Chapter 52
The next morning, I opened my eyes and said, “It was Shannon.”
Next to me, Caleb made a piggish snuffle. Rolled over onto his side, dead asleep. It was well before dawn. The room was pitch-black.
“It was Shannon who told Clementine what a tradwife is, because she needed Clementine’s help.”
Snore.
“She’s been gathering evidence, Caleb. All this time, that’s what she’s been doing. That’s why she stayed.”
“Three more minutes,” Caleb mumbled.
“She gave our daughter a fucking phone.”
Nothing. Always nothing.
I lay in the darkness and fumed.
Overnight, the final puzzle piece clicked together. I was staring wildly into the black, my brain tick-tick-ticking away, when I remembered it: Shannon asking for a new phone. Saying hers broke.
Liar.
The phone didn’t fall into a puddle. Weren’t the latest phones water-resistant, anyways?
No: Shannon got a new one so she could give her old one to Clementine.
Want to know about oceans, Clemmie? Want to know why Mama spends so much time on her phone?
Want to know what other kids call their mothers? It’s Mom. Want to call her Mom?
I thought back on every moment I had stood there like an idiot, smiling, while Shannon filmed the horrors unfolding around me.
The workers in the fields: cla-chink. The pesticide barrels, hidden beneath a wool blanket behind the barn: cla-chink.
The children screaming and crying: cla-chink. The Made in China stickers: cla-chink.
I’d been watching Shannon closely for months now. But my daughter? I hadn’t so much as glanced at her, and she had access to every room. She had been watching me closely, logging my every move, for twelve years. It wasn’t Shannon, but Clementine, who knew exactly how to capture me.
A few minutes after six, I knocked on Clementine’s door.
“Come in,” she called.
The lights were on when I stepped inside. Clementine was sitting on her bed, already dressed for the day, the covers already made up beneath her. There was a book in her lap, but she had set it down when I entered, and I couldn’t see the title.
She was thirteen years old. A little Natalie, Amelia liked to say. But now, for the first time, I found a strangely appraising expression in my daughter’s gaze, and I saw my father-in-law in her face, too.
“What is it?” she said, instead of Good morning. “What do you need?”
She had always spoken like an adult.
“I have to talk to you about something important.” I took a step inside, turned to shut the door behind me, then paused. A wave of nausea passed through me. I left the door slightly open. “Shannon told me she gave you something before she left.”
Clementine looked perfectly, authentically, adolescently bored. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. She gave you a phone. And you know that phones are against the rules.”
“Why would Shannon give me a phone?”
“Because,” I said, then stopped. “Well, how am I supposed to know why she does things?”
“So she told you that she gave me a phone, but she didn’t say why?” Clementine gave me a look. “How weird.”
A gust of panicked desperation blew through me. She knew. She knew what I was doing. If I wanted to find the phone, I would have to cause a scene, and there was nothing I resisted more than causing a scene, and Clementine. Knew. That.
“Clementine,” I said lightly. “Come on. Hand it over.”
“Hand what over?”
“The phone.”
“You’re starting to scare me, Mom.”
“Enough. I’m your mother. Give me the phone.”
Clementine gave me a look of practiced confusion. “Do you know what I don’t get? You spend all day long staring at your phone. So why are you so freaked out at the idea of me having one?”
“You’re grounded,” I said, because I had no idea what else to say.
I expected her to whine, What for? But instead she leaned forward and said quickly, with a voice that snapped like a rubber band, “Does being grounded mean I don’t have to be in your stupid videos anymore? Or does it mean I have to be in them twice as much?”
At that moment, Caleb called my name from down the hallway.
“One minute,” I shouted.
“No. Right now!”
My bedroom was in full disarray when I walked back in.
All the lights were on, and the bedding and pillows were all over the floor, and Caleb was standing at the foot of the bed, face as white as our sheets.
As if he had woken to a tarantula in bed with him.
No spider, though—just his phone, which he shoved quickly into my hands and stepped back.
The tarantula was now shivering in my grip.
I barely had time to read the preview for the first email—I hope this email finds you well—I’m reaching out from Pop Weekly Magazine for comment on the assault allegations that have recently—before another email dinged onto the notification screen—looking for comment—and then another—press inquiry!
