Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
After my shouting match with Wilder, the sudden silence made my ears ring as I stared at the woman who had appeared in the kitchen with us. She was tall and slim, and her wavy hair was pulled back into a short ponytail, dyed dark brown.
But it was Ryan.
“How are you, Elyse?” She spoke again, as if the clear repetition of my name would calm me down. It did—marginally.
“I’ve been better,” I said.
“I’m sure this was sort of a shock,” she said. She kept her eyes on me and her movements slow as she set her purse and the bag of groceries she’d evidently just picked up on the counter. I must have missed her at the supermarket by minutes.
“She was recording my conversation, Ryan,” Wilder said, a note of desperation in his voice. “She’s recording everything.”
Ryan turned her green eyes on me. The others had mentioned them in their interviews, and the media had certainly fixated on them in her time, but not until that moment did I understand their full effect.
She looked at me with a strange mixture of pity and appraisal, but I somehow felt that she wasn’t surprised.
Ryan met my gaze unwaveringly. After a moment, I felt compelled to either look away or give in, and I wondered how many others had been swayed by the same tactic.
She was waiting for me to speak, but I didn’t. Finally, Ryan asked, “Is that true?”
I glanced at Wilder and then held my phone up and said, “Yes.”
“Why?” Ryan asked.
There was no sound in the house. Outside, wind moved through the forest.
“I’m writing a book,” I said to Ryan at last. “About your life.”
Wilder exploded. “You can never publish that!”
Ryan ignored him. “Why are you doing that?”
I faltered a little at this. No one had pressed me on my reasons yet. It was a given that the book, if I pulled it off, would be a bestseller. Everyone was willing to pay for more information about the life and disappearance of Ryan Holding. But these were not my reasons.
“Because I wanted to understand the woman who brainwashed my little brother,” I said.
“How condescending can you possibly—” Wilder started, but Ryan cut him off.
“So you knew that he’d come with me? The whole time?” she asked.
I kept my phone clutched tightly in my hand. “I strongly suspected.”
Ryan nodded. She looked at me for another moment, then turned to Wilder. “I think Elyse and I need to talk woman-to-woman.” And when he looked like he was about to protest, she raised her eyebrows and said, “You wanted to put away the lawn furniture before the rain tonight, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said without looking at me.
“Thanks, Wilder.” She watched him go. Then she said to me, “Come on to the living room. We’ll be more comfortable. Lilla, you can come, too, if you’re not going to sleep.”
Ryan swept away while I looked around me and saw my niece, who—unnoticed by myself or Wilder—had crept back into the room and hidden under the kitchen table.
I followed Ryan and Lilla back to the living room. The cottage was not how I’d imagined Ryan living; I’d pictured her in a secret Italian villa somewhere with gated security and most of the luxury she’d become accustomed to retained.
But this house was on par with the other small homes on the island—cedar paneled, low lit, and snug.
The furniture reminded me of the thrift-store pieces we had in McKees Rocks, and houseplants and blankets littered the space.
Ryan curled up on the couch opposite the coffee table as I sank into an armchair. Lilla crawled into her lap.
They did look so alike, the now-dark-haired Ryan and the little girl with wispy strawberry curls. But my brother was there, too, in Lilla’s nose and brown eyes and dark brows.
“How much did Wilder tell you?” Ryan asked. She had not requested that I stop recording, so I’d slid my phone in the breast pocket of my jacket in the hopes that it wouldn’t come up just yet.
“The broad strokes,” I said stiffly. “I knew most of it until you two broke up. Or said you had.”
“We did break up.” Ryan nodded. “I broke up with him. And it was the hardest thing I’d ever done.”
“Then why do it?” I pressed. “Why not just date publicly? Unless you were ashamed of him.”
She gave a small smile. “You sound just like him. But it wasn’t that simple.
The media pressure was hard enough on my other relationships—how can you really get to know someone when you’ve got a whole camera crew following you around everywhere you go, criticizing your outfits and your public affection and the way you eat pasta in print the next day?
