Nineteen
“I didn’t kill him!” I yell as I slam my front door. Kicking off my shoes, I rush to make a right at the end of the hallway, then dig in my heels when I find Tyler sitting on my couch. I look over at my closed bedroom door, then back at him. “How did you—”
He holds up a bobby pin. “Found this in your bathroom.”
“Oh, so you play one bodyguard role and now you’re a master at picking locks?” I ask with a gentle mockery that freezes when he doesn’t smile back. “Tyler?” I ask, stepping closer, although there’s a part of my brain that warns me not to get too close.
“Hold up.” He raises a hand, gaze widening. “You didn’t kill him?” he asks, but it’s like he’s talking to me from the other side of a glass pane where I can see and hear him as usual, but it’s off . “What happened then?” he prompts when I don’t reply. And again, I can tell he’s shocked and also relieved, but something is pulling him back from feeling the full extent of those emotions. It’s like he’s a muted, less expressive version of himself.
“It… was a heart attack.” I’m still studying him for a clue as to the U-turn in his mood. Is he that upset that I tricked him and locked him in? “I went to the embassy, and my friend Kira showed me a press release that they’re sending out today. The coroner ruled that the cause of death was actually a heart attack. Tyler,” I say, attempting to infuse joy into the heavy air. “That’s it. It’s over.”
He gives a short smile, nods, and the anchor in my gut drops lower. Every move he makes is making my senses tingle. “Good. That’s… really good.”
“Hey.” With a few brisk steps, I sit down next to him and take his hand—except he stands up and walks away. “I’m really, really sorry about locking you in.” I jump to my feet, knowing nothing good is going to happen after I ask this question. “How mad are you at me?”
You’d think that by now, I would have developed the ability to foresee huge life-shattering moments coming from a mile away. Except that’s not how it works, is it? Because most of the time, life proceeds in a steady, unrecognizable blur, and you’re unable to identify a big life-shattering moment until you are firmly in it. Sometimes it’s sitting down for a dinner with your husband that starts with you asking “How’d your day go?” and ending with him saying “My lawyer will call you tomorrow” as he rolls out his pre-packed suitcase from behind the shoe cabinet. Another time, it starts out as a casual night stroll in the park and ends with you coming face-to-face with a stalker you didn’t know you had.
And sometimes, it begins with you and the man you love, alone in your apartment, his brows furrowed, hands, you now notice, clenched into fists at his sides while he stands in front of the door opposite your bedroom. The door that you always keep closed but is now ajar, and suddenly you feel like those people on the beach who don’t realize a tsunami has landed until it’s too late.
“What’s this room?” he asks.
“That’s my office.”
Another single nod. “I thought so. And the board? The one above the table? What’s that?”
“The—” And I pause. Because I know. Because he knows.
“Sorry for invading your privacy,” Tyler says as he opens the door, voice saturated with sarcasm. “But I was trying to contact your friends, you know, on account of you heading for jail and all, and thought maybe you hid my phone in here.” He walks into the room, sunlight streaming through the windows and illuminating every corner and item, including the whiteboard.
I straggle in behind him, every step feeling like I’m trudging through quicksand. “I can explain. Please.”
“Good,” he says with a humorless voice that makes my pulse spike. “Because I have a few questions. First off, who’s ‘golden boy’?” I open my mouth, but nothing happens. “I’m assuming it’s me, right?”
“Yes.”
“And these are… what?” He waves around at the notes. “Ideas? Brainstorm sessions?”
My voice is thick. “Yes,” I repeat.
I’m standing closer to him now and, for the first time, can see that his eyes are red. The thought of him crying alone in my apartment slashes deeper grooves across my heart. I want to reach out and hold his face, but I know that’s the last thing he wants right now.
“For the Vogue story? Or for some deal you’ve made with a tabloid?”
“ Vogue .”
“Really?” Tyler asks, already walking over and pointing at the two words I wish I could go back in time and stop my past self from writing down, even if it meant cutting off her fingers. “Why does that say ‘abortion story’?” He stares me down for an answer, every one of his shields fully up. “Were you going to write about Jess?”
“No, of course not!” I blurt, finding my voice.
“Then why is it on the board?”
“Because—”
“How would you feel if I revealed a secret about your sister to the whole world?”
“My…” I trail off, confusion momentarily seizing me—until I remember. My lie at our first dinner. The lie that had felt inconsequential at the time but now feels like the thing that will do me in.
He stares at me for a long beat until realization hits. “You don’t have a sister,” he says through a dark chuckle.
I swallow. “No. I don’t.”
“Why did you say that you did?”
“Because—” My voice dies out, but I dredge it back up. “I needed to get close to you. Get you to trust me.”
