Chapter Twenty-Nine Jo
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Jo
I shouldn’t have snooped. I know that. One minute, I was looking at a PDF menu from a Chinese restaurant, and the next, I was clicking over to a Word document titled “[WIP] Haven article—v.1.” My eyes skimmed over the paragraph, once, twice, then a third time before Silas appeared in the doorway to the bathroom. Immediately, sweat began to gather in my armpits. Anger forced my heart to pound. I was shaking when I pulled away from the desk. My vision clouded from the betrayal.
Silas tries to call and text me several times after I leave on Sunday. I block his number as soon as I get home.
This pain will pass.
I repeat the mantra my therapist shared with me years ago. Over and over and over in my head, this phrase repeats like a prayer.
I know that this is true, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. The heartache weighs heavy on my chest in my Monday class—held at a different time than usual to account for the Fourth of July holiday—but I push through. I savor the burn of my muscles as I ride my bike. It serves as a distraction from everything else. Every word that I utter to my clients feels important; yet somehow, I still feel lost.
The entire week, I float through life like an unmoored boat.
In my regular classes, I punish myself. For trusting someone, for letting a man hold my heart in his hands, for putting myself in this position again . I ask my clients to ride harder and faster than they ever have before. With nothing to lose, I’m as honest with my audience as I’ll ever be.
The words of encouragement flow from me like they never have before.
I tell them I’m struggling. I tell them it’s not easy for me right now. I tell those who are hurting that they will get through this. I ask them to lean into the discomfort with me. They rally in their own way, with whoops and cheers and athleticism that would make my Olympian colleagues proud.
Afterward, clients pull me aside and gush over the new heights they reached. The Instagram DMs and new follower alerts flow in so heavily that Tracey from PR emails me to ask if everything is okay even as she congratulates me on increased engagement.
I ignore it. I ignore all of it.
All I can do is smile and nod even if the action doesn’t quite reach my eyes. The movement is my medicine, and it’s all that I have.
The first bouquet of flowers arrives midweek. Pink roses interspersed with delicate lily of the valley blossoms—the perfect bunch to say I’m sorry. I take one look at the young delivery man, in his wrinkled company polo with a manila envelope tucked under one arm, holding the vase in a way that suggests people are usually excited to see him, before politely declining. I close the door in his face without remorse.
This pain will pass.
Alone in my apartment, I suffer through the worst of it—the agony of loving him, the sting of knowing he planned to decimate me in public, the ache of knowing he lied, the pain of letting him go. I’m so embarrassed by my predicament that I don’t even want to tell my friends, but when Amber and Serena call me on FaceTime—a pre-scheduled catch-up session I nearly forgot about—I feel my resolve crumbling the moment I tap into the call.
“Hey.” My voice breaks the second Serena’s and Amber’s faces fill my phone screen.
Serena catches on immediately. With her phone propped up on her bathroom counter, she abandons the mascara wand in her hand and brings the phone closer to her face. “What’s going on? What happened?”
I start crying immediately.
I tell them everything, including me blocking Silas’s phone number and sending the flowers back. When I’m done, Serena looks torn between murderous rage and sympathy. Amber looks dumbfounded.
“Jo, babe,” Amber says softly from her seat on her couch. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“I’m gonna fucking kill him,” Serena declares.
I shrug as I blow my nose. “What’s done is done, you know? I can’t do anything about it now. I just have to…” Feel like shit for a while? Wait to get roasted in print? Watch all future opportunities to leave my job disappear before my eyes?
A fresh wave of tears comes just as Serena says, “I can’t believe I’m not in New York right now, because I’d be over at your place as fast as an Uber Black would get me there. But we can still get through this together.”
For lack of anything else to do, I nod. “I know you would. Honestly, this kind of feels like familiar territory at this point.”
“Except you’re not the same person you were seven years ago,” Amber interjects. “You came out of that whole ordeal to be the person you are now. You’re stronger than you were then. You have more experience. You know what helps you and what doesn’t.”
I manage a weak, watery smile.
“Amber’s right, which is why I’m going to make this suggestion out of love,” Serena says. “It might be a good time to check in with your old therapist, Jo. She really helped you back then.”
So I do. That Friday night, after Amber and Serena have talked me off the ledge, I email my old therapist, Sonya, and ask if she’ll take me back.
