Wednesday evening
Sumner can feel the rattling within her, a barely contained system of loose screws, swinging violently within their ridges. She has a slight dampness under her arms, a stickiness between the bare backs of her thighs and the leather of the recording chair.
Ina would call this move, talent going rogue.
But she hadn't exactly left Sumner with a choice.
Sumner grasps the base of the studio-grade microphone like a lifeline. These may be the last words she ever speaks into this microphone, this material thing that connects her to millions and millions of fans every week, faces she' can't see...a scale she can't fathom. It's not the same for performers and singers on stage who can see the magnitude of the crowd, the adrenaline rush from their presence. It's a hard fame dynamic to understand, impossible to visualize.
But today, she's not speaking to all of them. Not really, anyway. Just to one. The one. The only channel she has left, technically on borrowed time. If Ina knew Sumner was here right now, about to speak these words, she'd send in security to drag her out, degrading her to the nobody she was when Ina first granted her a fifteen minute meeting to pitch herself.
Sumner inhales fully, then exhales with as much control and calm as she can muster. She doesn't have much time, but she only needs a few minutes.
Glancing up at the glowing red recording light, a presence that exists within her like the beat of her own heart, she closes her eyes once before opening her mouth to speak.
—
Hours before going to the AudioHaven studio, Sumner paced restlessly in Lucas' home, avoiding her phone like the plague. Instead, she turned her focus onto Lucas, to better understand the mysterious, mercurial man who very well held the rest of her life in his hands. She snooped through his closet, the drawers of his nightstand. He'd piqued a deep, unfamiliar curiosity in her over the past week and it served as a welcome distraction to the rest of her life falling apart around her.
She wanted to know more about him—about his family, his personal life. Was he in a relationship? What kind of woman did Lucas Saba date? He hardly struck Sumner as the wine-and-dine romantic type. His closet was relatively sparse, a series of dark gray and black v-neck t-shirts, a few thick flannel shirts she imagined he'd look great in during the cooler months. She found his old military trunk and gear tucked near the back corner. It was easy to imagine him in a war zone, assertive and in control, uncouth but strategic. She found only a handful of framed photos, one she assumed to be Lucas and his sister with their parents who had passed and another with Lucas and what appeared to be his pre-teen niece. No obvious signs of a woman's things or a girlfriend.
When she'd combed through everything she could, she felt the restless nausea rise up in her again. Making her way over the war wall, tracing this mystery through the lens of Lucas' mind, increased her sense of guilt and dread.
Then seeing her father's photo, knowing Lucas had gone to visit him, trying to imagine them seated at her childhood dining room table, talking about her...talking about Chloe. Sumner clutched her stomach and raced for the bathroom, falling to her knees and retching over the toilet but nothing came out. Just painful dry heaves and the reality of her situation weighed impossible on her body.
How had it gotten this out of hand? How much of all this was really her fault?
She rested her sweaty forehead on the cool, porcelain lid of the toilet, hoping she'd hear from Lucas soon. Perhaps they'd apprehended the killer based on the crime scene evidence alone. Maybe it could all end with her safely tucked away in the cozy, masculine home of a man she was starting to feel uncomfortably attached to.
And then her phone rang.
She leapt up from the floor, bracing herself for a moment on the doorjamb as dizziness swims across her gaze, the living room tilting. She'd hardly had anything to eat or drink and had thrown up several times.
Reaching for her discarded phone, her palms sweaty against the screen, she felt her fingers turn to ice at the caller's name flashing across the top.
It wasn't Lucas.
"Hello?" Sumner's voice felt raw, the bile and dry-heaving nearly stripping her of the very thing that defined her professional identity. She cleared her throat a few times before speaking again. "Ina?"
"Sumner, hello."
"Um, hi, what's—"
"We're going to have to drop you from Podster."
"Excuse me?" Sumner gripped the edge of the kitchen counter to keep herself from falling.
"Your recent involvement as a person of interest in the murders of Violet Russell and Natasha Wood are in direct violation of your exclusivity term agreement with Podster."
Sumner's mouth goes so dry she can feel her tongue like a foreign object, threatening to choke her. She's a person of interest? Had Lucas Saba told Ina that? Did he believe it?
Ina continues, her voice dipping lower like she's slipping off her own script. "Sumner, I asked you about a very similar situation once. When I first agreed to take you on, remember? Something in my gut didn't trust you then. And I certainly don't trust you now."
"Ina, I can explain—"
"It's over, Sumner. I operate from a place or risk versus reward. I've never wavered from this philosophy nor my transparency about it. Even a show as big as West Coast Killers can't survive a PR scandal like this. A signed confirmation of contract termination is in the mail to you now. You may seek legal counsel on your behalf, but I guarantee you—our position is ironclad."
Before Sumner could respond, the call ended. Ina and her icy delivery were gone, onto the next corporate battle.
