7. Chapter Seven #2
Absolutely no one in the audience missed the double entendre there.
Rachel let out a very un-TV-host-like giggle, while Colin’s smile turned a touch more genuine.
Good television, I thought. I wondered what the ratings on this interview were going to turn out to be.
Something told me the YouTube upload was going to go almost as viral as my wedding video…
Then Colin leaned forward, elbows on his knees, grinning.
“Yukiko—may I call you Yukiko?”
Kiki nodded.
“It’s interesting that you mention that you’re Jackson Avery’s sole legal wife,” he said, flashing a smile that seemed to have too many teeth. “Because as unusual as this whole arrangement is, we understand you’re not actually the first woman to be married to Jackson Avery, is that right?”
Next to me, Mona froze. Then swore.
And I knew that question hadn’t been on the list.
On the couch, Yukiko’s composure flickered for a half-second. “You mean Lauren,” she said.
Oh Jesus, I thought. What the hell was this?
“We do.” Colin nodded, giving the question such gravitas most of the viewers at home were probably fooled into thinking he was being gentle about the whole thing.
He didn’t look at all like someone trying to slip a knife between my princess’s ribs on national television.
“Lauren Avery. Jack’s first wife. She passed away—what is it, nearly twenty years ago now?
A car accident, when both of them were… well, about your age, actually. Tragic.”
Yukiko looked like she’d also realized this wasn’t a pre-approved question. She sensed the trap.
“Extremely,” she said. “My husband was broken for a very long time after Lauren’s death. He’s told me many times that it wasn’t until he came to Stillwell to finish his degree that he felt like he started to live again.”
Colin ignored that. “I have to ask,” he said, even though he very much did not. “What do you think the former Mrs. Avery would make of all this? Would she approve of adding more women to your husband’s… expanding family?”
He didn’t say harem. He didn’t say cult. But he sure made the word family sound like it.
“Son of a bitch,” Mona growled beside me. “You might need to give me the Samantha treatment, Jack. Next commercial break, I might try to kill Colin Holloway…”
I didn’t say anything. My entire attention was fixed on Yukiko.
She’d gone very still. The lights of Morning Harbor’s set seemed to burn down on her too brightly, not so much coaxing but forcing sweat to her forehead.
Her hand gripped her the wrist with my Monaco very tightly under the cuff of her blazer, like she was trying to make herself remember that I was practically beside her.
I could see her wanting to look off-stage and reassure herself I was there, then forcing the urge down because of how it would look on TV.
For one awful second, the ground shifted beneath me. This is what she warned me about, I thought, a surge of anxiety rising like an ocean wave through my brain. This is the freeze, this is exactly the thing she was afraid of—
Then Yukiko smiled.
Softly. Sadly. Not like a woman who’d been caught with a gotcha question.
But one who was disappointed in the hosts for being so callous.
I saw Rachel and Colin see it. Watched the surprise—and in Rachel’s case, guilt—flicker across their faces. And seeing it, I knew, even before Yukiko opened her mouth, that they’d just bitten off way more than they could chew.
“I think about Lauren a lot, actually,” Yukiko said, her voice radiating emotion.
“A lot more than you would probably expect from someone in my position. I never got the chance to meet her—she was gone long before I ever knew Jack, which he and I will both never stop wishing wasn’t true.
But it’s funny that you mention her as the first wife in this arrangement. Because in a way, she really is.”
Rachel looked stricken. “Mrs. Avery—”
“I live with Lauren Avery,” Yukiko said, her eyes going watery.
“I live in a marriage she build the foundations of, hand-in-hand with a man she loved first.” She paused, organizing the words she was about to say the way she organized everything else.
“Jack and Lauren lived in Montana, did you know that? It took me a long time to learn that. Jack doesn’t talk about that part of his life a lot.
But I’ve been asking him, lately—maybe it’s the pregnancy making me sentimental—all about the mountains, the town he grew up in, the places that were his and Lauren’s favorites.
Some day—once all of this calms down, maybe—I want to go there.
I want to stand where they stood. I think that matters.
I think it’s important not to be afraid of the people who came before you. ”
You could have heard a pin drop on that stage.
“A lot of people misunderstand me,” Yukiko said, looking right at Colin.
“They think what Jack and I have built is something I ought to be ashamed of. Like I’m a victim and he’s a villain.
I understand the impulse: it’s a simple explanation.
Seductive.” She smiled. “But I keep thinking—they didn’t know him twenty years ago.
I didn’t, either, but I know the man I met at Stillwell University.
Jack was a man so buried in grief he forgot to have a life.
Who only stopped wearing his wedding ring because it eventually started making his co-workers uncomfortable. ”
Mona glanced over at me, her eyes widening. She hadn’t known that.
“And I look at him now, and he’s happy, and surrounded by people who love him.
He’s about to be a father.” Her hand slid from my watch to her belly, resting on it gently as she reminded the audience about the twins.
“So no, I don’t think Lauren Avery would disapprove of this.
I know that wherever she is, she’s smiling.
She’s glad her husband found his way back to the surface.
He’s never going to stop missing her, and that’s okay.
And more than anything—I know how crazy this is going to sound—I wish I could meet her.
” She smiled, her lips trembling with a sob as she broke the tiniest little bit.
One small tear worked its way down her cheek.
“To steal a phrase from my husband, I think we all would’ve gotten along like a house on fire. ”
And she folded her hands in her lap.
Dead silence filled the studio. And then, the audience—the people Caroline had assured Yukiko she wouldn’t be able to see—broke into applause.
Rachel Bayer put a hand against her lip, then moved it over her heart. Even Colin Holloway, the shark, had the grace to pretend to be moved. Only up close could you tell that he looked like a man who’d taken a swing at the queen and missed.
Mona said nothing for a long moment. Then she laced her fingers through mine and squeezed.
“Holy fucking shit,” she whispered, sounding awe-struck. “Jack. Jack.”
“I know,” I said, smiling.
“I don’t think you do,” Mona said. “That was their unapproved question. Their hand grenade. And she… she just turned it into a fucking love letter.” I could see the wheels turning behind her eyes.
“I am going to push that clip across social media harder than I’ve ever pushed a story before.
Do you have any idea what this clip is going to do for us? ”
I could imagine. Mostly, though, I wasn’t thinking about the numbers or what went viral.
I stood to the side of the stage with my heart in my throat, watching my pregnant wife hiding my watch in her sleeve and defending a dead woman to the entire eastern seaboard and looking commanding and vulnerable at the same time.
And she was afraid she was going to freeze up!
“I’m going to marry her again,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know how you double-marry someone, but if anyone’s ever deserved for me to find a way, it’s her.”
Up on stage, Rachel had pulled a handkerchief from her suit jacket—nice touch, I figured—and was dabbing the corner of her eye. “Well,” she said. “I think we all could use a moment after that—”
I felt Mona’s phone buzz in her pocket.
She’d silenced it, but I was standing close enough for the vibration to rattle against my side. Her hand slipped from mine, reaching for it with a quickness that verged on panic. In the excitement of the moment, but of us had forgotten.
She pulled it out and looked and the screen. Even in the darkness, I could see her go pale.
“Mona?”
She didn’t say anything. She just tilted the phone toward me, letting me read the text. One sentence, three short words, from a number that only showed up in Mona’s phone as ‘restricted’:
House is empty.