Present Day
PART EIGHT
THE CIRCUS IS CLOSED AND THE SHOW’S AT AN END
Present Day
I T’S PRETTY SELF-INDULGENT, RIGHT? T O KEEP INTERRUPTING SOMEONE else’s story with your own? “Hey, Thomas and Evelyn, I know you have a whole thing going on in 1897, but I’m getting some billionaire dick here in 2023, so if you could pause for a few pages and let me fill the people in—that’d be great.”
But I swear, this is important. Maybe not to anyone else, but to me. And to Thomas and Evelyn’s story—to their ending.
As previously discussed, Armitage and I agreed that I would work independently. He would only read my final report upon completion of my research.
So … I put off the completion of my research. It wasn’t that I was just stalling—there was still plenty to read and plenty of documents to cross-check, but I wasn’t exactly speeding toward next steps. Why? Well, I would say it was a lot like our relationship. On the one hand, I felt like we had been together forever, but on the other hand, Armitage had still never mentioned any future beyond what we would order for dinner that night. And so, I worried that maybe everything would be over the second I turned in my research.
I wanted it to be undeniable, our love. But I was terrified it wasn’t. That I was living a fairy tale while he was living in a horny lit professor’s terrible first novel.
Then one day, I was sitting in the park (finishing my totally normal winter snack of ice cream, as one does), and I couldn’t help but watch the couples walking past me. Usually, I wouldn’t have paid them any attention. I tried not to look too closely at other people’s relationships—it made me too jealous and way too insecure.
There’s something so romantic about New York as the weather turns from fall to winter, though, and on that day, everyone seemed more in love than usual. Beneath the waning moon, each couple glowed with their own halo of radiance. A special spotlight that hit each one in time, declaring to the universe that these two people were meant for each other. They all walked closer, nuzzled cozier, held hands tighter.
They made me think of Thomas and Evelyn.
And then, they made me think of me and Armitage.
My hands felt empty without his.
That’s when I knew I couldn’t delay writing out Thomas and Evelyn’s story anymore. I had to know the truth: Was it just this research project, or was there something more happening between us? The only way out was through. Finish the report, turn it in, and see where our relationship went from there.
So I told him I was going to a conference (a lie), locked myself in my shitbox apartment with all the Domino’s I could eat, and wrote until my fingernails started to chip. It wasn’t quite like the book you just read. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but in light of what happened next, I’ve gone back and made some revisions.
In the version I delivered to Armitage, I wrote in plain, clear terms about Thomas Gallier. His true origin—an origin he’d tried desperately to hide. His business association with Dr. Andrew Samson—a business partnership that became a real friendship. His elephants. His appearances in the newspapers. His almost, not quite, never-could-be love story.
I wrote about Constance Alban and their marriage of convenience/blackmail. Family lore would describe her as Thomas Gallier’s one true love , but I laid out how the sudden increase in orders of whiskey to the Gallier house after their nuptials indicated a descent into alcoholism that can only be described as Tennessee Williamsian in nature. I even scrapped my note about the erection thing, hoping a straightforward account would convince him how important this story was.
When I finally gave the report to him, I was a woman on the brink. For one thing, now that I had spent so long with Evelyn and Thomas, I knew this couldn’t be it for their story. I wanted to share them with the world. On my blog, in a book, in a goddamn Netflix series—I didn’t care. I just wanted Evelyn and Thomas’s story to come out of the shadows.
As I sat on one of Armitage’s many brocade couches watching him page through my report, I realized there was another, more selfish, reason that my stomach was in knots. It had nothing to do with my work, and nothing to do with the fact that I hadn’t eaten a vegetable in a week. It had to do with us.
Because as I had finished writing Evelyn and Thomas’s story, I had becoming increasingly aware of the parallels—sure, I was no vaudeville star, but I was certainly fat, fabulous, and responsible for bringing a certain amount of spontaneity and joy to a certain rich man’s previously rigid existence. Historically speaking, that hadn’t worked out so well for Evelyn, and now, I wanted Armitage to tell me that our story wouldn’t end like theirs.
