Scandalized(8)

“It is.” He pauses. “What’s the story you’re writing? Two weeks is a long time to go to London on assignment, I’d imagine.”

“The original plan was a week, but it took an intense turn, I guess. I asked to stay.”

In fact, I begged to stay.

“Intense how?”

I do the internal calculation. I could tell him about the story, gauge whether he might be useful after all. He’s a businessman, clearly well connected. It’s a long shot, but wouldn’t it be wild if this inconvenient layover actually broke the story open for me somehow? The prospect makes me feel more alert. “Okay, let me ask you: Have you heard anything about a club called Jupiter?”

I watch him closely, searching for signs of a mask slipping into place. I get only a tiny thoughtful frown and, after a beat, a little shake of his head. “A nightclub, right?” he says carefully, and I nod. “There was something in the news about it recently.”

“Right.” I take another sip of my wine. “You probably heard about the bouncer who was beat up in an alley behind the club the same night he’d reported incidents of workplace harassment to his superior. He tweeted all about it and detailed how the police did nothing.”

Alec nods. “Okay, yeah, I think I saw something about that.”

“So, that’s all the London news outlets reported about it. Everyone moved on. No one seemed to notice that, about a week later, the same bouncer shared screen caps that someone sent him of a few of the club owners sharing sexually explicit videos in an online forum.” I pause, gauging his reaction. “Videos, allegedly, of those owners having sex with women in the club VIP rooms. But next day, the screen caps were gone. He deleted his entire Twitter account.”

No overt reaction passes over his features. So, Alec isn’t aware of all of this and… actually, I’m relieved. The story isn’t being talked about very much in London, and if he’d heard any of this about Jupiter, it likely wouldn’t reflect well on him. “So, I went over there to cover a really dry international meeting on pharma law, but I volunteered to be the one to go because of this Jupiter story. After I saw those tweets, the whole thing had been hovering in my thoughts for a couple weeks. I thought there was a chance this bouncer knew about some shady stuff happening at the club and got beat up for reporting it to his boss. It felt like he was trying to alert the mainstream media.”

“Right,” he says carefully. “But… you don’t think that anymore?”

Setting my glass down, I work to keep the anger from my voice, remembering the way the bouncer, Jamil, staunchly refused to speak to us once we tracked him down. “Oh, I still believe it. In fact, I know in my bones that someone is threatening him now. It’s why my boss let me stay longer. And the more I learn about what happens in those VIP rooms—the more terrible it becomes—the more I can’t seem to stop digging.”

Alec looks at me for a long, quiet beat. I expect him to ask what I mean, to explain what “terrible” looks like in this context, but either his manners prohibit him from pushing, or he sees the exhaustion ripple through me, because he says only, “Well, then it’s good that you’re working hard on this.”

I need a track change. “We never finished talking about Sunny.”

His expression flickers. Apparently, sex-scandal-to-sister-update is an abrupt transition. I need to get my social skills back in place. “How—?” he starts, and then frowns. “Oh. Yeah. She’s good. You should have looked her up when you were visiting in London.”

I pull my wineglass closer. “Would she even remember me?”

“Of course she would. You two were inseparable.”

“We were.” I frown a little in memory. “It’s true.”

He leans forward, picking up his glass to take with him as he settles back into the couch. “I remember when you two cut up her clothes for the talent show and Umma lost her mind.”

I laugh, wincing at the memory. “She was… not happy with us. But she could have called my parents and didn’t. We had to pull weeds for a month in her garden every day after school.”

“That was a minor punishment,” he says, smiling wryly. “I took the car without permission once and had to rebuild our back deck out of my own savings. We moved only a week after I finished it.”

Grimacing, I manage only, “Oof.”

“The transition to the UK was hard for Sunny,” he says.

“I bet.” This presses against a bruise I didn’t know I still had. “It was hard for me, too. Turns out making a new friend group in ninth grade is rough.”

He laughs. “Who knew?”

I grin at him, taking another sip. “Everyone?”

This makes him laugh again. I love the sound. His voice is deep and smooth; I bet he’s never yelled a day in his life—his laugh has that same calm resonance.

“She’s doing okay, though?”

He swallows, nodding. “She’s modeling. It’s a hard career, and I swear, fashion in London is brutal, but she’s doing well. You may have seen her in some print advertisements?”

“I wish I’d known to look for them.” I shake my head. “She’s working under her name? I should look her up.”

“Her given name, yes. Kim Min-sun.”