I spoke to Ryan. And Danny. There’s nothing to discuss. Be well.
Louis was too professional to say anything personal, but I knew from the undertone how hurt he was. After all, he had learned all these things about me yesterday too. I flashed back to a day in his office, telling him stories of my childhood on the farm: picking tomatoes in the field with my father, stewing over strawberry jam. I cringed, thinking of the postcard I’d given him of a little girl making strawberry jam, which he kept on his desk.
Violet came up behind me, the file box in her hands, reading the email over my shoulder. “That’s not great.”
I sighed.
“What are you going to do?”
I shook my head, anger gathering in my gut. “I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do. I’m not giving the advance back.”
Violet smiled, impressed. “Really?”
“Without the advance, I’m not liquid anymore. Between the renovation on the apartment, and Danny growing his business . . .”
“So don’t! I have a novelist friend who is like ten years late on his book, and he still hasn’t given a penny back.”
“I doubt you have a friend old enough to have spent ten years working on anything.”
“Maybe it was more like five.” She heaved the file box higher in her arms. “The point is, what do you think Louis is going to do? Take you to court? Freeze the money?”
I turned back to the computer. I clicked on Danny and my bank account, and it was all still there, safe and untouched.
She was right. Louis would cool down. I would reach out when he’d had a moment to process, and convince him there was a way for us to come out the other end of this. He could publish a different kind of cookbook, with a tinge of true history. Something about how I’d gotten here.
“Should I call the production assistants back in here, get them packing up again?”
I shook my head. “I have a couple of emails to send first.”
“Okay, what should I do?”
“Figure out who did this in the next five minutes,” I said.
She laughed, but I was completely serious. I knew if we could figure the hacker out, we could figure out how to turn the story. So I was something other than the villain.
“I was able to do a little recon on the aintnosunshine emails,” she said. “They definitely originated in the New York area. So it’s a New Yorker.”
“Great work . . . you narrowed the hacker down to nine million people?”
“At least I narrowed it down!”
I didn’t have time for her irritation, or her hurt feelings, so I blew through them. “So you’ve been trying to figure it out via the tech, right?”
She took a seat, dropping her files on the countertop. “Right.”
“Let’s go at it another way. Likely offenders.”
She nodded. “So . . . like . . . who wants to take you down a peg or two?” she said.
“I think the question is who has the ability.”
Something flicked across her face. I hadn’t been accusing her. But it was like suddenly she was worried I would put certain pieces together.
I started doing the math. Who had access to all this stuff? Violet and Ryan. And Violet had everything to gain. She wanted her own show. And now, wouldn’t there be a hole in the YouTube culinary universe? A hole just right for a five-foot-eleven redheaded vegan to jump in and fill?
She tilted her head. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“When did Ryan tell you they did a flash poll?”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“You said they ran a flash poll. Ryan would be the only one that could have told you about that.”
She paused. “After your kerfuffle, he said he was cooking something up and offered me a job.”
“And what did you say?”
She laughed awkwardly. “I said yes. Which is why I’m here now, in your studio, helping clean up files.”
“Violet, did you do this?”
“Hack you? I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” she said.
“You know that’s not an answer, right? Are you going to work for Ryan?”
“This is unbelievable,” she said. “I was going to give you a week. Help you, I don’t know, figure out who was behind this, find a place to hide out for a while. Like Tulsa! But I don’t need this shit. I’m so out of here.”
She reached for the file box.
“So you are going to work for Ryan.”
“I’m not going down with this motherfucker of a ship, that’s what I’m not doing. Do you know, like five seconds after the photos posted last night, I had several offers in hand? Including from Ryan?”
I stared at her, not letting her hysteria distract me from what she wasn’t saying.
Violet headed for the door. “I actually believed that you’d find a way to turn this around. But it looks like I was wrong. You’re a sinking ship, Sunny. And while I had nothing to do with the hack, at the moment, as far as I’m concerned, whoever did do this is my fucking hero.”
With that, Violet slammed out the door, taking the file box with her.
9
One of the first long articles about my show was in New York magazine’s Grub Street, which is a food diary of a notable person, following what he or she eats and drinks for a week.
If I’m remembering, they titled the Grub Street piece something like: “Sunshine Mackenzie Pairs a Mint Julep with Sweet Potato Pie.” It was a pretty accurate title considering that, one of the nights, I’d written about going with Danny on a mini pub crawl around Brooklyn in which I was searching for New York’s best mint julep. Fresh, delicate, a little sweet. The dreamer’s drink.
I secretly detested a mint julep. But Ryan liked the sound of the dreamer’s drink, so mint julep it was, even though I found it sticky and too rich and wholeheartedly believed that bourbon should be drunk with a little ice and nothing else.
After the fight with Violet, and five hours of packing, I left the studio in an Uber full of my files and belongings and proceeded directly to Red Hook—and the old bar and grill where I used to work—to drink my bourbon and ice undisturbed.
While the Uber sat outside, his meter happily running, I sat on the corner stool listening to the only other day drinker, a large tattooed guy named Sidney, who matched me drink for drink, while rattling on in detail about his wedding-planning business.
“I have an Iranian wedding tonight at Chelsea Piers,” he said. “Five hundred people.”
“You’re a wedding planner?” I said.
“I don’t seem like the type, right? It was my ex-wife’s business and then it was our business together and then I took the business from her in the divorce.”
“Why would you do that?”
He shrugged. “I could,” he said. “What do you do for work?”
“Nothing anymore.”
He took a sip. “What did you do?”