34. Graham
GRAHAM
K eeley is pacing the room, talking to MacNulty.
She’s come alive during this conversation, all laughter and wildly gesturing hands he can’t see.
When she’s like this, she could draw blood from a stone.
She could persuade you to give her a TV show.
She could persuade you to give her an entire network if you had one at your disposal.
She seems to be persuading MacNulty, anyway.
The interview time is set, and when she tells him she’s got nothing to wear, he says he’ll have a stylist send some things for her.
It’s exactly what Keeley wants—fame, stylists, adulation—and I hate everything about it.
I guess that makes me an asshole, but I never believed for a second I wasn’t one, so the revelation doesn’t make much of a dent.
“Our daughter will be famous,” she says to me, eyes gleaming. It’s one fucking interview, and she’s already spun this out into a future as a talk-show host. “Can you imagine? She could, like, be on the Kids’ Choice Awards and go glamping with all the little Kardashians in a private jet.”
“Yes,” I say dryly. “That sounds like just the recipe for developing into an intelligent, emotionally mature adult.”
She frowns and stomps away, already casting me in the role her father played…the bad guy, ruining all their fun.
And I will be.
Keeley dreams so vividly she can persuade everyone around her it’s real.
She makes you believe in a world entirely different from what it is, and then you wake up in a hotel room thinking your whole life has changed and discover you’ve been ditched with nothing but a marriage certificate and the bill for two wedding rings to show for it.
I imagine it’s one more thing she inherited from her mom, that ability to spin things so vividly.
When this interview occurs, they’re going to love her.
The whole world will love her. How could they not?
Keeley lights up every room she enters until she’s the only thing you can see.
And when all that happens, she’ll be endangered.
There will be fans and photographers and strangers stopping her in the street.
She and our daughter will no longer be safe, and I’ll be helpless to stop it.
It feels like history is repeating.