While Caleb was doing his best to escape the Jersey girl’s apartment without any significant bodily injury, Elsie came crashing awake with a hangover of her own to grapple with. Unlike Caleb, however, Elsie had almost zero experience with nursing hangovers, and for a bleary couple of minutes, she was absolutely sure she was in the middle of the messy process of dying. It certainly felt like death, and if that wasn’t what it was, she couldn’t imagine what the actual process would feel like. She was in the kind of pain that made her hesitate to even move, the kind of pain that meant each little twitch, even a move of her eyeballs behind her still closed lids, felt like its own personal agony. When she did finally open her eyes, not because she wanted to but because she recognized the inevitability of the act, the first thing she saw was that she wasn’t in her bed. She wasn’t on her couch either. Elsie wasn’t in or on anything that even faintly resembled something a person would customarily sleep on. Instead, she was stretched out on the floor like a dead person at a crime scene.

“Well, that explains the back pain,” she croaked to herself, her voice sounding like that of a lifelong smoker despite the fact that she’d never inhaled a cigarette in her whole life. “This floor isn’t exactly made for lumbar support.”

She laughed to herself, then groaned, rolling over onto one side and waiting for the wave of pain and nausea to pass. It hurt to laugh, even to laugh. Had she ever been in a place where she was hurting that badly? Maybe once, when she’d had her wisdom teeth taken out and had been put on a strict diet of mashed potatoes and ice cream, but that pain had been different because she hadn’t done it to herself. This pain, this was the worst kind there was because it came with an extra-heaping helping of shame and humiliation, which was bad enough all on its own. She sat up slowly, not because it seemed like a good idea but because there wasn’t really any other choice, and she saw that she was still wearing the slinky black dress Caleb had insisted on putting her in before he took her out for their disastrous night on the town. It was ripped along one side of the bottom, providing a sharp slit that was entirely unnecessary in a dress that already left very little to the imagination. She looked at that and then immediately felt the pain in her head sharpen to so fine a point it was as if some invisible adversary was holding an ice pick to her head and twisting it into her temple, slowly and with extreme gusto.

“Oh shit,” she moaned, then clawed her way onto her hands and knees, half crawling and half walking her way as quickly as she could manage down the hallway to her bathroom. She was sick then, violently sick the way she had been that time she’d visited Thailand and gotten a wicked case of food poisoning. Even after everything she’d consumed the night before was vacated, her stomach continued to contract, doing its best to rid her of all of her posions and only succeeding in wracking her body with a mean set of dry heaves. When she was reasonably sure it was gone—and only reasonably, because she was pretty sure that hangovers like this were unpredictable and had a life of their own—she sat back with her head resting against the wall, reaching over with one hand to turn the knob of her shower. She put it on cold and while she waited for the water to get going good and strong, she rummaged through one of the lower vanity doors where she kept the medicine she very rarely used. There was a bottle of codeine in there she’d gotten when having those previously mentioned wisdom teeth removed, and although she wasn’t positive it were still good, she swallowed two pills without any water . After a moment’s consideration, she palmed a couple of Benadryl that were easily in reach and swallowed those without water too. She didn’t really know how the two medications would interact with each other, something she would ordinarily have taken the time to suss out, but in that moment, she found that she couldn’t have cared less. She only wanted to start to feel halfway human again, and without bothering to peel off the probably very expensive dress—it didn’t seem to matter to her, seeing as Caleb had given her the dress and it was clearly ruined, anyway—she pulled herself over the lip of the tub and into the blessedly cool water. It was only once that water was beating down upon her that she pulled the dress off of her body, tossing it aside and musing distractedly about how, with its truly tiny dimensions, it looked like it could be a washrag rather than an article of clothing. Once that was done and she was as naked as the day she came into the world, Elsie stretched out on the floor of her bathtub, laying down with her limbs jutting out at odd angles while the water rushed over her and made tiny little rivers. She shut her eyes against the torrent and then and only then did she begin to cry.