A new delivery man shows up again on Saturday morning, just after I’ve returned home from the studio, where I taught my usual weekend classes. This time, he’s holding a pink rectangular box; the logo on his T-shirt tells me he’s from some sort of bakery. When I try to tell him I didn’t order anything, he extends the delivery slip to me with a single grunted “gift.” As soon as I see the name scribbled on the order, I tell him I don’t know anyone named Silas and close the door in his face.
Over and over again, I replay every interaction Silas and I shared in my mind. I comb through memories of interviews, of conversations about the article, wondering how I got it so wrong. Remembering the night of Derek’s birthday, I think about the sly way Silas said, “You’ll have to read the article to find out,” in answer to Andrew’s question. Nausea rolls through me.
This pain will pass.
Nearly every waking second, I’m afraid again. Anxiety and humiliation are my constant, unrelenting companions, hounding me every time I manage to forget the man I fell in love with is planning to roast me on a national scale. My personal struggles are going to become national news fodder. Everyone will know I’m a liar, an imposter, a fake who has no business asking others to believe in themselves. My parents will read the article and see my failure. Silas will publicly shred me after having sex with me. He’s already framed the narrative in such a way that I will look like a joke. A modeling agency reject.
He basically called me a con woman.
Sonya emails me back on Saturday afternoon asking me to meet on Monday. The message comes not a moment too soon; I’m on the cusp of darkness, having just declined a brunch date request from Amber for no reason at all. I’m alone in my apartment when I send Sonya a “yes, please” email that reeks of desperation.
But I don’t care; I need help. I know that I do. I can’t keep pushing my body—and by extension, my clients’ bodies—to the point of no return only to numb myself from the heartache that plagues me every day.
This pain will pass.
I remind myself of this again and again. The pain in my chest reaches a breaking point. It becomes a slow tingle I can’t escape, even in sleep, which eludes me for the most part. For now, my mantra, my box breathing, my classes, and my journaling will have to do.
On Monday, I will start over.
When I return home from my first therapy appointment in roughly three years, Amber is waiting on my stoop. She’s dressed in her usual work attire—jeans, pointy-toed flats, a nice floral blouse in beautiful jewel tones—with her braids swept up in a high bun. I can tell she’s come straight from the office even though it’s well past seven P.M.
“Hi,” she calls out to me when I approach. Her tone is light, but not light enough to hide the underlying current of concern.
Just when I thought I’d run out of tears, I start crying again.
She rushes toward me, enveloping me in a two-armed hug so tight I can barely breathe through the tears streaming down my face. This is not the first time I’ve cried today; in fact, I spent at least half of my fifty-five minutes with Sonya intermittently sobbing. Still, it’s nice to be comforted after a week of social isolation. Outside of my classes, I’ve been avoiding everyone and everything, instead opting to lock myself in my apartment with my curtains drawn shut.
Amber’s familiar scent of jasmine breaks through the wall of snot plugging my nose. I inhale as best as I can, relishing her comfort. She soothes me with gentle strokes up and down my back.
When the tears finally slow enough for me to choke out a few words, I disentangle myself and try to wipe the evidence of another mental breakdown from my face. “I’m sorry,” I mutter. “Been a long day.”
“Let’s go inside and you can tell me about it.”
Amber plops on my couch while I crank on my box fan, which really does a poor job of cooling the apartment—but does an excellent job of making my home sound like the inside of a jet turbine. I grab each of us a LaCroix out of the fridge before I throw myself onto the couch next to her with a dramatic sigh.
“So,” she says, with an air of faux chirpiness, “how have you been?”
The question catches me mid-sip, which causes me to spew watermelon-scented seltzer water all over my lap in laughter. “Okay, that’s good,” she says with cautious optimism. “You can still laugh.”
Remembering that feels good. After a week of complete and utter misery, a flame of hope sparks in me. I don’t even know where to start, so I pick the most objective fact rattling around in my brain. “I saw my therapist today,” I say, and leave it at that.
Amber nods slowly. “Okay, that’s good. How did it go?”
“Well, I cried for most of it. She gave me a referral to a psychiatrist to go back on anti-anxiety meds.” I pause to tap my chewed-up nails on the can of seltzer. “She didn’t say it, but I could tell she thought I never should have gone off of them to begin with. Lesson learned, I guess.”
“Even if you were on meds when this shitstorm happened, it still would have hurt,” she says gently. “Sometimes we just have to sit with the ugly feelings for a while.”
