All Chapters of Toxic & Tainted: The Billionaire's Cursed Obsession: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

POV: Vivian AshfordThe photoshoot is my idea, which is important, because most things that have happened to me in the past three months have been things that happened to me rather than things I chose, and I am finished with that particular dynamic.I call the photographer myself. Imani Cole, who I met at a gallery opening two weeks ago and whose work I have been following since her editorial spread in W last spring. Her aesthetic is precise and unapologetic, all strong light and direct gaze, the kind of photographs that don't ask for your sympathy and don't need it."I want something that looks like I know exactly what I'm doing," I tell her on the phone. "Not defiant. Just certain.""What's the occasion?" she asks."I'm tired of being photographed crying in parking structures."A beat of silence, and then a laugh. "I can work with that. Come to my studio Saturday."We shoot for four hours.Imani works fast and talks while she shoots, which keeps the face honest because there is no t

POV: Chase SterlingThe slap is on the front page of every entertainment outlet by midnight.There are seven photographs of it, from four different angles, which tells me the press presence at that premiere was heavier than I anticipated and also that someone had the specific anticipation to position a camera correctly, which means either I am more predictable than I thought or Vivian is, or both of us are, which is probably the most accurate answer.I sit in the back of the car on the way home from the premiere and I look at the photographs on my phone, one after another, and I think about the expression on Vivian's face in the half second before her hand moved. I know that expression. I have a catalog of her expressions built up over four years of paying close attention, and that particular one, the one where something she has been holding very carefully for a long time finally exceeds its container, is one I have seen exactly three times.The last time I saw it, she was holding a r

POV: Vivian AshfordEthan suggests dinner in the way that feels like a natural extension of a conversation rather than a formal proposal, which is either very good social instincts or very good journalism, and I suspect it is both. He texts on a Wednesday: There's a place in Los Feliz I think you'd like. No agenda, no follow-up questions. Just dinner, if you want.I look at the text for a while before I answer.The rational part of my brain, the part that has been managing my public image and my private decisions with increasing rigor since graduation, notes several things simultaneously. Ethan Beckett is writing a profile of me for Vanity Fair. Ethan Beckett is also, as of approximately six weeks ago, someone I called at one in the morning after Chase leaked college photographs of me, and who answered, and who said useful things in a steady voice, and who has texted twice since to check in without requiring anything from me in return, which is a quality I have not encountered very oft

POV: Vivian AshfordThe audition is for a film called The Cartographer's Wife, a period drama set in 1920s London, written by a director named Saoirse Flynn who has made two films that I have watched four times each and who is, by every measure I know how to apply, exactly the kind of filmmaker I want to be working with at this stage of my career.The role is the wife of the title, a woman who has been drawing her husband's maps for fifteen years without credit, and who spends the film deciding what to do about that, and it is the kind of role that wins awards and changes careers and which I would crawl across glass to audition for.Marcus says no.He says it on a Tuesday morning during our weekly call, in the measured tone he uses when he has made a decision and is presenting it as a conversation as a professional courtesy rather than an actual invitation for input. "Flynn's project has distribution problems," he says. "The financing is unstable. I don't want you attached to somethin

POV: Sienna RhodesThe post goes up on a Friday morning and by noon it has forty thousand impressions and by three in the afternoon I have stopped counting.It starts with an account I don't recognize, one of those gossip aggregator pages with a blue check and three hundred thousand followers, and it posts a photograph of me from the Whitmore gala six months ago, standing near Chase at the bar, taken from an angle that makes it look like we are closer than we were and more deliberate about it than we were. The caption reads: Reminder that Sienna Rhodes was Chase Sterling's original target at the graduation ceremony. Some people keep their enemies closer than their friends.The implication is clear enough that the comments do not need to elaborate, though they do anyway, enthusiastically and at length.By two in the afternoon a second account has posted the photograph from the premiere of me in the lobby, visibly distressed, with the caption: Vivian Ashford's "best friend" has been in