Tyler drags a hand down his face. He’s trying to remain calm through the storm, but as always, his mouth gives him away; right now, it’s twitching like mad, and I can only imagine everything he wants to yell at me. “What does—” He turns to the board, his jaw working as he emphasizes each syllable. “‘Doesn’t know what he wants. Not for you’ mean?” His eyes flash back at me, and I cannot remember the last time I took a breath. If I take even half a step forward, I will collapse. “That’s what you think of me? That I’m ‘not for you’? And instead I’m, what? A project? One that you’re simply laying out on a board and trying to reassemble for your article, grabbing as many pieces as you can even if it includes things I told you in confidence?”
“No, of course not. I was… Clarissa…”
At the mention of Clarissa’s name, a new emotion splays across his face. It feels like the precise millisecond where the mug you dropped makes first contact with the ground, when it hasn’t quite shattered yet, but you know the forthcoming damage is inevitable.
“What did Clarissa say?” he asks.
I take a deep breath and rip the Band-Aid off quickly. “I was trying to get a scoop on you, an exclusive. She said there were rumors—”
“Rumors?” he scoffs.
I give a stiff nod. “She said people are talking, saying that you’ve been acting a little weird, clearing your schedule for something big. That something’s going on with you and that if I could find out what it was…”
“What?” He takes one step in my direction, looking ready for battle. “What did she promise you if you could get a scoop on me? Was it another cover story? The Oscars? Fashion week? Cannes? What—” He places one palm against the wall, as if bracing himself for the answer. “—is my secret worth to you?”
What, I know he’s asking, is my trust worth to you?
What am I worth to you?
Everything, is what I want to tell him.
“It doesn’t matter, Tyler! Your secret was about Jess, and I absolutely wasn’t going to print that.” I look over at the whiteboard, wanting to scream at the stupid words I’d stupidly written and that now stare back at me, taunting me in black and white. “And no, you weren’t a project—”
“Answer the question. You were offered something in exchange,” he says in a voice of steel. I swallow, but it all tastes like bile. “What was it?”
“A full-time position,” I finally admit, emotion distorting my voice. “She’d hire me as a full-time reporter.”
“In Singapore,” he clarifies. He can’t blink back the tears anymore. Neither can I. He doesn’t bother wiping them away. Neither do I.
“Yes.”
“I told you everything .” His face is etched with uncontrollable rage, tears streaming down his cheeks, hair disheveled from how often he’s grabbed at his roots. “Everything. I’m so stupid. So fucking stupid. This whole time, I thought we were a team, but I was some… some…” He stumbles over his words like a kid experiencing anger—real, unfiltered anger, the kind that makes your veins expand with boiling blood—for the very first time. There’s no carefully crafted script that he’s memorized. This is entirely him, raw and feeling the full depth of emotions that he’s capable of. “Stupid… prized… farm animal. A… fucking golden ticket. Something that you… cash in at the end.”
“No,” I whisper. Like he’s a circus animal, May’s voice comes roaring back. “Tyler, none of that is—”
“You want your scoop?” He lets out a dark laugh. “Here it is. I’m retiring.”
I jerk backward, like a dog on a pulled leash. “What?”
He gives a quick, small shrug. “This is the last movie I’m shooting. There you have it. Tyler Tun is retiring from acting. Put it in the headline, baby.”
“But Bond,” I stammer. “I heard you and May talking in the trailer. She said the offer was going to come in any day now.”
“It did. Before I left LA. I turned it down.”
“Oh my god. That call the other week. The—” Studio stuff .
“As you can imagine,” he says in a monotone voice. “My team, as well as the studio, weren’t— aren’t, ” he corrects himself, “thrilled that after years of careful deliberation, their first choice has said no. They keep roping me into calls to get me to reconsider, but I’m… not.”
“Tyler,” I breathe out. “You’re… retiring? To do… what?”
“Come home. Figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. Maybe eventually open up a drama school here? I don’t know yet. All I know is that I’m done with acting. It was the Bond offer that made up my mind, actually. They said it’d be a minimum seven-year commitment, and instead of excitement, the first thing I felt was dread. There I was with an offer that actors spend their whole lives dreaming of, and the first thing I thought was, Fuck, I have to do this for at least seven more years? And that’s when I knew I was done. I love acting, but it stopped being about acting a long time ago. I don’t want to look back only once they’ve pushed me out and wish I could do things differently.”
The information overload is overwhelming, dizzying—but also makes such perfect sense that I can’t believe I missed it this whole time. Tyler saying he wasn’t making any plans . Asking about adopting a dog. Why he’d fought so hard to get this movie funded, and how he had meant it when he said he’d just wanted to shoot a fun movie with his best friend . My chest squeezes when I remember him in bed last night, asking me about what kind of couple we’d be, throwing out ideas for a hypothetical first vacation. Except, I realize, and my chest is now constricting so hard it aches, it wasn’t hypothetical for him. I remember his face, and now I can put a precise name to his expression then: hope. In this scenario, I don’t go back to LA.
