Scandalized(35)

I feel like I’ve been punched. “No.”

“Sunny doesn’t drink much because she can’t handle liquor very well.” He goes quiet for a long minute, and I reach over, setting my hand on his back and rubbing lightly.

“We can do this later.”

“No. This is good. I need to do it.” He wipes a hand over his mouth, and the rest comes out robotically. “At first, I wasn’t worried. Like I said, it would be strange for her to drink a lot, but again—she was doing really well professionally. Maybe she just wanted to celebrate with Josef—they were still friends, after all. I went down there anyway, to check on her. Called Josef. No answer. Called Sunny. Her phone was turned off, so I couldn’t even locate her.” He rubs his face again. “I called Lukas, who came to find me, and together we started searching all of the VIP rooms.”

I exhale a quiet “Oh shit.”

“Yeah. We found her. It was a huge party, but it was like my eyes just immediately zeroed in on Sunny passed out on a couch. She was—” He cuts off, shaking his head. “Everyone scattered like roaches when I walked in. I picked her up, found her clothes. Took her to the restroom. She was completely unconscious. I put her…” He swallows, squinting unseeing into the surf, unable to finish the sentence, but I understand that he’s telling me he had to help get her clothes back on. “And I splashed water on her face. We sat there for a long time. I don’t know how long, but people knocked on the door. I turned off my phone. I just talked to her. Told her she was safe and had to wake up. Finally, she woke up enough to walk, but barely. I put my coat over her, walked her out a back entrance, and took her to hospital.”

Again he goes quiet, jaw working.

“She didn’t remember anything about the night. I’m thankful for that, but unless there is video footage, we may never know exactly what happened. Do I even wish for that?” He passes a shaking hand down his face. “She had an exam, of course,” he says. He pauses for a pained beat, and then nods.

This feels like another punch to my solar plexus. “Alec, oh my God.”

I understand why he wanted to do this out here, where he can say it out loud and let it be swallowed by the ocean.

“She was really sick the whole next day,” he says. “They found a cocktail of things in her system—certainly nothing she could have ordered at the bar. Josef called in the morning.” Alec looks at me, and the hollow pain in his eyes is gutting. “He was so worried. Said he didn’t know where Sunny had disappeared to. Naively, I told him what I’d seen in that room, and he was shocked. He was really quite convincing.”

I feel sick.

“To be honest, I wasn’t able to process anything or anyone else once I saw Sunny on that couch. It never occurred to me that he’d seen her in that state. Because if he had, of course he would have helped her, right? His ex? My sister?”

“Alec…”

Alec shakes his head and blinks past me. “Later that day Lukas called me to check in. Needed to talk it out—he was traumatized by it all, too. When I told him about my conversation with Josef, he was furious. He said, ‘Alec, mate, Josef was right there. He bolted the second you walked in.’ He’d been there, Gigi.”

I knew it was coming. I knew it. But it doesn’t make it any easier to hear. “So, when Josef called you, he was trying to find out what you’d seen? What Sunny knew?”

“That’s my assumption, yes.”

We let this horrible truth dissolve between us. “Does Sunny want them to bring charges?”

Alec shakes his head. “It’s been two months. But because she doesn’t remember, because she doesn’t want to be dragged through the tabloids, because she’s justifiably worried about how this would affect her public reputation, and because she went there willingly—she’s very hesitant.”

“I bet you want to kick his ass.”

He laughs once, a sharp sound. “You have no idea.” There is violence in those words; the sounds scrape out from between his teeth. He turns his face away and pulls in a deep, steadying breath. “What kind of a monster can do this—at the minimum witness what happened to Sunny and very likely be the one behind it—and call me the next day playing innocent like that? I felt so incredibly stupid.”

“You gave your friend the benefit of the doubt. That’s not stupid. That’s what good people do.”

“I suppose.”

“No one from the club has said anything to authorities about him?”

He shakes his head. “Gigi, there are probably a hundred people who’ve seen women come in and leave drugged every week who don’t say anything.”

It’s the one thing I haven’t been able to figure out—how this could be happening at the club on such a scale without someone getting caught.

“I’ve felt hopeless. Not wanting to push Sunny to come forward but worrying that this story will continually get buried if she doesn’t. I felt rather cynical about it all until I heard the fire in your voice at the hotel the other night.” Alec catches my gaze and holds it. “I assume you know where I’m going with this: the only thing I need you to do on the record is to keep pushing, keep looking into Josef Anders’s activity.”

My heart breaks for him. “I promise I will.”