Chapter Seven Brielle
Ihave officially lost my mind.
That's the only reasonable conclusion I can draw from the current situation, which is as follows: I am lying in a narrow bed in a fire station in Brooklyn, wearing a stranger's sweatpants, staring up at a water-stained ceiling while the remains of my wedding dress sit in a heap on the floor beside me like a deflated ghost.
My wedding dress.
Which I was supposed to be wearing right now. At my reception. At the Plaza, where my mother had reserved a ballroom eight months in advance and organized a seating chart of two hundred and forty guests with the focused intensity of a military general planning an invasion.
Instead I am here.
I press both palms flat against the mattress and take a slow breath.
The room is small and plain in a way that I find oddly comforting.
There is nothing in it that requires anything of me.
No expectation embedded in the furniture, no agenda hiding behind the walls.
Just a bed, a narrow window with afternoon light coming through it at a low angle, and a chair in the corner that nobody has sat in recently enough to have left any impression.
I reach for my phone out of habit. The screen lights up and the first thing I see is my screensaver.
Me and Callie, two summers ago, somewhere on the Long Island Sound with our hair blown sideways and our mouths open mid-laugh.
I look like a different person. I look like someone who didn't know yet what was coming.
I should go back.
The thought arrives the same way it always does, quiet and reasonable and wearing the face of common sense.
I should call my mother. I should call Richard.
I should explain that I had a moment of complete psychological collapse brought on by smoke inhalation and a head injury, and that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, and that I'll be home within the hour.
I could still fix this.
My mother would be furious, but she'd get over it.
She always does, because her anger at me is always ultimately less important to her than the preservation of appearances.
She'd spin it. She's good at that. The PR team is already assembled.
A statement would be drafted by morning.
Brielle Hayes, overcome by the trauma of the fire, temporarily displaced but now recovered and looking forward to rescheduling the ceremony at the earliest opportunity.
Richard would accept it. Not out of love. Out of the same practical calculus that got us engaged in the first place.
And I would go back to being the person I've always been. The good daughter. The perfect bride. The woman whose wants are the last item on a very long list of other people's requirements.
I set my phone down without unlocking it.
I look at the dress on the floor.
I should pack it up. The few things Evan brought me, I should fold them and leave them on the bed. I should find my shoes, except I don't have shoes anymore, so I should find whatever is closest to shoes in this building and then I should walk out of here and go back.
I lean over and reach for the dress.
My phone goes off on the mattress beside me.
I don't look at it. I bunch the cold satin in my hands and try to think practically about how to fold something that has approximately the volume of a small hot air balloon.
It goes off again.
And again.
I drop the dress and look at the screen.
Richard.
Not a text. A call. Three of them, in the span of about forty-five seconds.
I stare at his name on the screen.
He calls again.
I think about the woman from the gossip account.
I think about her Instagram story, three words and a bump emoji, and the careful vagueness of father unknown that wasn't really vague at all.
I think about Richard's hands on a woman at a club the night before our wedding.
I think about the way he stood in that hospital room and said I didn't ask you to a nurse who was trying to help me, like she was an interruption in a conversation he was having with himself.
I pick up the phone.
But I don't answer it yet.
Instead, I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and stand up, and then I open the door.
The hallway is empty, but there's noise from below and from somewhere further along the corridor.
I follow the latter, wincing with each step toward the source of it, which turns out to be a common room of some kind, sparse and functional, with a television on the wall and a couch that has seen better decades.
Max is there. He's sitting on the edge of the couch with his elbows on his knees, not watching the television, which is off.
He looks like a man in the middle of a thought he can't quite finish.
When he hears me, he straightens immediately, the thought disappearing behind whatever expression he keeps ready for public use.
“You should be resting,” he says.
“I know.” I lean against the doorframe, phone in hand. “Were you waiting out here?”
A pause that lasts long enough to be interesting. “Checking on you.”
I look down at my phone. Richard's name has appeared again, a missed call notification sitting on top of the three previous ones.
“He keeps calling,” I say.
