Chapter 26 #3
"We're not blaming you," Annie murmurs. "That's the last thing. A woman alone, grieving… Of course you'd be vulnerable to it. It's not your fault."
"The other thing," Jenna says, and her voice drops lower, into the sorrowful place this was always heading.
"And I hate to even raise it. But you're playing Eve.
In front of the whole congregation. The children.
The whole school year starting. And if what we think is happening is happening, Audrey, you must see how that looks. You. Standing up there as Eve."
"In the temptation scene," Bethany whispers, almost holy.
The word temptation sits in the room with the dust.
"I went to Marcy about it," Jenna says.
Something cold slides through me.
"A week ago. I thought she'd want to know.
She told me it wasn't her business who comes and goes from your house, and she wasn't pulling you from a part you earned over a rumor.
" Jenna's mouth tightens, the first un-gentle thing she's done.
"Which. Well. I knew you'd see reason once it came from people who actually love you.
Marcy directs a play. We've been friends with you for twenty years. "
A week ago.
Marcy already knew. Or at least she'd heard enough to know people were talking. The realization lands strangely. Not because she didn't tell me.
Because she didn't treat me differently. Not once.
She gave me notes on a scene.
Fixed Caleb's timing.
Told me I was good.
Like none of this changed what she'd seen on that stage.
Was she watching me up there, thinking it too?
I don't know. And the not-knowing settles in quietly on top of everything else.
"So we think," Jenna says, soft and final, "the kind thing, the thing that protects you, would be to step back from the part. Until things are settled. Nobody needs to know why."
The silence stretches. Out in the hall a chair scrapes and someone laughs at something that has nothing to do with this room.
I look at the three of them. At Bethany, whose hand is still on mine. At Annie, who taught my son that the Lord is his shepherd. At Jenna, whose face is still doing the gentle, certain, grieving thing. Who completely believes she is saving me.
"Is that all?" I ask.
It comes out very quiet.
It confuses them. They glance at each other.
This isn't the scene they wrote on the walk over.
There was supposed to be crying, or arguing, or thank-you-for-caring, or a please-don't-tell-anyone.
They came prepared for a woman who folds, and they don't have a page for one who sits with her hands flat on the table and asks if they're done.
"Audrey," Jenna says, recovering, "we love you—"
"Is there anything else?"
Nobody mistakes it for curiosity.
Bethany draws her hand back. Annie looks at her lap. Jenna's mouth opens then closes.
"No," she says. "That's all."
I stand. The chair legs drag. I pick up my bag, my script, and my keys. Walk to the door, turn the latch, and then I'm out in the bright, loud hall where the flood crew is dragging long blue sheets away from the stage, the ocean rising and falling in kids' hands. Nobody looks at me. I keep walking.
I make it to the car.
I get in, setting the script on the passenger seat.
Put the key in the ignition, both hands on the wheel, and back out of the spot under the maple, slow, careful over the speed bump.
I turn right out of the church drive and make it exactly to the corner of Vine and Sumner, past the hedge, past the last window where anyone in that building could see me.
And then it comes.
Not a sob, not at first. Just my eyes filling all at once until the road smears.
I blink hard.
Once.
Twice.
It only makes it worse.
By the time I reach the stop sign, I can barely see through the tears, and I have to drag in a breath that hurts all the way down.
They know his name.
They know his name, but they have him completely, perfectly wrong.
They took the best man I know and fit him into the worst shape they had lying around because the world handed it to them first. Asher Calloway, the one the magazines built.
Not the one who draws cartoon dogs for my daughter.
Not the one who climbed down a trellis in a costume so my sister wouldn't see.
Not the one who held me until dawn in a chair because I couldn't use my own bed.
They'll never know him.
And the worst of it, the part that wrings the tears out faster as I take the turn onto the county road, is that I can't be the one to tell them. The truth is mine, and it's worthless. Anything I say only proves how far I've fallen for it.
He is kind, and they think he's a villain.
He is the safest place I have, and they think he's a danger.
And it doesn't matter that I know the difference. Nothing I say will move them an inch. I could lay every true thing on that table, and they'd see exactly what they walked in seeing: a lonely woman who lost her husband and let a famous man turn her head. Gullible. Naive. Fallen.
The truth doesn't make me anything but the fool who believes it.
I grip the wheel too tight all the way home.