I needed him to tell me that, actually.
But when Armitage finished reading my report, he merely said:
“Thank you, Phoebe”—like I’d just given him the newspaper.
“Thank you?” It was a December afternoon, and I had curled up next to him as he read, but now I found myself shivering despite the fireplace and the warmth of his body.
“Yes. Thank you. Now, what do you want for dinner? Thai?”
“What do you mean, what do I want for dinner ?” Maybe it wasn’t the cold that was making me shiver. Maybe I was shaking—with shock, and the beginnings of anger.
He chuckled. “Dinner’s the final meal of the day. When you eat, you generally need to pick something to eat—”
“I want to talk about this.”
“Oh. Yes. Um. It’s very well done. You’re a keen researcher.” A pause. I felt every muscle in my face tense, and he must have picked up on my disbelief—not that I was hiding it. “Is … is that what you’re looking to hear?”
“No. I mean, thank you, but that’s not really what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
He fixed me with a look of slightly narrow-eyed amusement. It was like we were communicating on two different frequencies. I was serious, maybe more serious than I’d ever been in our entire relationship. He treated me like this was just a silly lark.
“I … I think people need to know about Thomas and Evelyn,” I said. “We shouldn’t keep this story to ourselves.”
“Phoebe,” he said, my name almost a tut, “that wasn’t the deal.”
“I know it wasn’t the deal, but I want the deal to change. This is different. Everything is different now.”
We’re different now .
He set the research dossier on the table, shrugging as he did so. “I had a curiosity. You satisfied it. Now, what about dinner?”
I couldn’t believe how chipper he was. How normal . As if he couldn’t possibly understand why this mattered to me.
“We’re not talking about dinner.”
“Oh, yes, we are. I’m starved.”
“This is important.”
“Okay, then.” He breathed in and focused on me. “Go ahead. Tell me why.”
I thought he was being reasonable then, hearing me out.
“It has real historical significance.”
“Maybe, but people are going to ask where you got the story. The documents and everything. How are you going to explain that?”
“I’d tell them the truth. It all came from you.”
“Those are my family’s documents. I wasn’t exactly at liberty to offer them up for public consumption. Come on, let’s be serious about this—you know what my father is like.”
His father. A few months ago, I might have let him have that. Might have been so desperate to be liked that I would have made some bad joke, locked Evelyn and Thomas away forever, and gone about my life. All so Armitage would like me more.
Not anymore. Not now.
“Who cares? Who cares if anyone knows you gave me access to those papers?”
“My family will care. They’ll tear you apart before they let this out. Thomas and Constance are the reason our company exists. No one wants their dirty laundry aired out in—what? Your newsletter? Some book?”
I recoiled. Dirty laundry? Was that how he saw Evelyn?
Was that how he saw me ?
“It’s not dirty laundry. It’s a love story.”
For the first time, he seemed flustered. There it was—the understanding that I was not going to be talked down.
“You’re under an NDA,” he reminded me.
“And you could let me out of it with a wave of your pen.”
“It’s not—I’m not going to—” His neck flushed red. He tried another tactic. “Listen. You’re right. Evelyn and Thomas were interesting. No doubt. But we can put this little story behind us. File this away, clear those old boxes out of the attic. Too much clutter anyway.”
That “clutter” was the sum total of Thomas Gallier’s contribution to the original version of “this little story.” To erase it would be, effectively, to erase Evelyn Cross altogether.
He smiled. “And we can finally be together without those two dead people hanging over us all the time, hm?”
I glanced up at the portrait of Thomas and Constance Alban. The husband and wife whose portrait had presided over almost every research and writing session I’d yet conducted.
It seemed to me that there were always two dead people hovering over us, just not the two I would have preferred.
