There had been times lately when I had really hated Toby. At this moment, watching him in his element, talking to dozens of people at once, coordinating the PR response, I was glad he was on my side.

“Do we have a source yet?” he asked a disheveled young man hunched over a laptop.

“Not yet,” said the man. “The photos have their EXIF data scrubbed, so we can’t identify the camera. There are a couple of these that have artifacts that suggest a cell phone, but one could be from a drone.”

“Damn, how many people were watching me out there?” I said angrily. Someone brought me a cup of hot tea, even though my voice had gotten better.

“All right,” said Toby. He turned to the PR guys. “We don’t give a statement, not a single word until we get more info. The first site that divulges where the pictures come from, gets an exclusive from us. Got it? On the legal front, let’s see if we can send out takedown notices. Get these stories off the web before the world sees them tomorrow.”

“Do you think it’s Giselle?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I was sure of it, at first. But that would be career suicide for her, and she knows that. I guess it depends on how badly you pissed her off, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe Rhody?” I said, immediately feeling like I’d betrayed Cave, naming his friend.

“Possible. The guys are following up on that. I think if it were any other pictures, we could use Rhody to spin it, just like Giselle suggested. Two straight couples...what was her phrase, straighting it up? But these pictures...” He turned to the guy at the computer. “Start working on the theory that those pictures are doctored.”

“I don’t think they are--” he began to say, but Toby cut him off.

“Find some reasonable doubt, okay? Pixels that look a little weird. Lighting that comes from the wrong angle. I’m not saying we’re going to go with the story that the pictures are fake, but let’s make sure it’s plausible.”

Leaving them to their work, Toby took me aside. “The label wants to speak to you.”

“I bet they do.”

“I told them that I’m handling it. They’ve promised all the resources that we need. I’ve got more teams coming in over the next few hours to assist. We’re going to use the suite as our war room, for now. The thing is, Ransom...this could be it. Worst case scenario here, this might be the end of your career.”

Sometimes in daydreams, I had thought of this happening. A scandal, coming down like a lightning strike. Everything ending, all of this over with. In the daydreams, it felt liberating.

All I felt right now was sick, though. Sick and scared.

I wished I’d brought Cave with me. The way he’d leaned against me in the restaurant to offer his support...I needed that right now.

“Tell me what to do,” I said to Toby.

“You’re going to need to talk to the CEO,” he said. “You’ll let him know that we’ve got things under control. That’s all he wants to hear, Ransom. There has been a mistake, a misunderstanding, and we’re all going to work together to clear this up. CEOs hate stress. They like all the problems to be solved before they have to deal with them.”

“Isn’t comforting CEOs part of your job?” I asked. I tried to make it sound light, like a joke, but my voice was flat.

“Not this time,” he told me. “You’re the star, not me.”

I walked into my bedroom and shut the door. The anxious busy voices outside were instantly muffled.

Looking down at my phone, I thought about calling Cave instead. Hey, what would you do if I retired from the music business tonight?

Retired, that was a nice word. In this business, you didn’t resign. You didn’t get fired. You might get dropped from your label, but you were expected to keep on going, at least until enough people had lost interest in you so that you could disappear with some dignity.

If you dropped out during a scandal, they’d never stop talking about you.

I dialed the number Toby had given me.

“This had better be Ransom himself,” said the voice on the other end. A deep, confident voice, one that you could picture being soothing during quarterly earnings calls...but one that must be terrifying to his employees.

“Hi, Mr. Stone,” I said, my teeth almost chattering with nerves. “It’s me.”

“What in the high hell is going on down there, boy? First, they tell me you’re too sick to sing, and now they tell me about some gay rumors? I want to hear it from you, are you giving me a new album, or are you breaking our goddamned contract?”

“I’ve been working on new songs,” I said. My guitar and keyboard were over in the corner, their untouched silence an accusation.

“Not more of this Halloween shit that they were telling me about, is it? You’re going to give me some good songs, make some girls cry?”

Funny how ingrained the instinct is, when everybody in your life always tells you how great you are, how right you are, how talented you are...so that the second you’re challenged on it, you want to defend yourself. I almost explained to him that they weren’t Halloween songs, they were ghost songs.

I doubted that would go over very well.

“We’re getting lots of good jams from the studio,” I said. “We’ve been thinking about a nostalgia album, homecoming, something to get the grown-ups crying and the kids wishing they were old enough to feel it.”

Feeling like I was lying, with every word. How do you get in a position in your life where you’re lying to every single person you talk to?

“Glad to hear it, boy. I was worried you were gonna start singing some gay songs. You singing any gay songs, son?”

I swallowed. I was such a fucking phony. “We’re...um, we’re taking care of that misperception,” I said. “My team is working on it right now.”

“You goddamned better be working on it. You owe me two more albums, and I can’t sell a record if it’s under a cloud like that. You don’t want to pay me back that advance, now do you?”

“No sir,” I said, the way I’d talk to my dad back when I was young, like he almost expected a salute. Sir yes sir. Sir no sir.

“All right then. Handle it. Tell your boy Toby to send my assistant an update every hour, till this thing is over, one way or the other.”

My phone went dark. I could again hear the hushed and busy voices in the next room.

Without giving myself time to talk myself out of it, I called Giselle. Her phone rang and rang, and I was on the verge of hanging up, when a weary but familiar voice said, “I didn’t expect to hear from you again, darling.”

“I’m sorry, did I wake you up?” Amazed at myself for being so polite. I wanted to scream and scream at her, for what she’d done.

“I’m at the most amazing spa,” she said. “It used to be a monastery, but it was taken over by Buddhists in the 70s. There’s a natural hot spring, and the minerals are doing wonders for my skin. I thought I might stay until I’d fully recovered from the humiliation of our last encounter. Which again leads me to ask, why are you calling?”

“Do I really have to explain?” I said. “Surely by now you’ve seen what’s going on, on the gossip sites.”

“Seen? This is the first time I’ve touched the phone since I arrived. I had to dig it out of my bag.” I heard rustling and the tapping of her nails against the screen. “Oh my god! Ransom!”

The surprise in her voice could have been faked, I supposed. But I didn’t think it was.

Still, I had to ask. “Did you do this, Giselle? I know I made you mad, but--”

“Not in a million years!” she said. “I’d never do this! Where did they get all these pictures?”

For some reason, her startlement put me at ease. It was one thing to deal with the prying eyes of the paparazzi. Quite another to deal with someone who was actively trying to bring you down.

“I’m so glad to hear it wasn’t you,” I said. “Not Rhody either?”

“Rhody? All she wanted to take pictures of was me, I assure you. Do you need me to come back?” she said. “What has Cave said about all this? Is he okay?”

Oh, god. I was the worst boyfriend on earth. What would Cave say about all this? I didn’t know because I’d abandoned him there at the restaurant with his friends. Why hadn’t I brought him here?

Almost as if he had been summoned, the call waiting signal buzzed on my phone. It was Cave, trying to get through.

“I have to go,” I told Giselle. “I’ll let you know what happens.”

“I’m so sorry about it,” she said. “Call me if you need me to come.”

By the time she’d hung up, Cave had already been sent to voicemail. I sat on the side of the bed and looked down at the phone.

Part of me didn’t want to call him. It was that part of me that trusted in the business, in those guys out there being ordered around by Toby. They might not have been my friends, but they were the ones who were going to protect me, to make sure my future stayed bright.

If I called Cave, we’d have to talk more about honesty. About admitting things to the world. And I didn’t want to admit anything, I wanted to hide from the world. The world sucks.

I called him back.