Sophie

I knew my work day was going down the drain when I looked up from my computer and saw my stepbrother in his underwear. Dex Carter, his chest bare, his abs rippling, tattoos snaking up and down his arms, wearing pretty much just a scrap of cloth and elastic.

“Have you seen this?” Anna, my coworker, asked.

She waved the magazine closer to my face, and I bit my lip, trying not to look at it too closely. “Um, sure I have,” I said. “He shot that last year.”

“He’s practically naked,” Anna insisted. She was fiftyish, with a stylish graying bob and dark-rimmed glasses, and she was the head law clerk in the office. In other words, my supervisor. “I mean, I know it’s an underwear ad. But it’s practically obscene.” She adjusted her glasses and looked closely at the ad, scrutinizing it. “You can see the little trail of hair that leads down under the waistband toward his—”

“Yeah, I get it,” I said, my cheeks flushing. “What’s your point?”

She blinked at me, and I realized I had sounded a little sharp. Dex always did this to me. “My point is that you’ve only been working here for two months, Sophie. Wells and Anderson is a very prestigious law firm. If one of our clients saw this…” She frowned at the picture again. “We have a reputation to uphold.”

I swallowed. “The partners knew who my stepbrother was when they hired me,” I protested. “He isn’t just an underwear model. That was a one-time thing. He’s a star soccer player, one of the best in the world.”

“Not anymore, he isn’t, according to the news,” Anna said. “They’re reporting that he’s been disbarred.” She waved a hand carelessly. “Or whatever the term is in sports. I just heard.”

“What? No,” I protested. “They were only going to do a disciplinary review. They were going to talk to him and—”

“It’s all over the office,” she said, her voice gentling in pity for me. “It’s official. Sophie, your stepbrother is disgraced. And if I’ve heard about it, believe me, the partners have, too.”

I glanced around our open cubicle area, but the doors to the partners’ offices remained closed and silent. I tried not to panic. I liked my job. I was just out of college, and a position as a law clerk at Wells and Anderson was a great first job for any graduate. I had worked hard all through college, gotten straight A’s. I’d worked my butt off ever since I’d started here. I deserved to be here, completely on my own merits.

All of which could be ruined because my world-famous stepbrother had suddenly doused his soccer career in flames and sent it crashing to the ground.

Dex never did anything halfway.

His dad had married my mother four years ago, when I was nineteen and Dex was twenty-two. He’d already been an incredible player by then, on the rise, and ever since he’d been unstoppable. I’d barely spent any time with him, because he was constantly either training or jetting around the world, playing in league after league, negotiating ever-bigger and ever-better contracts. By the time I was in my last year of college he was a superstar, and I was no longer Sophie Breen, aspiring law clerk. I was Dex Carter’s stepsister. It was an identity I’d had to adjust to whether I wanted it or not.

Still. “I can’t see why it would matter,” I said to Anna. “I mean, I have no direct contact with the clients. Only the lawyers do the phone calls and face-to-face meetings. So whatever Dex does is irrelevant, right?”

“That’s up to the partners,” Anna said. “As I said, we have a reputation. If this”—she waved the magazine page with Dex’s mostly naked body on it—“situation gets ugly, it might reflect on us. Just be careful—that’s all I’m saying.”

When she walked away, I quickly gathered my packed lunch from my desk drawer and made my way to the break room. It was still twenty minutes to the lunch hour, but I couldn’t Google the news on my work computer, because the IT department monitored our internet use, and I didn’t want to be written up as a slacker. So I snuck into the break room while it was quiet.

I turned on the break room TV, the sound low. It was on the all-day news channel, with the headline scrolling across the bottom of the screen: DEX CARTER EJECTED AFTER WORLD CUP INCIDENT, RULED ‘A DISGRACE TO THE SPORT.’ The newscaster was saying, “It was thought at first that disciplinary measures would be taken, but the International League has ruled that Dex Carter is to be permanently banned from playing professional soccer, in any league, ever again.”

And then they played the footage that was the reason.

