Novels by Ogieva Gift

Chris arrived the next afternoon with a single sheet of paper inside a folder, which he placed on our kitchen table before taking a seat. When I looked at the content of the paper, I immediately understood that we were not about to have a conversation about what happened, but were instead being handed another script to follow.“This is what we’re releasing,” he said. “Both of you need to be aligned on it before it goes out.”Henry picked it up and read it silently. When he finished, he slid it across the table to me without saying anything, and I looked down at the statement.Neither Henry nor Quinn Brown had any contact with the deceased on the night in question. Reports suggesting otherwise are false and are being investigated as potential defamation.

News of what happened to me outside the company spread fast and wide. It did not go quite in the direction Henry’s agency wanted.By the following morning, the story had already moved beyond the people who had been at the protest. Entertainment pages picked it up. Gossip accounts reposted the videos. People who had never heard of me before were suddenly discussing me like they knew who I was.There was a photograph of me.Someone had edited the photo of me at the award show I attended with Henry together with a photograph someone took during the chaos outside the company.In the second photograph, I was on the ground, my hand pressed against the pavement, my face twisted in pain and confusion.The two pictures were plac

I hadn’t told Henry what I was planning. If I had, he would have stopped me.A stubborn, desperate part of me needed to do something with my hands and my voice instead of sitting inside our apartment, watching him fold in on himself one day at a time.I only wanted to drop off supplies that happened to be near his company, which was technically true, if not the whole truth.I parked two streets away and walked the rest of the distance on foot, telling myself I would just look. Just see the crowd for myself. Understand the scale of what we were dealing with before deciding whether there was anything I could actually do about it.The crowd had grown even larger than the news footage suggested, spilling off the sidewalk and partially into the street. Security guards f

That evening, the video had already been viewed and reposted millions of times.By the next morning, people had turned against Henry. Fans protested outside the company. The crowd outside Henry’s agency had grown large enough to make the local news on its own.I watched the footage over the breakfast Henry had ordered. My spoon was forgotten halfway to my mouth as the camera panned across dozens of people holding handmade signs outside the company’s glass entrance.JUSTICE FOR JULIET, one read in thick black marker.WE WANT ANSWERS, said another.A woman near the front, her voice hoarse from what looked like hours of chanting, leaned into a reporter’s microphone with a serious expression.“He owes her family an explanation,” she said. “He owes all of us an explanation. Now she’s dead, and his company wants us to believe it’s because she was crazy? We’re not buying it.”Henry sat across the table from me, not eating either, his eyes fixed on the same footage. His expression was difficu

Henry's phone rang. It was Chris. He answered and put the call on speaker."Henry." Chris's voice came through immediately. "Turn on your television. Right now.""What is it?" Henry asked."Just turn it on."Henry grabbed the remote from the counter, and the screen flickered to life on a news channel that was already in the middle of a segment.A chyron was scrolling across the bottom of the screen.Disturbing Video Surfaces From Deceased Woman Linked to Popular Actor."Oh God," Henry said quietly.He turned and hurried toward the kitchen.

By afternoon, the story had grown legs of its own online.Some people defended Henry outright, calling Juliet unstable and dangerous, saying she deserved whatever karma had come back to her. People created their own theories and connected things that didn't actually make sense. They defended Henry as if they knew him personally.Others weren't so kind.They kept asking why a former assistant would become so distressed that she would end up dead so close to his company. They claimed something must have happened before her death. To them, it couldn't be a coincidence that she had ended up at the company building that night.Whatever the company's statement had claimed, this story was nowhere near finished.It had only just begu