Tight Knit Read online

  Table of Contents

  Other Books by Shaya Crabtree

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  EPILOGUE

  About Shaya Crabtree

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  www.ylva-publishing.com

  Other Books by Shaya Crabtree

  You’re Fired

  CHAPTER 1

  It was perfect. Sort of.

  Lara double, then triple checked her angles. Her webcam rested precariously atop the coffee table on a stack of knitting books that were due back at the library a week ago. The camera lens framed her couch, and Lara centered herself in the shot, sitting on the ravine between the cushions like the middle child in the backseat of a car.

  The arms of the loveseat were decorated with scraps of unfinished work she couldn’t bring herself to complete. Sleeves of sweaters overlapped with six-inch scarves, and the colors melted into a rainbow that looked aesthetically pleasing but not too organized. If Lara couldn’t be proud of her work, she could at least be proud of her set design. On screen it looked like she had so much creativity she was forced to spread her energy across several projects, and she spent time nudging each piece into frame to make herself look busy.

  The neck of a sweater fell to the ground, and Lara extricated it from the claws of her cat. “Rocket, not right now.”

  She tossed a fresh ball of yarn to the other side of the living room for him to play with out of frame, then checked her watch. Still five minutes to go.

  To be safe, Lara checked her email one more time. She scrolled through the dozens of messages Roger Feldman had sent, searching for the most recent. Yes, the time was correct. Less than three minutes now.

  Lara had never met Roger Feldman, but she knew of him. Everyone did. The Trend Bender was the premier online gossip mag of the distasteful and easily amused drama queens of the world. A good review of Festive Feline Fashion could put Lara in the next tax bracket. A bad review, well, Lara didn’t want to think about it. She hadn’t wanted to risk the interview at first because she hadn’t needed it. She was getting press from plenty of other publications. Her business was doing fine. Until her life had gone to shit, her motivation had disappeared, and her orders became more backed up than a California highway. Now Lara needed this. It was the fresh start she so desperately craved.

  The Skype ringtone chimed, and Lara scrambled into position: seated with one leg draped over the other, settled into the couch. It was the most natural position she could design, and when she hit accept on the call, she hoped Roger thought she looked as comfortable as Lara did when she looked at her reflection in the little call window.

  Moments later, Roger’s face popped up. He was calling with his phone resting below him on his desk, giving Lara a great view of his chin.

  “Hi, Lara.” He waved. “Can you see me?”

  “Yep! I can see you.” He was blurry, but it didn’t matter what he looked like anyway. Lara wasn’t the one writing about him.

  “Great. We’ve got about—” He checked his watch. “Twenty minutes. Let’s get started, shall we?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “So tell me about your business.”

  Lara was caught off guard. This was the infamous Roger Feldman? Readers clung to the words of a man who opened his interviews with questions that a high school yearbook editor would ask? She had spent all morning preparing for this?

  “Really?” Lara asked. “That’s your question? I’ve already talked about this in every single interview I’ve given. Don’t you think people know about my business by now?”

  Roger swiveled slightly in his chair, clearly taken aback. “I figured you’d be willing to tell the story again,” he explained. “It’s a good one. Young woman builds a successful business out of her favorite hobby and makes enough money to quit her job. I’ve read all of your news coverage: The Star, Chronicle Weekly. I’ve done my homework, Ms. Spellmeyer. I’m not asking you the basics because I’m ignorant. I’m asking because most business owners I talk to are eager to discuss their work. You’re not?”

  “I am,” Lara said, a bit too quickly. “I mean, I like my work. I love my work.” She was stumbling now. Were her words meant to persuade Roger or herself? “I just prefer to talk about more specific details. I hate repeating myself. Everyone knows the general story by now.”

  “Everyone, huh?” Roger looked smug, and Lara hoped that was just her blurry connection.

  “That’s not what I meant. Of course not everyone has heard of my business, but I assume most of the readers on your site have. Your numerous emails mentioned how an interview with me has been much requested.” If he could play the leverage game, so could she.

  “That’s true. You’re a hot topic,” he conceded. “At the moment, anyway.” Lara didn’t care for the way he tacked on that addition. “Still,” he continued. “People love a good origin story. How does one build a cat sweater empire out of nothing?”

  Lara wasn’t falling for his tricky wording again. She wasn’t a boastful person, and she wasn’t going to start being one now. Instead, she’d be so humble that Roger couldn’t make her out to be egotistical unless he cut nearly all of the interview.

  “I wouldn’t call it an empire. I run a website people order cat sweaters through. It’s fun. I’m not a millionaire.”

  “That’s it?” Roger asked, mockingly. “‘It’s fun’ is all you have to say?”

  “Like I said, I’ve talked about this before. It was a fun hobby for me that accidentally turned into a business. I didn’t expect this. The details are pretty boring.”

  “The general details, you mean.”

  She just managed to avoid heaving a sigh. “Yes.”

  “Well, let’s go into some specifics, then, like you asked.”