Sumner sees her tears before she feels them, her body like a hollowed thing, carved painfully from the inside out. Everything she'd lost cycles through her mind.
Her father, when he slept with her best friend.
Chloe, when she was brutally murdered to death.
The division of her past from her present when that note showed up on her doorstep several weeks ago.
Lucas, when she realized a man she was starting to trust still considered her a person of interest.
And now her show, the podcast, the salvation she'd built to save herself.
All gone.
A guttural scream erupts from deep within her gut, whatever is left of her, the voice so strained and desperate it sounds foreign to her own ears. Slate perks up his pointed ears in response, watching Sumner with curiosity.
She starts flinging open drawers, not bothering to be delicate like she'd been in her earlier snooping. Has Lucas' every move been calculated? Getting close to her, coming to see her alone, grazing his warm, calloused skin against hers when he shouldn't have. Has it all been to get her to confide, to study her more closely, to frame her just as she'd been framed eight years ago? The thought forces a cluster of angry tears to form in her vision, her movements more forceful as she rummages through his pantry, finally finding what she's looking for in a box on the bottom shelf.
A hammer.
She stalks back over to her phone, setting down in the center of the counter, raising the hammer above her head with both hands, quickly glancing over to make sure Slate was safely tucked away on the other side of the room.
But then she stops, the hammer hovering in mid air.
She has no way to get out of Lucas' place. She has no team since her contract's been dropped. She realizes they must already know—no one has even reached out to her and it's Wednesday. Launch day. Yet nothing but radio silence from Luna, Akari, Benny, and Ezra. The realization further drives her rage, that no one in her life has ever put Sumner first. Only through their proximity to her podcast, did they find interest in her. And without that, she's nothing to them.
Nothing to anyone.
Sumner's hands shake as she navigates to the Uber app, quickly entering the AudioHaven studio address into her intended destination. Eight minutes later when the Uber shows up, the car idling along the curb in front of Lucas' house, she raises the hammer up high and brings it down in one, hard swing. The screen of her phone splinters into glittering charcoal shards.
She can hear her own exertion, her breaths bordering on a new round of dry heaves as she stares down at the smashed device.
Quickly, she sweeps up the mess with a broom in the pantry before racing out of the house and down the driveway.
—
Sumner feels the pause in her body, the one she's become conditioned to take when she's done speaking. Better for post editing. But it's become deeper somehow. A moment of total and depthless silence. She glances up, the red recording light meeting her eye line.
As she pushes the microphone a few inches away from her lips and removes the sound-canceling headphones from her ears, she feels weightless. Free yet unsteady. Would her plan work? Will it be worth the dangerous line she's towing of self-incrimination? After nearly four years and millions of fans, just three minutes and forty-five seconds could be the final nail in the coffin for good.
But then again, once the world hears what she just recorded—a near confirmation of what so many internet rumors have been swirling around for years—doesn't' she deserve it?
Standing from her chair, Sumner rounds the table toward the control booth to turn off the audio recording when she hears a noise. A noncommittal sound like an AC unit cooling down a degree. Perhaps it's just in her head. Or the chair brushing up against the table.
There it is again. A distinct clicking noise. Metal against metal.
Sumner stills and glances up at the digital wall clock next to the red glow of the recording light. It reads 10:46 PM. The sound has to be the building, or perhaps the night shift security guard coming inside to take a leak. She reaches into her pocket for her phone out of habit, remembering how she'd shattered it to pieces in Lucas' kitchen. No way to contact someone.
She continues walking toward the control booth, tiptoeing now. She shouldn't be here. Technically her presence on AudioHaven grounds could even be a legal violation of her recent contract termination. But then she hears the unmistakable click again. A frisson of electricity snaps down her spine. If it's a security guard tasked with throwing her out, she knows the entire thing will inevitably be filmed for TikTok. She can see the hashtag now: #cancelsumnerwest. A pulsing adrenaline quickens within her at the thought. The pounding between her ears intensifies, the catastrophic whirlwind of the past few days, a haunting tragedy that's come back with a tenfold vengeance, the addicting feel of Lucas' strong hard body against hers even as he works against her behind her back. Everything in her life has been inching higher and higher, the looming fear, the resurgence of pain, the teasing of pleasure, the drowning secrets. And then now there's the sound at the door, like a small tinny warning siren before all hell breaks loose.
Frozen in place, the recording button still just out of reach, Sumner stands and watches the studio door, her large pale eyes going impossibly wide as the black metal handle tips down, the mechanism sliding open despite being locked. It's like the back zipper of the room is being lowered without her consent, the irreversible loss of privacy, exposing her plan of desperation to something uninvited.
"Hello? Oh, hey—shit." Sumner releases a nervous pent-up half laugh, her hand flattening against her sternum. "It's you. I wasn't expecting anyone else to be here this late."