Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I don’t crash until I get to Delaney’s room.
But then… I do. In every sense of the word.
When I can sleep—curled up in a pile of blankets on the floor because what did she mean, take the bed —I dream about my childhood porch and a spotlight that’s always on, a lighthouse covered in salt and the birds that live on the very top floor. Then the hotel’s very real housekeeper actually walks in, and all of us scream. “I’m sorry, I thought the room was empty,” she apologizes for the hundredth time. There’s a metaphor there, somewhere.
When Delaney and Sarah aren’t in meetings, they sit with me in my burnt-out grief. I knew Delaney was going to be furious about Arthur’s decision, like I am—and she is, silently sitting by the window, a bag of potato chips in her lap, as she thumbs through a long contract from Cavalli. “Static sent one over, too,” she adds, almost emotionless. Almost.
I didn’t expect the same anger from Sarah. “He’s such a freaking idiot. Like, logically, no one should pick Leone over Cavalli. Cavalli is an infinitely better team.” She rubs my shoulders, too empathetic. “He’s only thinking with his ego. They always do. It isn’t your fault, and you couldn’t have changed his mind, I promise. Nobody blames you for how this went down, or needing space from him.”
Tears sting my eyes. Neither of them says they told me so.
They don’t have to.
Around the time they go to another meeting I’m not invited to, my phone starts buzzing with texts from Arthur. I glance at the first sentences.
Where are you?
Did you leave Monza?
Talk to me.
At least tell me you’re okay.
I turn my phone to Do Not Disturb when, an hour later, I get an email that Black & Graywood has been fired.
The subject line is definitive. Heavy. Lilah Graywood: Contract Termination. I lay on the floor while I read Max and I’s official severance letter. It’s generic, from a nondescript Ignition address. Nothing about Arthur or Holmes. Just a block of legal-department text that explains, given that Max and I were both fired, Ignition has through the end of the month to hire another team to wrap up the documentary unless I’d like to buy the film rights off them.
That’s right. Arthur was going to handle the legal side of the documentary. Without him to help me do this…
There’s really no movie.
It hurts to breathe.
A file folder sits at the bottom of the email. I click into the attachment against my better judgment. For your review, if you choose to purchase the footage back , the email said. The files must’ve been grabbed from my cloud, since everything is still organized exactly the way I left it, stored on Ignition’s server so they wouldn’t get suspicious. I click into the folder labeled June , find the British Grand Prix subfolder, and click.
Arthur on the podium lights up the screen, beaming and laughing and holding his trophy. Listening to his national anthem. Talking with journalists. My ridiculous heart pounds at the sight of him, failing to register that he’s only one inch tall and absolutely not real.
The reporter’s voice drifts from my phone. “But how did you feel out there today? What was it like to be back on the track?”
On-screen, Arthur is looking at the journalist. But when he’s not, he’s looking at me. Not the camera, me. “I’m looking forward to the rest of this season and next year.”
I remember this moment. I remember holding my breath. Next, the journalist is going to ask him how he can be this hopeful about his chances. Only—that isn’t exactly what happens.
From behind the camera, I laugh.
On-screen, Arthur’s smile dips, that funny expression I hadn’t been able to read at that time. His eyes find me as he leans forward, almost like he wants to come closer—closer to me and the laughter—then he settles back, smiles, and answers the question. “There’s still time.”
No. He hadn’t meant…
I flip through the other clips from June. July. August. Interviews, B-roll, shots of Arthur while he was on live television, when I thought he’d never notice me. Except he does. There are flashes, when he looks at the camera with utter concentration and a little half smile. The B-roll footage that should’ve been moving stock images of him looking cool and contemplative break the fourth wall—he’s always glancing over at the camera, my camera. Me. I’m everywhere. When Arthur isn’t searching me out, there’s my voice or a hand, me laughing in the background, me talking to Delaney or Cameron. And as the weeks fly by, the emotion in Arthur’s once- guarded face crystallizes, growing and shaping into gentle eyes and a barely hidden smile, the most unmistakable story that’s ever been written…
We had pulled it off. We had ruined Ignition’s documentary.
I’d filmed Arthur falling in love with me.
Hysterical laughter fizzes up my throat. They can’t use the footage now, any of this, because he had loved me, me , and I hadn’t even realized it. And now it’s too late, he’s picked what he loves more, and I’m alone, and this is so horrible and absurd and catch-22 that I can’t stop laughing. If I stop, I might sob, and if I start crying, it’s over. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I ask my phone screen. “You idiot .”