I obviously struggled with it. The men I dated struggled with it.
And all of us were famous already. Wilder .
. . Wilder hadn’t had to deal with all that yet.
And I didn’t want to put him through it. ”
“That was his choice to make,” I said. “Didn’t you trust him to decide what was best for his own life?”
Ryan looked at me again with that watchful, appraising eye.
I stared back and then glared. “This is different. I thought he was dead, Ryan.”
“You knew he wasn’t. You knew he was with me.”
I shifted on the couch. “I couldn’t be sure.”
“Anyway.” Ryan ran her hand along Lilla’s head.
The little girl was struggling to keep her eyes open.
“It was a mistake, regardless. I didn’t want to be away from him.
He tried to keep his distance. But it was a messy, messy time, meeting up in secret and then regretting it, regretting everything, not talking to each other but unable to fully call it quits.
He’d spoken to Skip and Jas about resigning, and I was beside myself about it. ”
“And then you just happened to get pregnant.”
Ryan was nonplussed by the accusation in my voice.
“Spin it however you like,” she said. “It was an accident. But once it happened, I realized I didn’t want it to happen again with anyone but Wilder.
And I thought maybe it wouldn’t happen, not ever again.
I can’t explain it rationally, but it really, truly did feel . . . like my only chance.”
A silence fell as the wind continued outside, punctuated softly by what must have been the sound of Wilder now digging in the garden. I allowed that we had both tried to protect my brother.
“And you wanted to protect Lilla like you protected Wilder,” I said aloud.
Ryan nodded. “The thought of seeing her face in a tabloid, in a TikTok, splashed across Teen Star’s news site .
. . it just filled me with dread. Still does.
Everyone needed something from me, wanted something, all the time.
I didn’t even want them to think about my baby.
And I wanted to be hers, and hers alone. ”
“How did you do it?”
“What? Disappear after the VMAs?” she said.
“We had all our affairs in order beforehand. Shipped the stuff we needed here. Then I went downstairs and changed out of my blazer and used the tunnel concourse to get to 30 Rock. I thought I’d have to bribe someone down there, but it was just . . . empty. The stars aligned for us.
“Wilder was waiting for me in a rental car at the other end. We stopped by the Midtown police station so the cops could see that we were okay, then we flew commercial, intentionally made a lot of connecting flights, and just kept our heads down until we were out. We’ve started the naturalization process and really pushed ourselves to build our language proficiency here .
. . Lilla’s already got it down, thanks to our neighbors.
But it’ll still be a couple years before we’re full citizens. ”
“And you got married.”
“Yes. To make things easier, legally.” She looked sheepish.
I wondered if she knew how it sounded—how I was sitting with this news at that moment, slowly processing just how much I’d missed out on.
I would never be in my brother’s wedding party.
I wasn’t there for him when he became a dad.
I didn’t get to shower Lilla with gifts when she was a newborn.
I slowly shook my head and forced myself back into journalism mode before the feeling became too overwhelming. “But why the spectacle? Why not wait until you could leave quietly?”
At this, Ryan gave a small smile. “I’ve always liked spectacle,” she said.
“And I wanted—with all my heart—to accept that VMA. I would have left earlier if it wasn’t for that, but .
. . god, I wanted to be there. Any later and people would have started to notice.
I’m shocked Tatiana never spilled the real reason for that blazer.
There’s no way she missed my change in measurements. ”
“I’m sympathetic to your fear about unwanted attention,” I said. “But what kind of life is this, living like you’re in witness protection? What happens when Lilla grows up? When she wants to go to school and make friends and live a normal teenage life?”
Lilla stirred but did not wake at the sound of her name. Ryan held her closer.
“We can give her most of it. Everything, really. We’re set for life. And we’ll move around the world as needed, showing her the best of everywhere, and eventually . . . letting her choose her own path. She’ll want for nothing.”
“And what about you?”
Ryan gave a little laugh. “Me? What about me?”
“You’re just . . . done?” I tried to fix her with the same calculating stare she’d given me. “You’re never going back to performing?”