“But what about Evelyn?” I asked, my voice small.
“What about Evelyn?”
“You can’t just let the world forget her.”
“I get that it’s a love story, and I get that you’ve invested a lot in this, but honestly. They’re two dead strangers. Why do you really care—”
“Because they’re us!”
I don’t know why I said it.
No. Fuck that. I do know why I said it. I said it because it’s true and because I felt it in the long bones of my body.
“What was that?” Armitage asked, as if he hadn’t heard.
“Never mind. Forget it.”
“No. Explain yourself.”
He stood up, leveraging his height against me. I turned to my research dossier.
“It’s just … how could you read all of this and not think there were at least some similarities between what happened between them and what’s going on between us? Don’t you see it?”
“No.”
The word, one syllable, two letters. To me, it was a blow. He said it like it was a kiss.
“Excuse me?”
“If I see a similarity, it’s because you wrote it there. You with your editorializing—”
“This is facts-based research .”
“God, why are you pushing this? You want to be like them? Phoebe, he left her . He threw her away like she was nothing. Not exactly the model for a great relationship.”
He gestured between us. For a split second, I thought he was reaching out for me, so I flinched back. Hurt, his gaze softened.
“Unless …” he trailed off. “Unless you don’t think this is a great relationship.”
I said nothing.
“We’re not going to end up like them,” he promised.
“Then prove it.”
Do something, say something—anything at all to make me believe you. His hands came up to cup my face. I didn’t fight them.
“Phoebe,” he started. “I—”
This was it. I could almost see his perfect lips shaping around the words. I love you . But instead, he just offered:
“I don’t want this to come between us.”
But I knew it already had. For some reason, I thought again about that night on the park bench, watching the happy couples walk by under the drifting snowfall. How my hands had felt empty without his, how those same hands felt like irons around my face now.
I thought about how I’d been sitting on that park bench alone because he rarely left the house in my company.
I thought about how he’d never said it. Never said I love you . And still, six months into our time together, couldn’t bring himself to do it now.
Love was a series of choices. A role you step into every day, a part you play through ovations and heckles.
Maybe, I bargained with myself, he didn’t have to say the words if he could just show me.
I gave him another chance.
“Then let me have the story. Risk something for me. Forget what your family will think. Forget what anyone will think. For once, just do something because you want to.”
“I can’t,” he said.
Can’t was not the same as don’t want to .
Clearly upset, Armitage raked a hand through his hair. “If you go public with this, then you know you can’t have me too, right? Don’t make that choice. Please . Don’t do this. I’ve always stood by you. I want to always stand by you—”
No, you haven’t. And no, you don’t.
The thought was immediate, a lashing out from a bitter cavern I didn’t even know existed within me.
It was true, though. I hadn’t realized it until that moment, but with that one idea, it all settled in with blistering clarity.
“Do you remember when you said you were afraid of me?” I asked, voice shaking.
“That’s ancient history. I said that before we—”
“Why?”
No answer.
“Why are you afraid of me, Armitage?” I repeated.
He dropped his cowardly head. Ran a hand across his mouth, then through his hair. He quivered beneath my stare.
He didn’t have to say it. I knew.
He had never been seen in public with me. Dinners at home. Cocktails in his private, walled garden. Long hours in his study. Nights in bed with the curtains drawn.
Did his parents know about me? Did his friends? He’d locked me in a pantry rather than tell his dad about my existence.
How many parties had he been invited to over our time together? A hundred? How many times had he invited me to go with him? Zero.
He was all over the society pages. Speculation ran rampant about his love life. Inset photographs of him and luridly thin women abounded.
God, I was going to be sick.
I loved this man.
And this man was ashamed of me.
To him, I was good enough to fuck. Good enough for wonton soup and cold medicine and limoncello spritz and movie night and T-shirts. Good enough to waste time with. Good enough to rehearse being a real man with a real heart. Good enough to use.
But not good enough to be a part of his real life.
