Chapter 31
“Where’d you go?” said Gen over breakfast. It was a serious spread, nothing elaborately prepared but all of it hearty—eggs, seeded bread and lox, bananas and almond butter, avocados—and ready to provide for far more than two people.
“You’re super quiet. What’s wrong? Last night, did I say something I shouldn’t’ve? ”
“No, no. It’s this.” Emily showed Gen her phone. Gen read Jack’s text and frowned, then glanced up at Emily, brows raised queryingly, so Emily said, “Go ahead.”
Gen scrolled through the texts, the furrows of her expression deepening. She set the phone down hard. “Will you tell me why you haven’t filed?”
Emily could have explained how she was saving for a legal battle, and her wish to not destabilize her children’s lives, but she said the largest reason, which was also the sum of her other reasons: “I’m afraid of what he’ll do.”
“I get that,” Gen said, “but I’m right here.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
The lawyer that Jocelyn had recommended, Sophie Martinez-Day, wore a white silk blouse beneath her blazer and no jewelry.
She was a stark contrast to Gen, seated next to Emily in the waiting room in jeans and immaculate Nikes.
Emily closed her writing notebook and rose to shake the lawyer’s hand.
As she followed the lawyer into her office, Emily glanced back at Gen, who smiled encouragement and settled in her chair with a magazine, giving the impression of a guard dog relaxed across a threshold.
Sophie told Emily, “I’ve reviewed your prenup and I don’t think it protects Jack as much as he would like. You signed it soon before your wedding, which suggests that you were under duress to agree.”
Emily hadn’t felt under duress. She had seen signing the prenup as a point of pride. She had wanted to prove that she wasn’t with Jack for his money.
“You also used a lawyer that your husband chose and paid for,” Sophie said. “There are grounds for a challenge.”
“I’m not sure I want to challenge it. I just want my kids.”
“And they are accustomed to a certain way of life. That takes money. The law is the law for a reason, and New York State doesn’t like to have a rich house–poor house situation, where the kids go on ski trips to the Alps with Dad and live in a tiny apartment with Mom.
That’s not healthy for children or their relationship with their parents.
You’ve been out of the workforce for over a decade, and while society might undervalue a stay-at-home mom, I do not.
It’s work and you deserve compensation. Let me fight for what you need. ”
Emily took the offered pen. Signing the document felt like when she went for the last time, at eighteen, to the field near her childhood home and found the log by the creek, and saw how the log looked smaller than it had when she was little and called it hers.
Her secret, her landmark. Stripped of its bark by the years, the log was salt-white in the August sun, the creek more mud than water.
Her boxes were packed for college. She thought, Everything will change.
It wasn’t just leave-taking that overcame her in the lawyer’s office, or fear, or elation.
She was surprised, too. There was her name on the page.
The date. She would never be the same. People talk about coming of age as if it only happens when you’re young, as if entering adulthood means inhabiting a final era with no more moments when you say goodbye to an old life, but that couldn’t be true, because she just had.
Sophie neatened the papers into a perfect stack. As Emily watched her do it, she was filled with a huge sense of relief. Sophie said, “I have to ask: Are you seeing someone?”
Still buoyant, Emily told her about Gen.
“That was Gen Hall reading People in the waiting room?” Sophie said.
“I thought she looked familiar.” She was silent, then said, “You might want to be careful about how public you are with this relationship. Your description of Jack makes him sound volatile, and knowing about Gen could make him more so. I’d rather not negotiate with a volatile person.
And, I hate to say this, but there are homophobic judges and we might get one of them. ”
“But this is 2012.” New York had just legalized gay marriage.
“Officially, yes, discrimination is illegal. Imagine, though, that your husband sues for full custody—which he might do if only to avoid paying child support—and argues that your ‘lifestyle’ isn’t in the children’s best interests.
His legal team doesn’t have to say the word gay.
They can talk instead about Ms. Hall’s fame and argue that the children will be exposed to public scrutiny.
They can use fame when they mean gay to give the judge an acceptable reason to rule in Jack’s favor.