“Yeah. My insides are hideous right now.”
“Have you talked to him?” she asks.
I can’t bring myself to look at her. “No. I blocked his number, remember?”
There’s a long pause in which I stare mindlessly at my own mangled cuticles. The manicure I received at the photo shoot is long gone. Next to me, Amber shifts on the couch, stretching out her legs and kicking off her shoes before taking a deep breath. I brace myself for what she has to say.
“Hear me out here, okay?” she prods. All I can do is nod and close my eyes. “I’ve been thinking about this, and it doesn’t make sense. Why is the magazine putting you on the cover if only to decimate you? Why waste all that time and money just to be a dick to a public figure?”
My eyes fly open, my gaze sharp as I reply, “I don’t know. To sell more magazines?”
“Maybe.” Amber worries her bottom lip between her teeth for a minute before adding, “Something still isn’t adding up here.”
“He lied to me, Amber. He knew who I was when he showed up at Serena’s goodbye party and pretended to recognize me from somewhere. He manipulated his friendship with Derek to meet me.” A shudder of disgust rolls through me. “He used my own weaknesses to get close to me just so that he could write some hot take. He called me a ‘modeling agency reject’ who is ‘wholly out of touch.’ Those words were on his computer. I saw them. I’m Silas Anders’s new cauliflower rice. What part of this doesn’t add up?”
I wish I could forget those words, but I know I never will. They’ll haunt me for the rest of my life, along with all the other ghosts that are about to surface at a national level. A new wave of tears threatens to fall, but I fight them back with a hard swallow.
Amber is pensive as she takes a sip from her drink. “Maybe you’re right. The audacity of that man.” She sets her can on the coffee table and adds, “What a fucking dick.”
I snort my agreement.
For a while, Amber lets me talk in circles. Around and around, I spiral the drain of despair and anger and hurt. I speak so freely that I almost let news about the Haven acquisition slip, but I manage to maneuver my mumblings into the dread I feel about telling Z. My boss needs to be warned about the incoming bad publicity. I figure I have at least a week or two to gather my thoughts before I tell her how badly I’ve fucked this up.
Eventually, the conversation shifts away from my predicament and into more neutral territory. We talk about Amber’s work, the wedding, the upcoming bachelorette party in Vegas. After living in my depression hidey-hole for a week, I’m grateful for the reprieve from my problems. I have events to look forward to. Friends to celebrate things with. It’s enough to calm my breathing and help me forget about Silas’s betrayal, if only for a few minutes.
This leads us down a path of nostalgia. It’s one of those situations that can only happen with old friends, where one story leads into another and another until we’ve snowballed so far that neither of us have any idea how we ended up talking about the time Serena lost her shoes at a warehouse party in Brooklyn and I puked in an alley behind a Dollar General. That night, we’d ended up on the Brooklyn Bridge just as the sun rose, a bottle of tequila in Amber’s purse as we sang “Dancing on My Own” at the top of our lungs. It was the summer we first met, before either of them started the Big Girl jobs, before I met Z, before all of this—and it had been perfect.
Amber relives the early days of her relationship with Derek; she laughs as she recalls how they bonded over a weirdly specific Star Trek plot point that I don’t come close to understanding. Her deep eyes get all soft and wistful when she talks about him. For all that I’m happy for her, jealousy zings through me.
Amber has always been open and curious and kind. She’s never let the obstacles in her life deter her from being this way. Not the death of her mother, not the heartbreaks before Derek, not even the struggles that come from being a Black woman in the New York tech world. Amber has space in her heart for everyone.
She gives me a listless, almost wonder-filled sigh as she finishes a story about how Derek braved a blizzard to bring her tampons, only to spend the night, when they first got together. “It’ll get better for you, Jo,” she says quietly. Her hand comes to rest on my knee. The diamond on her ring glitters in the lamplight. “Did you love him?”
There’s a knot in my throat when I nod.
When two hours have slipped by and we’ve polished off my emergency container of Ben & Jerry’s Americone Dream, Amber turns to me and says, “You’re going to be okay, you know. This too shall pass and all that.”
This pain is temporary.
“I know,” I reply as I nod.
Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I’m surprised at the ease with which the words leave my lips. More than anything, I’m surprised that I believe them. Because although it hurts and stings and keeps me up at night, this situation is not like last time. That was worse. I’m better prepared now.
After all, this isn’t my first rodeo.