Max doesn't ask who. He watches me with that steadiness of his, the kind that doesn't push or pull but simply remains, like a fixed point.
Footsteps on the stairs announce Jase before he appears, carrying two mugs with the focus of a man determined not to spill them. He stops when he sees me in the doorway.
“Oh, hey.” His face does something warm and immediate. “You're up. Good. I made tea. I don't know why I made tea, I don't even drink tea, but it felt like the right gesture.”
“It is the right gesture,” I tell him.
He hands me one of the mugs. Our fingers overlap briefly around the ceramic and he gives me a look that is somehow both checking that I'm okay and also somehow not making a production of checking that I'm okay, which is a difficult combination to pull off and he manages it effortlessly.
Evan appears behind him on the stairs, and leans his shoulder against the wall just inside the doorway with the air of someone who has decided to be casually present without making any demands about it.
My phone lights up again.
All four of us look at it.
“You can take that privately,” Max says. “We can—”
“No,” I say.
I don't fully know why I say it. Only that the idea of going back into that small room alone to have this conversation feels wrong in a way I can't entirely articulate. Like I've been having every difficult conversation of my life in small rooms alone, and I'm tired of it.
My phone lights up again on the cushion beside me. Richard. I turn it face down and slide it onto the side table.
“I should call him back at some point,” I say. I don't know why I say it out loud. Maybe because the room is quiet enough that it needs filling, or maybe because I've spent so long keeping everything inside that saying a true thing plainly still feels like a small act of courage.
“You don't have to do it tonight,” Max says.
“Or at all,” Evan adds, from the doorway.
Jase tilts his head back to look up at me. “When you're ready, we'll be here. All three of us. You don't have to make that call alone.”
I look at him for a minute. Then at Evan. Then at Max.
Nobody in my life has ever offered me that before.
To simply be present while I do a hard thing.
My mother would have scripted the conversation.
Richard would have made it about himself.
Even Callie, who loves me more than anyone, would have talked me through it with advice and opinions and the best of intentions.
These three men are just offering to sit with me.
“Okay,” I say quietly. “Not tonight.”
And so we stay there, the four of us, while the city carries on outside and the phone stays face down on the table and nobody asks anything of me at all.
The room is very quiet.
I look down at my left hand, at the ring that has been sitting on my finger for a year and that I have never once looked at with the feeling it was supposed to produce.
I work it off over my knuckle, which requires slightly more effort than feels appropriate given the occasion, and then I set it down on the arm of the nearest chair.
Then I sit down on the other end of the couch from Max, pull my knees up, wrap both hands around my mug of tea, and let out a breath that feels like it's been building since approximately the age of sixteen.
Nobody says anything.
Then Jase, who has apparently decided that the situation calls for him to sit down on the floor directly in front of me with his back against the couch and his long legs stretched out.
Max is looking at me sideways with an expression that I can't entirely read, though I notice that whatever tension he'd been carrying in his shoulders when I walked in here has shifted into something else.
I look down at the ring on the chair arm. The light catches it.
“Can I ask you something?” I say to the room at large.
“Sure,” says Jase.
I look between the three of them. “What are your names? All of them. Properly.”
A beat of surprised quiet.
Then Evan makes a sound that might be a laugh, Jase drops his head back against the couch cushion with a grin spreading wide across his face, and even Max, controlled and contained and permanent as a fixed point, lets the corner of his mouth curve upward just slightly.
“Jase Thibodeau,” Jase says, tilting his head back to look up at me.
“Evan Pomar,” says Evan.
I look at Max.
“Maxwell Redwood,” he says. “Max.”
I nod slowly, looking at each of them in turn.
“Brielle Hayes,” I offer, though they already know that.
“We know,” says Jase.
“I know you know.” I wrap both hands tighter around the mug. “I just thought it was only fair.”
Outside, the city carries on with itself, indifferent and endless. Somewhere out there, Richard is probably already on the phone with a lawyer, or a publicist, or his mother. Somewhere out there, my mother is doing something I won't enjoy hearing about later.
But right now there is tea, and a water-stained ceiling, and three men who don't seem to require anything of me at all.