Ryan met my eyes without hesitation but toyed with the edge of the blanket that Lilla had pulled around the two of them. “No.”
“I’m surprised,” I said.
She shrugged. “There was a time I thought I’d never give up my career for motherhood.
But things changed. Lilla is my priority now.
And I couldn’t have been a normal parent for her at my level of fame.
I mean . . . not the parent I wanted to be, at least. Not the mom I wanted Lilla to have, not the best version of myself. ”
“So, what?” I pressed. “Did you need to be normal? Do you have to be absolutely perfect before you can be a decent parent?”
The room was quiet as Ryan ran her hand through her daughter’s hair.
“It doesn’t matter now. I don’t miss it.”
I nodded and leaned back in my armchair. The night had darkened to indigo outside, and I could now see my face reflected in the window.
“I saw your old stuff,” I said quietly. “Skip took me to the Madcap storage locker to help me find the crystal ball.”
A flicker of eagerness passed briefly across her face. Ryan made a strange movement, gripping the edge of the blanket and then letting go, so quickly I thought for a moment I’d imagined it. “Did he?” she said. Her voice was controlled.
“Mhmm. It’s all there, dwindled down to one room in south LA.”
“Was the dress there? The spider dress?”
I nodded. “All zipped up in a garment bag.”
Ryan looked somewhere past my shoulder, eyes unfocused. “That dress was such a statement. I’d never felt angrier or more badass than I did when I wore that to the Met Gala.”
I found myself watching her closely. “The spider dress, all your merch, the old CDs with the secret messages . . .”
Her gaze flickered back to me, wistful. “I was so proud of those CDs. It’s silly, but . . . it was fun. It was one of the best ideas I ever had.”
“Have you felt any withdrawal from it?” I asked. “No one can be at the pinnacle of fame like you were and come down so easily.”
Ryan’s mouth twisted again into a smile, but a wry one. “I can’t say it was exactly easy, going from one hundred to zero. Recovering from the burnout was something I had to do or I would’ve collapsed anyway. But . . .”
She looked down at Lilla now, sleeping soundly, and gently stroked her hair.
“I have so many songs about her,” Ryan went on.
“Pages and pages and pages. I named my fourth album Waterfall because I felt like my inspiration had come back, but it was nothing compared to this. She opened the floodgates. I have endless new material, living here on the island. And . . . it’s a strange feeling that it has nowhere to go. ”
I watched Ryan watch Lilla and softened at the sight of the two of them together.
I still resented Ryan for her choices. But I wondered what I would have done in her situation, a circumstance so far outside the way I lived my own life.
And at once, the true regret I had been feeling all evening bubbled to the surface.
“I wish I had gotten to meet her sooner,” I said around the knot in my throat. “I wish you hadn’t shut everyone out.”
Ryan nodded as though she had been waiting for me to say it. “I’m sorry, Elyse,” she said. “I knew we would hurt a lot of people when we left. I know I caused you a lot of pain.”
I halfway laughed, halfway snorted, and fought to keep the tears from coming. “It’s a pretty shitty apology for all these years,” I said. “No one could be sure if you and Wilder were okay, or hurt, or happy.”
“I know.” And she looked me full in the face. “If I consent to your publishing this book . . . will that help to make up for it? Will that be a start?”
I felt my stomach drop a little. I hadn’t thought it would be that easy. And something about her giving me the go-ahead made me hesitate and wonder if publishing was the right thing to do, after all.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “What would that mean for you three? Even if I don’t name Hailuoto, even if I’m vague about country and region, people will come looking.”
She shrugged and looked back down at her blanket. “We can move again. We want to travel anyway. We’ll be long gone from here by the time the book ever goes to print.”
“But—”
“And we’ll let you know where we’re going this time,” she added with a small smile.
“I don’t know, Ryan,” I said, suddenly thrown into uncertainty.
“It’s the least I can do, Elyse.” She fixed me in her clear, steadying gaze. “And I insist.”