LITMIR.BIZ

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call him when he committed to the NFL draft. She’d sat down with his family, she’d talked to ex-girlfriends, former teachers. Everyone had glowing things to say about him.

      Who didn’t love Richard Stanson, the all-American quarterback?

      Samantha prided herself on having a small close-knit clientele. These weren’t just people she represented; they were people she knew. Her entire business model was built on the idea that trust was the number one component of each and every relationship.

      They had to trust her with their careers, their compensation, and she had to trust that she was working for the right people. Good people who understood what it meant to be not just an athlete, but a professional. It wasn’t just about the money for her. It hadn’t been since she’d left Barkley Partners to go it alone.

      She wanted to be an agent on her terms. She wanted only the best kind of clients, and she wanted to make sure she did right by all of them.

      Richard had been one of her first major wins. Everyone wanted him, but he chose her because he said he trusted her the most. He’d legitimized her agency. He’d legitimized her.

      If an all-American quarterback didn’t have a problem with a woman as an agent, then who would?

      “Sam, I didn’t do it.”

      Samantha closed her eyes. He looked so earnest. Sometimes she forgot he was only twenty-six. Still, in many ways, just a kid playing a game.

      “Come on, you have to believe me,” he said again, putting his hands on her desk. He had immediately flown to Chicago when the story had been about to break. He said it was because he wanted her to hear his side first, and he wanted to do it in person, so she could see his face when he told her.

      Too late about getting to her first.

      Social media was already beginning to tear down America’s quarterback. Guilty before even having a chance to say he was innocent.

      Samantha’s phone had been buzzing frantically all morning. His sponsors would want constant updates. She didn’t blame them, not when the man whose face was on so many of America’s favorite products had just been accused of hitting a woman and knocking her down a flight of stairs.

      “I’ve been with you for four years,” he told her. “You know what kind of person I am. You have to.”

      Samantha stopped reading the Tweets and set her phone aside for now. She looked into his eyes, really looked into them as she tried to evaluate whether or not he could be that good a liar.

      He sounded innocent. He looked innocent.

      In the four years he’d been her client nothing like this had come out before. But in the past seven months of him dating Juliette, the supermodel, things had been different. Their relationship at best could be described as intense. At worst volatile. Several of their verbal arguments had been caught on camera outside various nightclubs.

      Samantha had at one point suggested that maybe they weren’t a good fit. Richard had shrugged it off and just said that they were working through their issues. The next thing Sam heard, they were engaged. When he’d called to tell her that news, he’d promised Sam that they were better. More relaxed as a couple. He seemed so certain she was the one. That their love was the real thing.

      Would a man who loved his fiancée hit her?

      Sadly, Sam knew the answer to that question all too well.

      “People are reporting hearing shouts in the stairwell before you opened the door and called for help.”

      “We were drunk,” he insisted. “Yes, we were loud and obnoxious before it happened. I’ve got no excuse for that, I can only tell you it’s the truth. Hell, that’s why she fell. And I was too drunk to catch her before she went down.”

      It wasn’t the most unreasonable story. They had left the hotel bar late at night and decided to take the stairs to their room on the second floor. They had been drunk, clearly loud enough for people in the hotel lobby to have heard them. Juliette had tripped in her four-inch-high stilettos, fallen, hit her chin on the stair railing and knocked herself out cold.

      The concierge had opened the door to the stairs, only to find Richard picking up his out-cold fiancée with a severe red mark already forming on her face. He did the next logical thing and called the police.

      Only, Juliette had revived by the time the police got there and backed up Richard’s story. No formal complaint had been filed, and the police left the hotel.

      However, someone in the lobby, who must have realized who Richard was, had apparently snapped a picture of the quarterback with his unconscious fiancée in his arms. From there it was nothing more than a few reTweets to social media obliteration.

      “You need to let me get out there. Let me tell them my side of the story. They’ll believe me. Hell, they will believe Juliette.”

      No, Sam thought. They won’t. Not when a woman is about to marry a man who is about to become the highest paid NFL quarterback of all time.

      “You’re not saying anything,” she told him. “I’ll hold a press conference in the large conference room downstairs. I’ll tell them everything you said exactly as you said it and let them ask me their questions. If you and Juliette are seen together, I think it will just lend more credence to a false accusation. Besides, her face must be a mess. I’ll handle it.”

      “I knew you would believe me,” he said, smiling and nodding. “I knew you would never think that of me.”

      “Just one last question.” Samantha had gone over the series of events Richard had detailed for her, coupled with the police report and the story she’d heard directly from the concierge at the hotel. One thing hadn’t sounded right.

      “Why was her shirt ripped?”

      “What?”

      “Her shirt, the concierge said a bunch of buttons were at the bottom of the steps, and it looked like her shirt was ripped in front.”

      Richard shook his head. “Maybe when I reached for her, I grabbed her shirt from behind?”

      “Maybe?”

      Richard groaned. “Come on, Sam. I already told you. I was drunk. Freaking blitzed. It happened in a second. One minute she’s standing next to me, the next she’s at the bottom of the steps.”

      It all came down to trust.

      Did Sam trust Richard or didn’t she?

      * * *

      THE NEXT DAY Sam stood in her conference room, which was filled to capacity with press. ESPN had sent a film crew, and it was clear they were disappointed only Sam would be speaking.

      “Richard Stanson is innocent. I’m not saying that as his lawyer or his agent, but as his friend. He is the victim in this case. The victim of a picture taken out of context by a person who didn’t have all the facts.”

      “Can you tell us the facts as you understand them?” one reporter called out.

      Samantha laid out Richard’s perfectly reasonable explanation for the events of a few nights ago.

      “Now, this doesn’t excuse him from overindulging—Juliette, either, for that matter—but it doesn’t make him the monster he is being portrayed as...”

      Sam stopped talking, because she could feel an immediate change in the room. Phones were buzzing. Everyone was shifting to look at their messages.

      No one was paying any attention to her.

      That meant bigger news was breaking.

      Good, she thought. The quicker they moved on to the next story, the sooner they would leave Richard alone.

      “So if that’s all your questions...”

      “Ms. Baker,” one reporter said, stopping her. “A last question. Have you seen the video?”

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