Elsie cried for several reasons, quite probably for reasons she hadn’t even thought of and wouldn’t understand if she did. She cried because she felt so fucking terrible, cried the way she had when she was little and sick and only the comfort of her daddy could make her feel even a little bit better. Except there was no daddy to make her feel better now. He was long gone. The only one there to comfort her when she was ill was herself, and she was pretty lousy at the job. She cried because, for the first time ever, she had had so much to drink that she couldn’t remember what all had happened to her the night before. There was this swirling black hole where her thoughts and memories were supposed to be and that frustrated her to no end, even frightened her a little. Mostly, she cried because she was so stinking mad she could hardly see straight. She was furious, really. The chip she’d already been carrying on her shoulder seemed to have grown exponentially overnight, and the target of all of that anger was the one and only Caleb Grant.

Caleb Grant, superstar fuckup and playboy extraordinaire, was the reason she was feeling this way. He was the reason for all of this, and never mind the fact that she had been the one to pour all of those drinks down her throat. Never mind the fact that he had actually taken some of those drinks away from her, that he had tried to stop her from making such a complete and total ass out of herself. To someone else, those things might have mattered. They might have counted in Caleb’s favor, but for Elsie they carried no weight at all. Caleb had been the one to drag her to that posh nightmare of a club to begin with, and as far as Elsie was concerned, that made him liable for everything that had taken place both there and after. (Although the after part was the part she remembered almost not at all, so it was hard to be upset about the actual events that had taken place there.)

So Elsie lay there, welcoming the way the cold water pelted down on her skin, the way one might welcome a massive storm after a period of drought, and stewed. She lay there until both the codeine and the Benadryl had begun to do their work, and by the time she shut the water off and stood to get out of the shower-tub combination, she felt like she was floating, like she was walking on clouds or something. She wondered momentarily if she might possibly have taken just a little bit too much medication, but by the nature of what she had taken, she found that she didn’t really care. There were only two things she cared about at the moment, only two things she had the energy to care about, or maybe the mental capacity. The first thing was that she was feeling shockingly improved from the nightmare that had been waking up on her living room floor. Aside from a mild, persistent nausea she was pretty sure would be with her for the rest of the day, Elsie actually felt pretty good. It was only because of the medication and some far away part of her brain knew it, but that was okay. That was just fine. If need be, she’d take more medication. She’d take it all day until she’d outlasted the hangover and could return to some version of normal.

The second thing she cared about was handling the “Situation.” That was how she’d come to think about it while meditating on her shower floor, as the “Situation,” with the “s” capitalized and flashing in big, warning neon. The Situation was that she was tethered to this job with Caleb Grant, and she was no longer willing to do it. Christ, she didn’t even know what the job was yet! He hadn’t even deigned to explain that much to her. All he’d told her was that people were messing around in his things and that he thought it was an inside job. He’d yet to give her access to an actual computer, instead choosing to waste her time, dragging her to swanky bars and then yelling at her while they were there. (She had a vague memory of him getting right in her face and telling her off, and while the idea was infuriating, some small, uncomfortable voice in the back of her head kept chiming in and telling her that when it came to that part, at least, she had deserved what she had received.) Well, she didn’t care how rich he was anymore, not how rich or how good looking either. She worked with computers; that was what she did. She did it because she was damned good at it, but she also did it because it meant she didn’t have to tolerate people’s weird bullshit and crap. What she was most definitely not, was some kind of escort. This was not a remake of the movie Pretty Woman, and she was not a hooker with a heart of gold. She was done, and the first thing she was going to do— after slipping into her sweats…because why in the hell would she put on anything else, a voice inside of her head screamed, a voice that was starting to sound just a little bit manic even to her own ears—was to call Travis and let him know she was done. She didn’t think he would fire her, both because of the kind of guy he was and because she was arguably one of the most talented people in the city. But if he decided that was what he had to do, so be it. She was starting to think that this whole thing had been some kind of a weird joke, a prank played by a man who had too much time and too much money and therefore had to get his kicks in the strangest possible ways.