Not good enough to love.
He was afraid of me because I wouldn’t fit into the world of his fancy friends, wouldn’t win his asshole father’s approval. I knew then that if it came down to it— when it came down to it—he would not choose me.
That’s why he would rather burn a great love story than share it with the world. He was vain. Cowardly. He was one of the most powerful men in the world, but terrified what people would think if he didn’t fit their expectations.
Not only could he not bear anyone thinking that this Gallier liked women like me … he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone knowing that another Gallier did, either.
That’s why he was scared.
He reached for me. “Let’s just sit down. Forget about the book. Forget about everything. Start over.”
No. I wouldn’t.
I started for the door.
“ Please ,” he said, his voice breaking this time. “Why can’t we just go back to the way it was?”
“Because I deserve better than the way it was.”
From the moment I started working on this research, I knew that Evelyn Cross shouldn’t be a footnote in someone else’s story. A long-buried secret no one uncovered for over a hundred years. Doomed to be erased.
Deniable.
I wouldn’t let that happen to her.
And after studying her courage, her confidence, her unflinching sense of self-worth for months, I now knew how to make that choice for myself, too.
All this time, I’d been thinking I wasn’t good enough for Armitage.
But he wasn’t good enough for me.
I left without another word. I didn’t listen as he shouted my name, begging me to come back like I was the last lifeboat abandoning him on a sinking ship. I didn’t answer his calls. I didn’t return his texts. Didn’t buzz him up when he rang at my shitty apartment.
The choice destroyed me, but it was the only one I could make.
When he did finally break through, it was with an unsigned, unmarked letter. No Gallier letterhead, no flouncy signature. Just a plain white envelope filled with ripped-up scraps of paper. It took me a minute to reassemble the page, but when I did, I realized two things:
It was our NDA. Torn up into a dozen pieces. Ready for the garbage.
It was the official end of whatever Armitage and I had together. He’d said if I went public with the story, we were over. And by giving me the freedom to do just that, he might as well have waved me goodbye.
So I took the hint. And I wrote.
I gathered up the copies of my research from the Gallier family archives and my own trove of documents from the Manhattan Historical Preservation Society and all the notes I’d scrawled over the last few months. Between shifts at the MHPS, I devoted every spare minute to writing this book, this new story of Evelyn and Thomas. I leaned into the similarities between their story and mine and Armitage’s. History repeats itself, you know, and I was stupid to think I could escape that.
But when I finished it, when I left Thomas in that sad study and that sadder alcoholic stupor—when I left Evelyn on that ship bound for an uncertain future—I knew I couldn’t let that be the end. Not after everything they’d been through.
Not after everything I’d been through.
As I’d been researching their relationship, I’d wanted nothing more than for them to have a happily ever after. With this manuscript in my hands, I realized that I had the power to give them one. Their story could be a fairy tale. In the end, the man could be a hero and the heroine could get the guy. Their friends could be saved. The pawn in her father’s matchmaking schemes could be with her true soulmate. The close-minded villain could get what was coming to him.
Love could win.
Like any rich douchebag, Armitage was obsessed with classical studies. He went around quoting ancient dead guys all the time, and one of those quotes stuck with me.
A man called Menander once wrote:
We live, not as we wish to, but as we can .
I know I’m not anybody. Who is Phoebe Blair to question a playwright whose work has lasted since the third century BCE?
Still. Fuck that. I will live as I wish to. And if I can’t, then I will write as I wish to.
Maybe this story is not historically accurate. Maybe I will never be allowed to show my face at academic conferences again, and maybe the Gallier family will use their entire fortune to make sure that my life is ruined for this.
But I don’t care.
Because …
One day, I will be nothing more than a story, too. And when that day comes, I hope someone writes me a fairy tale.
And so, we turn back the pages, turn back time. It is the night of the ball. Evelyn has just been told that Thomas is getting married. And now, they are on one final collision course.