Chapter 58 Kir
KIR
“Ooh, baby, don’t you know I suffer? / Ooh, baby, can’t you hear me moan? / You caught me under false pretenses / How long before you let me go?”
— “Supermassive Black Hole” by Muse
For three days, the world stays perfect.
Jillian and I sleep and fuck like rabid animals and sleep some more.
We work separately during the days and come home at night to each other, and every time I see her face for the first time after hours apart, I wonder if perhaps I’m not as broken as I always thought I was.
I check in with Mat on Thursday afternoon.
The board transition is proceeding far smoother than anyone expected.
Lukas hasn’t contested the vote or filed any legal challenge.
Turns out that’s because no one has seen hide nor hair of Lukas since the board vote.
He and Rae vanished into thin air. I’m too love-drunk to give a fuck.
On Friday morning, I’m walking into the office late when my assistant, Madison, runs up to me. “Mr. Lazarev? I have Richard Thornton on line one. Editor-in-chief of the New York Times. He says it’s urgent.”
I shrug. “Sure. Put him through.”
These newspaper types and their “urgency.” The entire Lazarev Global PR team has been working around the clock to spin the news of Lukas’s “departure” in a positive light. They do good work, so I’m not overly concerned about it. Times are changing around here. It’s long overdue.
I step into my office and drop into my chair, feet kicked up on my desk. The light for Line 1 is flashing on my desk phone. I pick it up.
“Kir,” Thornton says. “Thanks for taking my call.”
“Of course, Rick. Always a pleasure.” I reach for the espresso Madison left on my desk. “What can I do for you?”
There’s a pause. Not a long one, but long enough that I stop halfway to the coffee.
“I’m calling as a friend,” Thornton warns. “Not as an editor. I want to be clear about that upfront.”
I pull my feet off the desk. Something in his tone is starting to unsettle me. “Okay. Sure. I’m listening.”
“We’re running a piece tomorrow morning. Front page, above the fold. It concerns your family. Your father, specifically, and the company.” Another pause. “It’s... significant, Kir. It’s a full investigative feature. Your mother’s name is in it.”
Only offices can be this quiet. Something about the combination of coffee pots and printers, of fluorescent lights and carpets and cubicles, sucks away the silence like nothing else in this world.
“My mother,” I echo.
“I’m sorry, Kir. It’s… Fuck, I hate even saying this, but it’s going to make things ugly.”
“Who wrote it?” I ask in a numb, deadened voice, even though I already know.
He clears his throat. “I can’t get into specifics. The piece has been through Legal, it’s been fact-checked, and it’s going to print tonight. There is nothing I can do to stop it at this point, even if I wanted to. I know you and I go way back and—”
“Rick.”
“Yeah?”
“Who wrote the fucking article?”
He sighs. “A reporter named Jillian Pierce.”
I don’t say anything. I’m looking at the wall across from my desk, the one that still bears a mark from when she hurled my laptop at the wall.
I’m looking at the dent in the plaster where it hit.
I told Maintenance not to patch it. I like it there, same as I like when I look at my back in the bathroom mirror and see the faint traces from where she’s clawed me bloody every time we make love.
I like that she’s made herself known in my life.
I like that I’ve made myself known in hers.
“I’m telling you this because I consider you a friend,” Thornton continues, “and because you deserve time to prepare. Get your legal team together, get your PR people on the phone, do whatever you need to do.”
“Thank you, Rick,” I hear myself say. “I appreciate the call.”
I hang up.
Then I run.
I don’t remember the elevator. I don’t remember the lobby or the street or the cab or whether I ran the whole way or flew. The next thing that exists after Thornton’s voice is my hand on the penthouse door, shoving it open so hard the handle cracks into the wall behind it.
I know at once that she’s gone.
My heart supplies that message and then my brain goes rummaging for details to prove it. I find them easily.
There’s a space at the door where her shoes were that’s no longer filled.
When I race into the bedroom, I see no laptop on the bedside table, no bag looped over the armchair.
The bathroom counter has no toothbrush or Tom Ford perfume bottle.
The air itself is screaming at me that she’s gone, gone, gone.
It smells like lemon cleaning solution and nothing else.
No bergamot. No cherry. No Jillian.
I turn back out of the bedroom and charge up the hall.
