38. Cynic – Stella
We get a week.
One week of blissful togetherness, of normalcy, and living in the now before reality comes crashing in.
Break
Riggins is at his AA meeting while I make dinner for both of us when I decide to shuffle out to the mailbox and grab the mail. Walking back to the house, I tuck a package I ordered under my arm as I sort through the envelopes. I move past a royalty check, a magazine, spam, spam, spam, catalogue, spam, then—weird.
My hand pauses and my feet stop moving toward the door, a white envelope in hand. An unlabeled envelope. I flip it over and see both sides are blank.
Weird.
I move up the stairs, staring at that envelope while I push open my front door and close it behind me. Gracie bumps against my legs as if I’ve been gone for a year instead of two minutes, but I barely realize she’s there.
Instead, I walk to the kitchen island, dump the rest of the mail on the counter, the package I’d been waiting for long forgotten, and flip the envelope over. There’s something inside, a stack of papers, I think, but nothing on the outside. How did it even get to me? I’d like to believe I would have noticed a car driving up or someone putting something in my mailbox, but I know that’s not true.
Anyone could have delivered an envelope without me noticing.
A fan, maybe? My name is officially splashed across the internet, so tabloids won’t take long to figure out who I really am, to find the marriage documents from Vegas. As soon as I saw the first headline of Riggins Greene’s Secret Wife Revealed! I stopped checking, living in the bliss of not knowing.
Something tells me that it’s all about to end.
Slowly, like it’s a Pandora’s box and I’m about to release something terrible into my world, I slide my finger under the flap.
Am I? Am I about to ruin everything? I asked myself.
Still, I break the seal, the paper ripping and revealing colorful papers beneath. Slowly, I pull them out.
The acid in my stomach churns as it comes to understanding what they are, what I’m looking at.
Articles from the last week about our marriage. About Riggins’ history, relaying all the gory details of our breakup. Another with details about the DUI the record label concealed and his rehab trip, speculation about how it happened when he came home.
There’s even a photo of me holding his hand at his father’s funeral. Then there’s an article about me—Everything you need to know about Stella Hart, Atlas Oaks’ front man’s secret wife. Quotes from artists I’ve worked with, people in town who know me or think they do.
It all feels horribly invasive as if I no longer have control or privacy.
The room starts to shrink around me, dark blue waters lapping at my ankles as I lay all of them out on the counter. Some are painting me as a home-wrecker, sympathetic articles about Willa Stone, the heartbroken pop star.
The public doesn’t know about the fake relationship they sold too well.
I should have known this would happen. Even when we were together, when the press was just barely starting to get interested in Riggins and the band, the shit they’d publish was ridiculous, so far from reality that sometimes, we’d laugh about it.
But right now, as I carefully spread the photos and articles on my kitchen island, I can’t find any humor in it. Not when front and center is an article showing Riggins out partying, clearly wasted beyond recognition, the photo allegedly taken the night I left. While I was on a plane back to New Jersey, sobbing the whole way, he was out partying.
It looks strange right next to a photo of me in a white dress we bought on the strip, Riggins in his usual dark jeans and a tee, standing in front of an officiant at a little chapel in Vegas. How the press got that photo, I don’t know. I don’t even have a copy of it.
All I can remember is how fucking hopeful I was at that moment and how it all came tumbling the next day. For the first time in a week, I wonder if I can do this. If I can handle the scrutiny of the media, the constant reminder of the hurdles we’ve jumped.
For the first time, reality hits me. I told him I was ready to try, but I didn’t think about the outside world when I made that jump. I didn’t think about the scrutiny I would face, that we would face, and if I was strong enough to withstand it.
Can I do this?
Can I handle this? My mental state is fragile as it is, so can I endure the constant reminders of the most painful days of my life?
For the first time since that day, I let my brain go back to that morning, dissecting where we went wrong, the moment Riggins broke my heart, and I let myself wonder if this fairytale we’ve been living in for a week can ever overcome that.