“But what will you do instead? In the meantime. Like… day-to-day-wise?” I ask.
“I don’t know. That’s the beauty of it,” he says with a cautious joy that, despite the shock of all of this, still shines through. He sounds happy. Light. Free. “I have had my life planned out months, years in advance ever since… since a long time ago. Too long. And I don’t know what I’m going to do after this movie, but I’m excited to have nothing on my calendar. I’ll probably travel. Read a lot more. Maybe take up a sport. Every day that I’ve woken up here has felt increasingly right . I want to be able to see my parents and cousins whenever I want, go over to my parents’ house for dinner, go on a family vacation for the first time in god knows how long. I want to be able to go to a restaurant without a baseball cap and sunglasses.” And right when I thought the pain couldn’t feel any more acute, he adds, knowing exactly what he’s doing, “For a minute there, I was even considering dating.”
I want to tell him everything that’s been going through my mind over the last few weeks, every single embarrassing, stupid, infatuated thought that I refused to let slip out because I thought we couldn’t have it all. “Tyler,” I say, knowing that this is irreparable, and nonetheless still wanting to fix it somehow, some way.
“I would’ve told you, you know, if you’d asked,” he interrupts. “Fuck, it sounds so embarrassing, but one week by your side and I was a goner. And I know, I know that would’ve been foolish and reckless and it would’ve caused a hell of a shitstorm and I’m not someone who does reckless things, but that’s what you do to me, Khin. When we’re together, nothing makes sense except for you, and then you become everything and then it all makes sense. It’s like the earth tilted on its axis the moment I met you, like my whole world as I knew it shifted, and I knew instantly that there was no turning back for me now.
“How could you of all people say that I don’t know what I want? Has it not been humiliatingly clear by the fact that I would do anything, literally anything, including help cover up a murder, for you ? I can’t stop staring at you when we’re in the same space, I think of your smile all the time. When I drop you off, it’s all that I can do to not kiss you goodbye or ask if I can come over. Hell, I almost did tell you my secret last night. But—” His smile looks like it physically hurts. “—I thought it would’ve been more fun to surprise you,” he says, each glass shard of a word slicing me to the bone. “If anything, I wish I was someone who didn’t know what he wanted, because then I wouldn’t care this much, and just like I am just another profile subject to you, you would simply be yet another reporter to me. I wish I didn’t want you as much as I do.”
My heart throbs with a pain that hearts weren’t built to withstand. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“I’m going to go now,” he states, moving past me. Helpless, I turn and watch his back, shoulders low, gait heavy. Right as he takes one step across the threshold, though, he pauses and looks over his shoulder. “Can you do me one favor? I feel like you owe me at least that.”
I nod feverishly. “Anything.”
He swivels so he can look at me, and it aches to simultaneously have him so close and know that he’s beyond my reach now. “Don’t tell May about my retirement. I want to be the one to tell her.”
The knowledge that not even May knows amplifies my shock tenfold. “She doesn’t know?”
“No, I didn’t want her to be sad the entire time we were filming. She doesn’t even know we’ve already turned down Bond. But don’t try to get a quote from her or anything, okay? Promise?”
The fact that he thinks that getting quotes for my article is at the forefront of my mind right now cuts deeper than I think even he intended. I rally for one last attempt. “Tyler, you… you have to believe me. I wasn’t going to print anything that you told me in confidence. I would never do anything to hurt—”
“I don’t think I have to believe that,” he interrupts swiftly. “In fact, I don’t think I have a single reason to believe that.”
“Everything we said last night. Everything we’ve done for each other this past month. Isn’t… isn’t that enough reason?”
“What, that you pretended to like me so that I could be the next rung on your career ladder?” He shakes his head with a rueful snort. “Who would’ve thought that between the two of us, it’d turn out you were the better actor? By a fucking mile.”
I am painfully aware of how a person’s voice sounds when they’ve made up their mind about leaving you, that specific finality in their tone when they’ve decided that there isn’t anything left to salvage. I drop my gaze to the floor as his footsteps recede. Several seconds later, the front door shuts.
As though his leaving has also sucked out all of the gravity in this apartment, I crumple down onto the floor, the waistband of my jeans digging into my flesh as I pull my knees to my face. Despite the sunlight warming my bare arms, a biting coldness settles in my bones.
With my marriage, we had been two tectonic plates gradually drifting apart until the gap became so wide that it was no longer unavoidable, no longer temporarily fixable by any amount of therapy or time apart or a succession of optimistic yet unfounded promises that we’ll be better tomorrow . This, however, feels like a sinkhole—like one moment I was taking a photo of the view, and the next, the ground gave in and I’m still grappling for purchase even though I know there’s no point. The ground is gone. My lungs scorch as I breathe in more sand.