When I’m all out of laughter, I wipe my sticky bangs from my forehead, barely catching my breath. Maybe I should go into extreme debt to buy this footage. I could keep it as proof that I really had caught this man’s eye for one summer around the world.
One summer.
And August is almost over.
The thought makes me want to burrow under my blanket pile until the hotel concierge kicks me out.
But I can’t. So I pick my phone back up, open the contact list, and do the next best thing. “Lilah, honey, hi,” Mom says when she picks up, and yeah—she’s been waiting for me. I calculate the time difference between an Italian noon and a Kentucky morning, and wince.
“Sorry for calling so early. Are you with Dad?”
“He’s right here. Do you need him?”
“No. Just…” A sharp pain needles beneath my ribs, the first indication that the emotions I’ve been putting off are about to eat me alive.
“It’s okay,” Mom says gently. “What’s going on?”
There’s so much I haven’t told her that I don’t know where to begin. So I start from the very top of the list. “Max and I broke up.”
“Oh, Lilah.”
Her sadness punctures me, just like I knew it would. How my name soars out of her mouth. “It’s okay. He didn’t… want to be with me anymore.”
It’s such a stupid, childish way to summarize a breakup, complete with cheating, international travel, and competitive motorsports. Still, I can picture Mom’s loving frown in my mind’s eye when she tuts disapprovingly. “He’s always been a fool.”
“Mom.”
“No, pumpkin. I mean that. I was happy you both found what you did when you did in each other, but he never could keep up with you. Who could? You’re my little alien. You deserve someone who’ll never hold you back.”
Hearing her nickname for me makes the lump in my throat heavier. “Thanks, Mom. You aren’t mad?”
“Why would I be mad?”
I blink away tears, rubbing a finger beneath each eye and wishing it was someone else’s hand doing it for me. “I don’t even know anymore. It sounds stupid when I say it out loud. I just thought it would make you regret… you know, adopting me. I am an alien. Don’t you wish you’d gotten some basic daughter?”
I don’t mean it as an insult. Basic is exactly what I’ve always wanted to be. As someone preternaturally quirky, with niche and intense passions and a medically diagnosed brain, I’ve had people apologize to me for their Sex and the City rewatches and brewery trivia nights. As if I think they’re boring, when really all I want is to fit into life the way they do. I want so desperately to be happy—thoughtlessly and simply. I want to scream with other women about a mutual interest and talk about what I love without worrying that I’m accidentally hinting a moral superiority that doesn’t exist. From my vantage point, basic is beautiful. It means being a part of the crowd, a part of something .
Standing out, being nefariously and subtly different, is like having a splinter buried in your finger that you can’t see without a flashlight. It’s exhausting. I want to be like other girls. I want to be a human at all.
“Lilah, pumpkin, I will never regret making you our official daughter,” Mom says with enough tenderness to last me forever. “There were days when you were younger, I had less-than-kind thoughts about your birth family. But you? I’ve never not wanted you. I can’t imagine anyone feeling otherwise.”
“She emailed me. My birth mom.” Saying that makes me sick. “But I didn’t… I didn’t reply. I used to look for her, Mom. I waited. And now she’s right there, and I can’t. I don’t want to.”
“You don’t have to.”
“But I always do,” I reply, tipping over into tears. “I always face the truth. I look at what hurts me. I’m—I used to be—a documentarian, and that was the one thing I had going for me. I could take the pain.”
“Ah, there’s where you’re wrong, young grasshopper.” I hear her soft smile. “Life doesn’t need to be painful to make it meaningful. Do you remember what we told you on your adoption day?”
“Kind of,” I croak.
“Your grandma always said the name Graywood meant a dead tree. Something that had stopped growing. But I don’t see it that way,” Mom says. “Gray trees grow despite the pain, not because of it, out in the cold, covered in moss. And you, my dear, will always be a Graywood. You’re a good documentarian—and a damn good person—because you still keep your eyes open when other people would’ve shut them for good.”
Her words trigger the memories. Mom and Dad had painted my bedroom dark gray before I’d moved in, and decorated it with glow-in-the-dark stars and filled bookcases and astrology posters. They’d advocated to our small-town teachers to learn more about ADHD and got me extra time on tests and big projects. They’d helped me get into college, editing my application essays about why my grades had slumped for a few years. Even when I hated myself the most, they’d picked me. They’d let me be—no, chose me to be—a Graywood.