  Good. Finally some real questions.

  “A woman messaged me a few weeks ago, saying that a sweater you sent her caused her cat to have a severe allergic reaction. Would you like to comment on that?”

  Fuck. This was not what she’d prepared for. Had that woman really contacted Roger?

  “I wouldn’t call it severe,” Lara said.

  “Are you a vet?”

  “What?”

  “Are you a veterinarian?” Roger asked.

  Lara didn’t appreciate the patronizing. “No, but—”

  “So you have no medical authority to categorize the situation?” Roger’s face was so blank, so impersonal. His mouth was hidden behind the hand holding his chin, and his eyes were hidden behind the glare his office lights cast over the lens of his glasses. He didn’t care about the well-being of that cat. He cared about the drama of the situation.

  “That specific cat had a long list of medical issues that I wasn’t made aware of,” Lara said firmly. “If the owner had told me that the cat was allergic to wool, I would have made the sweater out of a different material. The issue has been corrected, and I use hypoallergenic yarn now just to be safe. That cat is fine, by the way. All the sweater did was make him sneeze. I don’t think anyone could call that severe.”

  “Corrected how?” Roger asked.

  “I offered to give the owner a refund and send her a new swe
ater.”

  “Was the cat allergic to the second sweater?”

  “I never sent it,” Lara said. “The owner turned down my offer. All she wanted was her money back.”

  “So she didn’t trust your work?”

  “Maybe,” Lara said, thinking out loud. “I don’t know. It wasn’t my work that was the problem. The order form on my website specifically asks which materials the customer wants their sweater made out of. If she knew the cat was allergic to wool, she shouldn’t have chosen wool.”

  “So you’re blaming the victim for the incident?”

  Lara blinked. This was hardly victim blaming. “If a lactose intolerant woman orders a glass of milk, is it really the restaurant’s fault if she gets sick?”

  Roger shifted slightly. “I have to say, Ms. Spellmeyer, this seems like a touchy subject for you.”

  It was, clearly, but Lara tried not to let it show too much. She adjusted her hair, making sure she didn’t look too frazzled. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t the best situation, as you can imagine, and I thought the issue had been buried. I didn’t expect you to bring it up.”

  “What do you do when you’re approached with these kinds of questions online?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You have over one hundred thousand Instagram followers. Surely an Internet celebrity such as yourself must get tough questions like that on a daily basis.”

  “I don’t consider myself an Internet celebrity. People follow me for the cat pics, not for me. I don’t post personal stuff. You don’t get a lot of hate comments when all you do is post pictures of cats.”

  “I see,” Roger said. He was quiet for a moment. His chin bobbed as he rocked in his chair. “Well, I think that’s all for today.”

  “Oh.” Lara glanced at the clock. “Aren’t we supposed to have ten more minutes?”

  “Well, you know.” Roger adjusted his glasses along the slope of his nose. “The extra time is a precaution. Sometimes you get everything you need sooner than you expect.”

  He was blowing her off. This guy had pestered her for an interview for more than two months and now that he’d finally gotten it, he was cutting it short after ten minutes of nothing. She knew he was definitely writing the article. He’d told her the date it would come out. So what was he going to base it on? The questions about the allergic cat?

  Wait, when had Feldman started pestering her for an interview? She did some quick time calculations in her head.

  Oh shit.

  CHAPTER 2

  Two days had passed since the Trend Bender article was published, and Lara couldn’t bring herself to leave the house. Everyone had read it by now, and it wasn’t just the people in town that Lara had to worry about. For once, the digital world was worse than the real one. Lying in bed all day wouldn’t stop the hateful string of comments from appearing on her social media, but that hadn’t stopped Lara from trying. She was tired. The embarrassment and regret barely let her sleep. It was nine in the morning, but she had gotten maybe three hours at best. She’d spent the night tossing and turning, and when she hadn’t been doing that, she’d been checking her phone. First, she’d deleted dozens of comments about the article on her Facebook page, then the Twitter messages requesting follow-up interviews from people who had no intention of letting Lara tell her side of the story and every intention of dragging her back under the bus for another daily news cycle.

  She buried her head under her pillow, but still her phone buzzed. And buzzed. And buzzed. Frustrated, she re-emerged from her tomb of suffocation to see the same two words written on her screen over and over again. Cat Killer. Cat Killer. Cat Killer. Someone had commented that on every one of Lara’s Instagram posts from the last month. Dealing with people who had read the article was one thing, but confronting people who had only heard about the article through a warped game of telephone that turned cat allergies into premeditated murder was something Lara wasn’t equipped to handle. Then there were trolls who didn’t even know who Lara was; they’d just heard about the scandal on Reddit and shown up to gleefully watch her career burn. It was the final straw.

  Defeated, she turned off her notifications and went back to sleep, hoping that things would somehow be different by the time she woke up.

  They weren’t. Her phone woke her up a second time, and what Lara thought was the alarm she’d already snoozed ten times turned out to be a phone call. She accepted without thinking.