“Not from me, he’s not,” Elsie spoke to herself grimly, blow drying her hair and then brushing it out until it shone. She didn’t even realize she was doing it; she didn’t realize that despite the hangover and her decision to shrug off all things Caleb Grant, the impulse to watch over her appearance in a particular way had already begun to seep inside of her and take its hold. Once she had that done, she searched her living room for her elusive cell phone. It had never been elusive for her before. It had always been in the exact same place every morning when she woke up, but then again, she had never woken up in the middle of her floor either. This morning was, apparently, one for the books. After searching on hands and knees and becoming very nearly convinced that while she had made it home, her phone had not, she finally found it tossed so far back underneath her futon couch that she had to lay flat on her face and do a weird little shimmy in order to retrieve it. Once she did, she wished she hadn’t. She had several missed calls, a few from Clara, a few from Finnley, and four or five from Travis. The six missed calls from her mother really gave her pause, but she decided she wasn’t ready to fall down that particular rabbit hole just yet, and so she deleted the voicemails her mother had left her without opening a single one. The text message Travis had left her, however, was impossible to ignore. It had popped up the second she looked at her phone’s screen and what it said gave her an unhappy, unsettled feeling in the pit of her stomach. It was that text that made her feel like she might start throwing up all over again. She considered taking another dose of the Benadryl and codeine cocktail but pretty much immediately thought better of it. Whatever was coming, she had a feeling she was going to need to be as clear headed for it as possible. She read the text, read it again, read it for a third time, as if doing so would give her some kind of insight into what it meant without actually having to do any further investigation.

Not sure if you’re dead or alive at this point. Aren’t answering your phone. If it turns out you aren’t dead, turn on the news. The shit has hit the fan. We’re into it now.

We’re into it now. That was the part that really got to her, the part that made all of the little hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Travis saying, “we’re into it now” like it was almost as bad as him sending her a message that the apocalypse was coming, and if she’d ever done any doomsday prepping, now was the time to put the things she’d squirreled away to use. It made her afraid; it made her want to dig her heels in and refuse to do the thing Travis was asking her to do. The only positive thing the message did was make Elsie forget all about her plan to call her boss and give her ultimatum, which was ultimately best for everyone involved. She put her phone down on the futon then sat down beside it, feeling numb and foggy from medication, lack of sleep, and just general confusion. She reached for her remote control, feeling like it was a sleeping snake laying in her hand that was getting ready to strike, and flipped it to the on position. She did so while completely unsure as to how she was to supposed to know what Travis wanted her to look for, but she needn’t have worried on that front. There were plenty of things for her to worry about, plenty of things—and more mounting on top of those—at an alarming rate, but figuring out why she’d gotten so many calls and why Travis had decided that the shit had hit the fan was not one of them. She let out a low groan and felt the color begin to wash out of her world. Everything went a sort of grayish color, and the noise coming out of her television set started to sound like it was coming from very far away.

It was the same on almost every station, with regularly scheduled programming having been suspended in order to share the “breaking news” that was in large part only salacious gossip and happily executed slander. From what she could gather, there were two stories running at the same time. The first was about Caleb Grant and her. Her name, Elsie Morrow, was plastered all over the news like she was some kind of a famous person. But she wasn’t! She wasn’t one of those people who had gone out and gotten herself famous, thereby subjecting herself to a higher level of scrutiny than the rest of the world. She was just Elsie, a girl from Texas with a little bit too much of a stubborn streak for her own good and a preternatural ability when it came to all things computers. From what the news anchors were saying, on the other hand, she was the next up and coming “it” girl, a beautiful mystery that had rocketed onto the scene out of nowhere and made a pretty gigantic first impression.

That first impression would be last night, and Elsie saw with mounting horror that somebody in the club had gotten almost every move she and Caleb had made on film. This wasn’t the kind of accidental film that came from a lucky cellphone camera, either. This footage was shot with intention. It was steady and true and deliberately following the two of them from the moment they entered the club. It showed her spilling a drink all over an Amazonian brunette. (It was something Elsie had forgotten and sorely wish she could go on forgetting.) It showed her storming off to the bar and ordering herself not one but three, count them three drinks, only to have Caleb swipe them out from under her before she could get them down. It showed the two of them fighting and then, perhaps the most startling thing of all, it showed the two of them sharing what could only be described as a passionate kiss. She hadn’t remembered that kiss at all but now that she was seeing it, the whole thing came flooding back to her. She could remember that salty-sweet taste of his lips, could remember how the spicy scent of him had seemed to fill her up completely, and without even realizing she was doing it, she lifted her fingers to her lip and placed them there lightly, feeling where Caleb’s lips had burned their memory into her brain. With that burning still lingering so stubbornly that it almost felt real, Elsie watched herself flee the club. She watched Caleb slam one drink, then another, then another. By the time the brunette she’d almost gotten into an ill-advised fight with approached Caleb at the bar, even a blind man would have been able to see that he was staggeringly drunk. When the two of them left together, she was hanging all over him and he was hanging all over her in return, although to Elsie it looked like it was more for the physical support it provided him than for anything else.