I didn’t want to watch. I’d seen it a dozen times, and it hurt every time. But still, I found myself leaning forward, the sandwich in my hand forgotten, as I watched the footage from the World Cup game that had been played just three days ago in Argentina. It was like a car crash in slow motion—the kind of thing you just couldn’t look away from.

There was Dex on the field, looking dark and dangerous, running as effortlessly as liquid mercury, his body powerful in shorts and his USA jersey. There he was arguing with a referee and being given a yellow card. There he was arguing with Sebastian Santos, the Brazilian player, both of them shouting and red-faced. And then Dex does it: He hauls back and punches Santos in the face, a powerful one-off hit that breaks Santos’s nose and sends a spray of blood flying onto the green.

Oh, Dex, I thought as the newscast played the punch over again in slow motion and I watched his powerful arm swing in a perfect arc through the air before it connected with Santos’s face. What have you done?

“There’s no doubt Dex Carter’s career is over,” the newscaster said as they finally cut away from the painful footage. “The fashion designer Espana has released an official statement that they will no longer be working with him for their underwear campaigns, and his other sponsors are expected to follow suit. The president of the International League has said that, and I quote, ‘Violence of this kind has no place in the sport of soccer, and will not be tolerated at any level. We value sportsmanship and mutual respect above all things.’ Dex Carter himself has not made a statement to the media—instead, he has retreated to Milan, Italy, where we can see him here, disembarking early this morning, accompanied by international supermodel Jesetta Bibliona.”

I watched, my throat closed, as they cut to footage of Dex, wearing a dark suit and sunglasses, walking briskly from a plane on a runway and into a waiting limousine. On his arm was a tall, willowy woman, the most beautiful female I’d ever seen, also wearing sunglasses, her long mane of flawless hair blowing in the wind as she followed Dex into the car.

I turned off the TV and looked around, dazed. The break room looked the same as ever, with its few nondescript tables, cheap coffee maker, and employee bulletin board. I could hear the faint hum of activity outside, phones ringing and low voices, as well as the buzzing of the fluorescent lights. Just another day at the office at Wells and Anderson. I put down my untouched sandwich and pulled out my phone. I stared at it, my thumb hovering over the screen.

I got asked a lot of things about Dex, but by far the most common question was, What is he really like? I always answered it the same way: He hasn’t been around much since our parents got married, so I don’t really know him that well.

People always nodded, like that made sense. Sure, if your famous stepbrother was never around, how would you get to know him? You couldn’t.

I never told anyone about the texts.

Not anyone. Not my best friend Dana, not my college roommate, not my own mother. No one. I couldn’t have said why, except somehow the texts were… all mine.

I hesitated. I should text him. But he was in Milan with a supermodel—chances were low that he needed my concern. He was probably getting quite a bit of comfort from Jesetta Bibliona right now. He wasn’t thinking about his non-famous, college grad, law clerk stepsister.

But still—that footage from the World Cup. Maybe I didn’t know him all that well, but he’d never seemed so aggressive and angry before. What the hell was so wrong that he would do a thing like that?

That wasn’t Dex. That much I knew.

I held my breath and quickly typed out a text. Are you all right?

I hit send before I could change my mind, then dropped my phone back into my pocket as if it was diseased. I didn’t want to know if he typed back a rushed Busy right now or Can’t talk. Or nothing.

The break room door opened, and two of my coworkers came in, talking and laughing. They went quiet when they saw me.

“Sophie,” one of them said. “Oh, my God. Did you hear?”

It was beginning. I repacked my sandwich and stood. “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Um, talk to you later.” I dodged back to my desk in my cubicle. I’d eat there. I should probably work through lunch hour anyway, in order to keep my numbers up. So I’d have something to defend myself with if the partners wanted to fire me.

I ignored the stares from the other cubicles as I walked back to my desk. I worked through lunch, and I worked the rest of the afternoon without looking up, without talking to anyone. I turned my phone off in case anyone in the press got my private number and called me. I had to get my own career going. Dex Carter wasn’t the only person in the world, after all.

So it was hours later, after work, when I finally turned my phone back on and saw that he hadn’t answered me at all.