I’m not saying this will happen. It’s a risk.
Ultimately, it’s your call whether to keep your personal life private, and my job to protect you whatever you choose. ”
Outside, standing in a cold wedge of sun that fell like a brass sword between the buildings, Emily told Gen what the lawyer had said. A rare uncertainty stole over Gen, dragging at the features of her face. Then her mouth firmed into a line. “I think we should listen to your lawyer.”
That wasn’t what Emily had thought she’d say.
“I was in Star Tracks,” Gen said. “You know, that celeb thing with photos in People ? I saw it while you were talking with the lawyer: a shot of me and Nita vintage shopping. Nita’s holding a shiny top.
The caption was like, ‘Hall and fellow athlete take a break from training to go for the gold lamé.’ Harmless.
But someone will get a shot of you and me.
It’s a matter of time. If we’re seen, it should be as friends.
I don’t want to give Jack evidence to use against you. ”
“We’re supposed to hide everything—again?”
“In public.”
“Hiding is hard for you. You hate it.”
“What’s the alternative? That I cost your kids their mom?”
“I can’t lose them.” The thought was annihilating.
“You won’t.” Gen’s tone was clipped and hard. “Look, it’s not you I’m angry at. It’s not your fault. I’m being an asshole, maybe, talking like it’s my decision. I know it’s not. But I need you to understand that I can be a secret this time, for this reason, okay?”
Emily slowly nodded. Gen was right: it was safer.
But you —She couldn’t finish the thought.
She remembered Gen saying, when they texted about the press and how it hungered for morsels of Gen’s life, I won’t lie about who I am .
She saw Gen’s face as she sat on the farmhouse porch, eighteen and gutted, looking at Emily in disbelief, her eyes saying what her mouth didn’t: How could you pretend to your dad that I’m nothing? Am I nothing? Is that what I am to you?
Emily couldn’t lose her children. But what if she lost Gen?
She saw how that might happen—the embittering secrecy, the one-too-many lies.
Emily felt something inside her pried open like an oyster, exposing one living word: you .
She crushed Gen’s hand. Gen gazed steadily back.
Emily said, “I don’t know if I can hide how I feel. ”
“You can’t?”
“Isn’t it all over my face?”
No longer agitated or lost-looking, Gen smiled. “You’ve got a mystery face. Like, ‘Oh, nothing to see here.’ I know better.”
“You know me.”
“I do.”
Passersby wove around them, busy, inattentive, jackets fluttering, and it seemed as if they were all pieces of ticker tape, and she and Gen were the only real people.
“We can be careful,” Gen said. “I want to be careful with you. With your life. I don’t want to be something you regret.”
Because it was a weekday and Emily had hired a babysitter, she left Gen’s apartment in time to make dinner. It was dark and the walk to the L was cold. Stores were closed. The street was empty. Emily hunched her shoulders.
She was a few blocks from the L when she heard footsteps.
The tread behind her was heavy and fast. Emily turned the corner.
The footsteps followed. Her throat tightened as she remembered the lawyer’s warning.
She quickened her pace, picturing the subway platform full of people.
She was close. Nearly there. But the footsteps behind her quickened, too.
Was it Jack? Had he followed her to Gen’s…
or hired someone to follow her? Maybe it was a photographer chasing a story and she had been seen leaving Gen’s building.
If she turned around, she’d be blinded by a camera’s flash.
She imagined the pop of sudden light: harsh enough to strip paint.
What would the image show, what would the caption say?
She ducked into a bar. Loud, humid. Safe.
As she caught her breath, she saw, through the window, a person rush past—the one who had been following her.
It was a young woman in her twenties wearing combat boots.
She didn’t even glance at the bar. She was, Emily realized with foolish relief, probably just hurrying to catch the next train.
Still, the anxiety didn’t fully leave. It leached into Emily’s bones and lingered even when she called a cab, buckled herself into the nicotine-scented back seat, and Brooklyn fell behind her as she went over the Williamsburg Bridge.