“Trouble in Paradise Already?”

“Girls Know How to Have a Little TOO Much Fun.”

“Do Blondes Really Have More Fun?”

These were the kinds of taglines scrolling along the bottom of the screen, as Elsie watched the footage play over and over again while overly eager, bright-eyed reporters dissected what each individual piece meant. She heard them try to figure out who she was and what she meant to Caleb Grant, then heard that “a close friend” had reported that the two were actually a couple. When she had seen more than she could stand, she switched the station, which was how she found the next story involving Caleb Grant. This one, however, was even worse than the first. This one contained all sorts of “found footage” about Caleb’s past, dirty little secrets from his parents and the fact that he’d started off with “questionable” beginnings. It went on to release several emails in which either Caleb himself or one of the people working for made rather unfortunate comments about some of their clients and how completely moronic they were. In short, Travis was right. The shit had most definitely hit the fan, and there was going to be fallout for a whole lot of people, herself included. Elsie sat there like a stone, half convinced she was having the most lucid dream of her life and that when she woke up she would know for sure that Benadryl and codeine were simply not to be mixed. She found herself hoping that was what it was, needing that to be what it was. She would have settled for a Wizard-of-Oz-style, it-was-all-a-dream ending any day of the week over coming to terms with the fact that this was real, that this was really happening to her and to Caleb.

“Jesus! Shit!”

The sound of her phone jangling beside her was so startling that she actually screamed out in the middle of her living room. She screamed out and then had to fight back the urge to cry. She didn’t want to cry because she was upset, although she was definitely a little bit of that. She wanted to cry because she was more pissed off than she had ever been in all of her life. She felt violated, like a caged animal, and when this particular animal was caged, she bit. She picked up her phone, ready to rip the head off of whoever it was that felt like this would be a good time to try and talk to her. When she saw who it was on her caller ID, she froze. That was an expression that got thrown around a whole hell of a lot, but in that instance Elsie felt like it was actually true. She felt like all of the muscles in her body had locked up simultaneously, right along with whatever was left of her mind after the numbing effect of the drugs she had taken to tame the beast of the morning after. It was Caleb. Not his assistant, whose name she couldn’t remember but who had struck her as a weasley sort of man that she had disliked right away, but Caleb Grant himself who was calling her now. And just what the hell was she supposed to do about that? She could still feel the immense weight of the anger she’d felt towards him while she’d been cooling herself off in the shower, but now that anger was mingled with other, more complicated emotions as well. She felt sorry for herself, felt exposed and flayed open for all of the world to see, but she also felt sorry for Caleb. A half an hour ago she had been sure that the whole story about someone hacking into Grant Corporation’s databases was total bullshit, only to find out that it was not only true but that his personal information was being hacked as well.

She looked up at the television, still feeling frozen, and saw a picture of Caleb as a young boy flash across the screen. In that picture, he looked like he couldn’t have been more than three, and he was sitting on an older man’s knee, a man who looked remarkably like him and could only have been his father. Both father and son were wearing hardhats, the father smiling widely at the camera while the son looked up at his father’s face with an adoration so complete it made Elsie’s heart ache. That did it. That picture and the expression on baby Caleb’s face was enough to break the strange paralysis that had overtaken Elsie, and she picked up her phone, sliding the screen to talk and holding it up to her ear.

“Hello?” she answered in a small, frightened voice that hardly sounded like her own.

“Elsie. Elsie, sweet Jesus. I need you. I need you to come. Can you do that? Can you please come?”

“Yes,” she answered without even stopping to think about it, just answering without giving it a moment’s hesitation. “Yes, I’ll come. Just give me fifteen minutes to get myself looking like I’m still a human, alright? Is fifteen minutes okay?”

“Yes,” he said in a low, thick voice so full of gratitude it was hard to believe this was the same cocky man from the day before. “Yes, that’s okay. I’ll have Joe there waiting for you, waiting to pick you up. And Elsie?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you. Thank you so much.”