  “Lara?”

  Even though she hadn’t heard it in four years, Lara knew that voice instantly. Once upon a time, she had woken up every morning to that scratchy voice saying her name from the pillow beside her.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Paige Daley.”

  “I can hear that,” Lara said. “What do you want, Paige?”

  “This morning one of my interns read a story about your business that was published in The Trend Bender. The Daily Page is going to recount it. I was wondering if you wanted to make any additional comments for the newspaper to run.” Paige’s voice sounded rehearsed, like an automated recording.

  “Is this a nightmare?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m still asleep, right? Please don’t tell me that my ex-girlfriend actually just called me for the first time in four years to tell me that her newspaper is going to publish a horrible article about me in a town that already hates me and my entire family.”

  “It’s nothing against you,” Paige said. “The article made national news, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t cover such a big story about one of Perry’s own.”

  “It’s a gossip column, Paige. I thought you took that job because you were passionate about real local news.”

  “I did, Lara. You know that better than anyone. I know we haven’t talked in a while, but I’m still me.” Paige could try to appeal to their history all she wanted, but Lara had decided a long time ago that she and Paige didn’t know each other as well as they’d thought. “Besides,” she continued. “This is real local news.”

  The sad part was that Paige wasn’t wrong. With a population of only a couple thousand people, Perry was tiny. Lara making a national fool of herself probably was going to be the most interesting thing to happen for at least the next month. It didn’t help that she was a Spellmeyer. Perry loved to hate on the Spellmeyers. A girl has one alcoholic grandfather and suddenly the whole town treats the entire family like Roger Feldman looking for his next career to ruin.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” It was too early for this. Lara hadn’t even had coffee. Somewhere in another room, Rocket was meowing for breakfast. Usually the cat’s whining would get on her nerves, but nothing could annoy Lara more than Paige Daley.

  “Do you care to comment?” Paige asked when Lara was silent for too long.

  “My comment is, ‘Go fuck yourself.’”

  “Mature.”

  There were Paige’s true colors. Lara was wondering how long she could keep up the professional facade. Apparently, the answer was forty-five seconds.

  “And it was mature of you to call someone whose heart you broke to ask them to help you get ahead in your job and open themselves up to even more public ridicule?”

  Paige was silent for the briefest of moments. Lara almost thought she had gotten through to her, but—

  “Yes,” she said, too much confidence booming in her voice. It sounded overdone, which was surprising. Lara had never known Paige to be lacking in confidence. She was explaining the situation to herself, not to Lara. “I’m putting aside my personal differences for the sake of professionalism.”

  Lara rolled her eyes and channeled all her energy into making sure Paige somehow saw it through the telephone. “And that is exactly why we broke up. You care more about professionalism than people’s feelings. How could you ask me this? How could you run a gossip column like that? In what universe is this the hard-hitting news you always claimed to be so passionate about?”

  “Lara—”

  “Roger Feldman is a scumba
g who leeches onto every little mistake someone makes and blows it out of proportion to get hits on his website. I had one bad day and gave one bad interview, and now people are acting like it’s the end of the world.”

  “Is that your comment?”

  “The part about Roger Feldman being evil or the part about you ruining our relationship and abandoning your ethical principles?”

  “That’s not what happened, and that’s not what’s happening now either, but I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Of course. Paige was probably getting off on this. She always had to win. She had to show Lara that her business was the more successful one. She had to prove that choosing journalism over their relationship was the better life decision.

  The silence stretched out. Lara didn’t know what to say. Paige was clearly going to do whatever she’d set out to do, and rationalizing wasn’t going to get Lara anywhere. Should she hang up? Should she cuss Paige out some more? She didn’t have the fight in her. So she spoke to Paige like a human being, hoping that her ex was still one somewhere in her heart.

  “So you’re really going to run this article, huh?” The words hit Lara as she said them. As fulfilling as yelling at Paige had felt, it wasn’t going to improve her public image. With all that Lara had said in the last five minutes, Paige could easily write an article far worse than Roger Feldman’s.

  Paige was quiet for a moment, as if she was actually considering Lara’s plea. When she spoke, she sounded off the record, but Lara actually couldn’t tell if Paige was being sympathetic to her plight or rubbing it in her face for the fun of it. “It’s my job, Lara. If I don’t run this, I look out of touch with Perry. Or like I’m playing favorites trying to protect you. I’m not.”

  Would that be so bad? This situation was far worse for Lara than it ever would be for Paige. “God forbid you put my feelings first for once, huh?”

  There was a grunt on the other end of the line. Then: “I’m sorry, Lara. I’m really not doing this to mess with you.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “It’s not like I follow your life,” Paige snapped. “I didn’t know about this story until my intern brought it to my attention. I’m covering it because it’s my job. It’s a local interest piece, and I thought I’d be nice and give you a chance to defend yourself. If you don’t have anything else to add, I’ll leave you alone. It was nice talking to you again.”