I tilt my head to stop my tears from falling. Is she right? What if I’m the one keeping me away from life on Earth, trapping myself without air? “But… but there’s this guy, the one from the stories online,” I whisper. “And he loves me. I know he loves me. But we’re different, and he doesn’t see it. He’s really, really rich, and his family hates me—”
“Well, fuck them, then.”
“No, it’s…”
“No nothing,” Mom says with that Appalachian resolve I’ve missed. Chapter closed. “Because you know what? So what if you’re different? To hell with these rich folks, and screw this Arthur boy if he misses his chance with you because he’s too busy talking to some race-car team. You don’t exist to fit into his life. This is your life, too, Lilah Graywood. This is your one shot at this exact life. Go live it.”
When we get off the phone, I pull my locket out from under my shirt and slip my fingernail between the hinged heart-shaped sides. It opens, yesterday’s pill falling into my palm. I pocket it and look at the cut-out disposable-camera picture of me tucked into the silver heart frame. In the picture I’m still six years old, chubby and smiling and laughing, round cheeks and awful bangs.
Photographed by my birth mom.
It all comes back when I look at this photo. Her patchouli perfume oil. The clink of her press-on nails, thick with satiny nail polish. Our house, and how it vacillated between sardine-stuffed with life, new boyfriends and loud cousins and spinning vinyl records, to silence. To nothing.
But this girl, smiling in the photo? She’s laughing. She’s okay.
She had been loved enough to be photographed.
I hadn’t only recorded Arthur falling for me. Every video I’d taken of him had been my love letter back, my battle against the ticking second hand to keep him frozen and safe with me. I’d loved him with glass between us, so clear that I don’t know if he’d seen it until it started to shatter.
My birth mom had loved me, too, once. Probably more than I’d ever know. But she’d loved me with her own glass walls. She hadn’t wanted the real me, couldn’t cope with who I became, only found me now that I looked good on the outside.
That’s the difference between her and me—I broke the glass. I only want the real Arthur. I learned from what happened with Max, stood my ground, and told the truth. Now any chance of making this film is over, and Arthur and I aren’t documentarian and muse anymore. We’re just… a man and a woman who met in a very unique way. I can’t control his narrative anymore, if I ever could.
Whatever happens next is his decision. And he has to live his life, too.
I close the locket, drop it beneath my shirt, and look around. There’s half an hour left in my friends’ meeting. My stuff is packed already. I could get a flight right now and go home.
Or… I could do the one thing my birth mom never did.
I can be the person who stands up for me.
That night, sandwiched between Delaney and Sarah, I send three emails.
The first goes to Max.
I don’t know if you remember when we first met. I thought you were the coolest person I’d ever seen in real life—how you walked into class and made those two guys by you crack up. But that was always the problem: I saw you as a whole person, and you only saw me as a girl. Lesser. Stupid. Teachable. Controllable.
I used to put you on a pedestal so I could keep myself down. But you went along with it every time. I never listened to “the right” music. I never knew “the best” TV shows. I was always a little wrong. I think that’s why you picked me, too. I was already insecure about having ADHD and being from my hometown, and you could enjoy feeling superior to someone who you weren’t threatened by. I’m sure when you read this, you’ll roll your eyes and find an excuse to write it off, too, because that’s what you do. You’re too cool to be real. Too chill to be earnest.
You said I never let anything go, but you haven’t grown in the six years I’ve known you.
I don’t want to work with you again. I don’t want to be an “ad agency with style.” After today, you aren’t going to hear from me. You’re going to wonder, though. One day, in twenty years, I’m going to cross your mind, and it’ll click that you lost the best friend you ever had because you viewed women as below you.
And when you reach out to me, I won’t reply.
The second email is for Arthur.
I’m coming to Bob’s wedding. If you would like to talk there, then we can.
After that, I write a reply to my birth mom.
It’s long, rambling. At some point, all sentence fragments. I describe how I’ve felt haunted by her refusal to acknowledge me, how I grew up silent because she’d taught me that was safest. How her behavior had conditioned me to seek out a partner like Max, who corralled me and controlled me. Put me in second place.
And then, when I’m happy with it, the truth gleaming in black text on a harsh white background, I delete each word, one after the other, until the page is blank and I’m free.