“Natalie,” Caleb said, “you have to believe me. I didn’t hurt Shannon. I didn’t do anything to her, I swear—”
“Shut up,” I snarled. There was no time to explain to Caleb what had happened. While Mama was cleaning up your mess, darling, she made a little oopsie herself! I threw the phone at Caleb’s chest. It hit him and he let out a squeak of fear.
“Call your father,” I hissed, then stalked into the bathroom and slammed the door.
By the end of the week, we had a full legal team on retainer.
Specifically, we had Doug’s legal team on retainer, which meant we were paying thousands of dollars an hour for five sleek-looking New Yorkers to hover in the kitchen in expensive-looking charcoal suits and alternate between staring at their phones and glancing nervously at me out of the corner of their eyes, like a pack of greyhounds waiting for the bell to go off.
When Doug arrived at the ranch, the lawyers looked relieved that their owner was here.
They pawed and whined at him excitedly while he took his coat off, all five of them speaking over one another to tell him how prepared they were, how much work they’d been doing while he was away.
I resisted the urge to chuck a handful of kibble at their faces.
That night, we sat around the dinner table, the lawyers and Doug and Caleb and me, and devised a plan of attack.
“She’s going to come out swinging,” the lead lawyer said. A bald man named Paul who tended to talk with his hands. “Sources are telling us it’s more likely to be televised than a magazine feature.”
“That means she presents well,” Doug said to Caleb and me. “They think she can win in the court of public opinion. Not all television interviews are created equal, though: she might just get a little two-minute scene in between war updates and the weather.”
Caleb gave his father a guilty, worried look. “Are you worried about the campaign?”
Paul was typing away on his laptop now. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”
“No?”
“No. Doug’s base will rally around him. Middle America is deeply sympathetic to successful parents who have disappointing children.
It fits perfectly with Doug’s message, really: kids are spoiled these days, no one knows how to work hard, the American dream is dead.
That sort of thing.” Paul frowned at something on his laptop, then typed a little bit more, oblivious to or unconcerned with the sudden reddening of Caleb’s face.
“In fact,” he went on, “it would really help us if it turned out that either of you has a drug problem.” He looked hopefully at Caleb, then at me.
“Do either of you? Have a drug problem?”
“No,” Caleb muttered.
“No,” I echoed through gritted teeth.
“Ah.” Paul shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”
“It should be fine,” Doug added, “as long as we handle it correctly.”
“Okay, so have we learned anything relevant about Shannon?” I asked the lawyers.
“I think it would be a stretch to paint her as deeply unreliable, but medium-level unreliable, absolutely.” Paul began to tick off on his fingers. “Didn’t graduate from college. Has a sister who’s a lesbian. One of her parents got a DUI over the summer.”
“That’s what you have?” I looked fiercely at the lawyers. “I’m paying you two thousand dollars an hour, and the best you can come up with is that her sister is a lesbian?”
Two days after that meeting, Shannon’s prime-time interview was announced during a nighttime news segment for Doug’s favorite channel.
“Up next, an assault allegation from America’s favorite family farm,” a redheaded anchorman said. He glanced expectantly at his coanchor, a blond woman with eye shadow up to her eyebrows.
“That’s right, Sean. If you’re one of the millions of people who follow Yesteryear Ranch online, then you’ve probably come to know and love Natalie Heller Mills and her ever-growing family for the beautiful life they live out in the mountains of Idaho.
If you don’t follow Yesteryear Ranch, you might know the last name anyways.
Yes, that’s right: this is the same Mills family as presidential candidate and current front-runner Doug Mills.
Natalie Heller Mills is married to Caleb Mills, the youngest son of the Mills family dynasty—which, between the big red barn and the family farm operation, makes their Instagram account about as American as it could possibly get. ”
I sat on the couch, frozen, while a series of video montages grabbed from my account played. Me milking Sassafras. Me standing in the chicken coop with Jessa and Junebug grinning by my feet. Me and Caleb kissing in the fields, backlit by the falling sun.
“Heller Mills has millions of dedicated followers with whom she shares pictures and videos of her daily life. At the same time, a bit ironically, she’s also extremely private, and has famously never given an interview.
Now a producer who lived at Yesteryear Ranch for just over two years has shocked the Yesteryear fan community with an accusation of assault—and the accusation has been leveled not at Natalie’s husband, Caleb, but against Natalie herself. ”