Chapter 11 He Lost Us Both #2
Over the next week the full picture of Blake and Hailey's collapse becomes clear through the friend group.
Sierra tells me most of it during our regular dinners because Sierra has maintained contact with Alana, who despite cutting Hailey out of her life still hears things through mutual connections.
And Chase, who is slowly coming to terms with the fact that his oldest friend used his name as cover for an affair, has talked to Blake a few times and reported back.
The picture is ugly.
Hailey and Blake's relationship, whatever it was, did not survive the exposure.
It couldn't. The affair existed inside a sealed container of secrecy and lies.
When the container broke, everything inside it died on contact with air.
They had nothing to build on. No trust. No foundation.
No shared history that wasn't contaminated by deception.
They were two people who got together by betraying someone else and when the consequences arrived they turned on each other immediately.
According to Alana's sources, Hailey blames Blake for everything.
She says Blake pursued her aggressively.
She says he told her his relationship with me was essentially over and that we were only staying together because of the lease.
She says Blake made promises about leaving me that he never intended to keep. She says she was manipulated.
Blake, for his part, told Chase that Hailey came on to him at a party and that he was too weak to say no and that the whole thing was a lapse in judgment that got out of control.
He says Hailey was the one who booked the motel rooms. He says she was the one who pushed for more frequent meetups.
He says he tried to end it several times but she wouldn't let him.
Both of them are lying. Both of them are rewriting the history to minimize their own responsibility and maximize the other person's blame.
The messages I read on Blake's phone showed two people who were equally active participants.
Hailey booked rooms and Blake booked rooms. Hailey initiated conversations and Blake initiated conversations.
Hailey sent the explicit messages and Blake responded in kind.
Neither of them was a victim of the other.
They were partners in something ugly and now that it's been exposed they're both scrambling to be the one who comes out looking less terrible.
It's not working for either of them. Pinehurst has already made up its mind.
"They deserve each other," Sierra says one evening when we're having dinner at her apartment.
She's made pasta and she's pouring wine with the generous hand of someone who believes that difficult conversations require alcohol.
"And the fact that they can't even be honest about what happened to each other tells you everything about who they are as people. "
"The worst part is that they're both telling versions where they were the passive one," I say. "Blake says Hailey came on to him. Hailey says Blake pursued her. They both want to be the person who was swept up in something rather than the person who actively chose to do it."
"Because actively choosing to do it means admitting they're bad people."
"They're not bad people, Sierra. They just did a bad thing."
Sierra looks at me over her wine glass with an expression that suggests she disagrees but isn't going to argue the point.
"You're more generous than I would be," she says.
"I don't care anymore," I say. And I'm surprised to realize that I mostly mean it.
The anger isn't gone entirely. I don't think it will ever be completely gone.
But it's fading into something more manageable.
Disappointment maybe. Or just exhaustion.
The kind of tired you feel after carrying something heavy for a long time and finally putting it down.
I've stopped checking Blake's social media.
I've stopped wondering what Hailey is doing.
I've stopped replaying the messages in my head and cataloging every lie.
The evidence notebook is still at Raina's apartment in a drawer in the guest room and I haven't opened it in two weeks.
I don't need it anymore. It served its purpose.
What I need now is to rebuild. Not immediately. Not dramatically. Slowly. One day at a time at the salon, one evening at a time at Raina's, one small decision at a time that belongs only to me.
I'm twenty-four years old. I have a job I'm good at.
I have a sister who would burn the world down for me.
I have friends who showed up when it mattered.
I have my savings back in my own account where nobody can touch them.
I have a guest room with all my belongings in it and a bed that's mine and a closet that's mine and a life that is, for the first time in six years, entirely mine.
It's not the life I planned. It's not the house with the porch and the big kitchen and the wedding and the future I'd been building toward since I was eighteen.
That version of my life was a drawing on paper and Blake crumpled it up and threw it away and I watched it go.
I grieved for it. I grieved for the house that doesn't exist and the wedding that won't happen and the family I imagined having with a man who turned out to be someone else entirely.
I grieved in bathrooms and in parked cars and in Raina's guest room in the dark and now I'm on the other side of all that grief looking around at what's left.
What's left is solid ground. It's not pretty yet. It's not furnished or decorated or ready for guests. But it's mine and it's stable and nobody is undermining it while I sleep.
At the salon my work improves. I'm more focused than I've been in months.
The distraction is gone. The weight of carrying someone else's secret is gone.
I'm present with my clients in a way I haven't been since before I found those messages.
Cheryl notices. She tells me one afternoon that my cuts have been sharper lately and that Mrs. Henderson specifically requested me for her next appointment even though she's been going to Cheryl for five years.
"She said you have steady hands and good conversation," Cheryl says. "That's the highest compliment Mrs. Henderson has ever given anyone under the age of fifty."
I start thinking about getting my own apartment.
Raina hasn't said a word about me staying too long and she wouldn't because that's not who Raina is.
But I can feel the need to have my own space growing inside me.
Somewhere that belongs only to me. Not shared with a boyfriend or a sister or a roommate. Just mine.
I start looking at listings online in the evenings. One-bedrooms in Pinehurst. Studios that I could afford on my salon income. Nothing fancy. Just a place to start over.
What's left is me.
And I'm enough.
Raina finds me sitting on her guest room bed one night staring at the wall. She doesn't ask if I'm okay because she's done asking that question. She just sits down next to me.
"You know what you need?" she says.
"What?"
"A project. Something that has nothing to do with Blake or Hailey or any of this. Something that's just for you."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Take a class. Rearrange the guest room. Start saving for your own place. Something that points forward instead of backward."
She's right. She's always right. And somewhere in the back of my mind, in a place I'm not quite ready to look at directly, I think about Nathan Johnson asking me if I was okay at a bar on a Thursday night and offering his number through Ronnie and then walking away without pushing.
I don't think about Nathan for very long. I'm not ready for that yet. I'm barely out of a six-year relationship. The ring mark on my finger hasn't fully faded. I'm sleeping in my sister's guest room.
But I notice that I think about him at all.
In the quiet of Raina's guest room with boxes stacked against the wall and apartment listings open on my laptop and the faded ring mark on my finger catching the lamplight, I notice that my mind goes to Nathan Johnson without being directed there.
It goes to his voice asking if I was okay.
It goes to the way he walked away without pushing.
It goes to the specific, unusual kindness of a person who notices someone else's pain and stands near it without trying to fix it or claim it or make it about themselves.
I close my laptop and I turn off the light and I lie in the dark and I let the thought sit there without examining it too closely.
There's time. For the first time in a long time, there's time. I don't have to rush toward anything. I don't have to figure everything out tonight. I just have to keep going forward and trust that forward is the right direction.
And it is.