A woman is in the kitchen, but it’s not her.
It’s the maid. She’s wearing earbuds and humming softly to herself as she scrubs the sink basin, her back to me, completely oblivious to the fact that I just blew through the front door like a fucking wrecking ball.
“Get out,” I spit.
She stops, half-turns, and frowns, then pulls out one earbud, unsure if she heard something or not. When she finally turns fully around to see me looming there like a specter of death, though, she screams.
“Ahh—!”
A soapy sponge falls from her yellow-gloved hand and lands on the floor with a wet smack. “Sir, I’m so sorry! You scared the daylights of me. I was almost done with—”
“I said get the fuck out of my fucking apartment!” I roar.
My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds like his. Lukas’s voice coming out of my mouth. I hear it and I hate it, but I am powerless to stop it.
The woman flinches at my wrath. She fumbles in her apron pocket for something and hurls it at me in terror. She mumbles something about “found this under the couch” as she flees past me. The door clicks shut behind her.
And then I’m alone. More alone than I’ve been since my father carried my mother’s poisoned corpse out of our home for the last time.
I stand in the kitchen, staring at the sudsy puddle spreading on the floor from beneath the sponge. It reminds me of the blood seeping out of the hitter I killed to keep Jillian safe.
I almost can’t believe this is happening. She wrote it. She wrote the article. She looked me in the eye on the way home from Coney Island and said, Okay, I’ll kill it—and then she published it anyway.
I told her I loved her.
And she fucking stabbed me in the throat.
Did she love me back? She said the words; that much is certain. But people say all kinds of things when they’re naked and warm, being held by someone who would do terrible things on their behalf. So did she ever love me? Or was I just the story?
Every conversation replays at once. All her many questions. I thought she was curious because she cared, because she wanted to understand me.
But maybe she was just doing her job.
Maybe I was the source she was fucking and nothing more.
I look down at the thing that the maid threw at me on her way out.
It’s an envelope. Small, aqua-colored, and slightly crumpled.
The maid’s words come back to me—found this under the couch—and a dim memory surfaces through the rage: the night I flipped the marble coffee table and Jillian’s stolen mail went everywhere. I recovered all of it except one piece.
This piece.
The one with the handwritten return address from Montclair, New Jersey.
I’d set it aside that night because I wanted to savor it. Then the table tumbled over and the vodka shattered and the envelope disappeared and I forgot about it entirely, because everything after that night was Jillian, Jillian, Jillian.
My thumb runs along the sealed flap. I tear it open.
Inside is a single sheet of cream-colored stationery with a letterhead printed in navy blue: Briarwood Family Services, Montclair, NJ. Below the letterhead, a date from three and a half weeks ago, and then:
Dear Ms. Pierce,
We are writing to inform you that the adoptive family of your biological daughter (Case File #JRP-0619-A) has expressed interest in initiating contact.
Per the terms of your original adoption agreement, this letter serves as formal notification that the adoptive parents have filed an Authorization to Share form with our office, consenting to the release of identifying information to the birth mother.
Should you wish to proceed with contact, please reach out to our family reunification coordinator, Liana Lynch, at the number below. There is no obligation and no timeline. This is entirely at your discretion.
With warmth and care,
Adriana Fleming
Director of Post-Placement Services
Briarwood Family Services
I read it so many times and yet it still doesn’t make sense. Until, like an optical illusion snapping into place, suddenly, it all makes sense.
Jillian has a daughter.
Jillian has a daughter, and she gave her up for adoption, and she never told me.
That explains so much. The playground. Jillian standing at the chain-link fence in the cold, watching other people’s children until the park emptied and the streetlights came on. Crying. Dragging the back of her hand across her eyes and walking away alone.
The Coney Island gondola. The little girl in the red jacket with the balloon. The way Jillian’s entire body locked up when I said, You’d be a good mother. She turned away from me so fast and so completely that I thought I’d said something stupid without knowing what.
She had a child. She carried a child and delivered a child and handed that child to strangers and walked away and never said a single word about it.
As I stand there, dumbstruck, I feel our love has become like a little red balloon of its own. It’s out of my hands now, and out of hers, too. The difference is that she chose that. She let it go. She opened up her fingers and it took off, flying higher and higher.
Going.
Going.
Gone.