The Podcast

Chapter 25

Tuesday morning

Her skin in the mirror looks milky in the early morning light, the plum colored lace dark and inky against her fair thighs. It had been years since she talked to someone so directly about Chloe. About her own father. She'd suppressed them down over the years, through her work and her success and her rise to podcast fame, she imagined herself standing on top of their memories like they were soft earth pushing them deeper and deeper into the ground underneath the weight of all that she'd built. But no matter how high she built up, they were still buried underneath it all, like bodies rotting under a house. She'd never be free of them completely.

Sumner smooths her hands down her flat stomach, turning slightly to highlight the delicate pinch of her waist and the slope of her slender but feminine hips. Sumner knows how she looks in a mechanical sense. What poses to strike at brand events, the colors and fits that are most flattering to her frame. But rarely does she really look at herself and see something soft and warm and yearning. Chloe had always been so comfortable with her body, with her easy sexuality. And not just because she'd been beautiful. It was more sure and grounded than that. A deep-rooted sense of confidence, a desire to be pleased and to demand it shamelessly. To laugh freely without worrying if the sound was too loud, to throw on a bikini without second-guessing what she'd eaten for lunch, to press herself up against a man and tell him what she wanted. To demand it.

Sumner loosens her dark, thick hair from her ponytail, letting it fall in waves past her shoulders, tickling the skin of her exposed breasts. She angles her head, squints her eyes. Recreating the image that had burnished itself into her mind's eye forever. The one that shattered her world, her trust in others. The same image three middle-aged LAPD investigators slid across a cold metal table blown up on printer paper. She'd always hated it, centering her rage on that one photo. But maybe if there was someone she had in mind, she could take a photo like this too. Perhaps it's what all men want, that wanton look. Not an ounce of hesitation. And maybe for the right man, women are willing to give that to them.

Her alarm clock shrieks out through the quiet of her bedroom, puncturing her thoughts. She drops her hands from the ends of her hair and walks over toward her nightstand to turn it off.

The interruption reminds her that her own reservation around sex, her dislike for the few sexual encounters she's had, isn't only because of her inability to let go, to release her inhibitions with someone else. It's because of her father, of the consequence his actions planted deep within her—a hatred of men and their sexual desire seen as weakness. After all, how weak must he have been to do what he did? To choose his base needs over his only daughter—his only family.

For Sumner, sex had been a necessary performance, a favor to others, a right of passage. But never something for her own pleasure.

She pulls on the clothes she'd set aside in her closet the night before. The fabric skims across her overly-sensitized skin and she wonders how smooth and how full her breasts might feel in his hands. How small she'd feel beneath the weight of his body and the heat of his skin. Is that the feeling Chloe had been craving? Could Sumner really blame her for that?

Him. The same man she'd just told her most damning secret. Maybe that's how it works—give them your mind, your trust, and your body willingly follows.

Turning back in the full-length mirror, she's once again shielded by her carefully curated armor. A pair of MOTHER olive green trousers, a Reformation linen bodice that flattens her chest, a pair of pillowy Prada mules in desert beige. Pretty, poised, and sexless.

She reaches for her purse, but for the first time since she can remember, Sumner is dreading going into the studio today. A pit in her stomach, heavy and acidic, it's not like she can exactly call in sick. The steady drumbeat of the podcast's relentless release schedule beats like a heart within her.

There's always been a small part of her, carefully closed up and locked away, that's known the game would resume. That the handwritten note she'd found by Chloe's bloodied head was the beginning of something—not the end. And so when that note arrived six weeks ago followed shortly by another, it felt more like a tax than a surprise. Like the devil had simply come to collect.