, she still considered him a family friend, you know.” He swallows and then swallows again, clenching his jaw. Turning his eyes up to me, he says quietly, “This is really off the record?”

“Entirely.” I force my voice past the lump in my throat. “I promise.”

He looks back down at the water. “A couple months ago, another one of my mates from this group, Lukas, was staying with me. He’d moved to Berlin, but while he was in town, he wanted to check out Jupiter to see what Josef was up to. I didn’t much feel like going, but he and a couple of our friends went. A couple hours later, Lukas calls and tells me that Sunny had come in, but he hadn’t seen her in a couple hours, and when he had seen her, she looked already pretty drunk. He thought I might want to come get her.”