Chapter Twenty-One Brielle
His name on my screen is still saved as Richard. Not Richard M. Not Ex. Just Richard, the way I saved it four years ago. I've thought about changing it twenty-three times — once for each call I've declined — and never done it.
The twenty-fourth call comes on a Tuesday morning, and for some reason I pick up.
"Brielle." He sounds relieved. That, too, is its own kind of information.
"I'm not calling you back after this," I say. "So if there's something you need to say, say it."
A pause. Richard doesn't pause — he moves through silences the way he moves through rooms, filling them automatically, without thinking.
"I handled things badly," he says.
"Yes."
"I would have told you. About — about all of it. I want you to know that."
"I know," I say. "That's what makes it worse."
I watch two pigeons negotiate a patch of sidewalk at my feet.
"She's having a girl," he says. I don't know why he tells me this. Maybe he needs to say it to someone who will understand what it means. Maybe he just needs to say it out loud.
I think about that for a moment. "I hope she's nothing like you," I say. "That's not an insult. She deserves better than who you are right now."
Another pause. Then: "Are you happy?"
"I'm getting there," I say. "Don't call again, Richard."
I hang up. I stand there on the sidewalk for a moment. Then I continue walking to meet Callie.
Callie is outside the station at ten on a Saturday morning in a vintage leather jacket and paint-stained boots, leaning against a car that I don’t recognize and eating an apple with the unhurried energy of someone who arrived early and has been enjoying the neighborhood ever since.
She sees me come out and holds up the apple. “You look good,” she says, which from Callie means something specific. Not put together. Not dressed well. Good, like something in the baseline has shifted.
“I feel good,” I say.
She takes another bite of the apple and nods. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s go.”
The car belongs to someone on her crew, borrowed for the day because Callie’s own car is in the shop for reasons she describes as a difference of opinion between herself and a parking structure in Long Island City.
She drives the way she does everything, with total confidence and a loose relationship with lane discipline, and I sit in the passenger seat watching Brooklyn go past the window and feeling, in a way I couldn’t have predicted two weeks ago, entirely at home in it.
We end up at a coffee place in Carroll Gardens that Callie has been going to since film school, small and warm and permanently slightly too crowded, with mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu and a barista who knows her order without being asked.
We find a table near the window and sit down, and Callie drops her bag on the floor and looks at me across the table with the focused attention she usually reserves for a scene she’s trying to figure out.
“Tell me everything,” she says. “And I mean everything. Not the edited version.”
“There isn’t an edited version,” I say.
“Brielle.”
“Callie.”
She raises her eyebrows.
I wrap both hands around my coffee cup and look at the window for a second, at the street outside going about its Saturday morning, and then I tell her.
Not the shape of it, the way I did last time, but the actual thing, the kitchen, breakfast, and the admin office, and Weston, and the way the station sounds at different times of day and what it feels like to do work that is mine and to do it well and to have people notice without making a production of it.
She listens without interrupting, which is not always something Callie is capable of.
“You’re happy,” she says.
“I think I might be,” I say.
“That’s not a small thing,” she says.
“No,” I agree. “It’s not.”
She turns her coffee cup in her hands. “And the three of them.”
I look at her.
“I’m not asking for details,” she says. “I’m asking how you are with it. All of it together.”
I think about Max’s face in the kitchen two mornings ago when he thought I wasn’t looking. Jase is in the freezer aisle, saying that doesn’t mean it doesn’t count. Evan in the park, his mouth on mine and then mine on his, the October cold around us, and neither of us caring about any of it.
“I’m working on being okay with wanting what I actually want,” I say. “Instead of what I’m supposed to want.”
She nods slowly. "And the Richard piece?"
"Handled," I say. "I answered his call this morning. Before I came here."
"Finally."
"Don't make it a thing."
"I'm not making it a thing." She raises both hands briefly. "I'm just saying finally."
"He told me the baby is a girl." I set the cup down. "I don't know why. Maybe he needed to say it to someone who would understand what it meant."
Callie looks at me steadily. "And?"
"And I told him not to contact me again. He agreed." I pause. "I think I'm actually done with all of it. I can feel it. Like a door I forgot was still open swinging shut."
Callie looks at me for a long moment. “Good,” she says simply, and means it, and moves on.
She pulls her phone out and slides it across the table to me.
On the screen is a photograph of a woman, thirties, dark hair, standing on what looks like a rooftop in low evening light. Below is a document and a script page.
“Her name is Mara,” Callie says. “She’s in four scenes. She doesn’t say much, but she says it in a way that has to land or the whole third act falls apart.” She pauses. “I’ve been trying to cast her for three weeks. I keep looking at people and thinking no.”
I look at the photograph.
“And then I keep thinking about you,” she says. “In that Chekhov piece. The way you went was still in the second act. I’ve worked with trained actors who can’t do what you did in that one moment.”
“That was college,” I say.
“That was you,” she says. “College was where it happened.”
I look at the script page. The dialogue is sparse, exactly as she described.
“When?” I say.
“Three weeks. Brighton Beach. Two days of shooting, maybe three.” She takes her phone back. “You don’t have to decide right now. But I want you to think about it properly. Not as a favor to me. As something you might actually want.”
That word again. Want.
I’m still learning what it means to use it about myself without immediately qualifying it.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
She nods, satisfied, and reaches for her coffee. “Now. Are you actually looking for an apartment, or are you telling yourself you’re looking for an apartment?”
I open my mouth.
She raises her eyebrows.
“I’ve looked at a few listings,” I say.
“On your phone.”
“Yes.”
“Have you gone to see any of them?”
I pause.
“No,” I say.
“Right,” she says. “So you’re not looking for an apartment. You’re performing the idea of looking for an apartment so you don’t have to examine why you don’t actually want to leave.”
“I’m going to have to leave eventually,” I say. “It’s a fire station, not a long-term housing solution.”
“I know that,” she says. “I’m asking why eventually feels further away every time I talk to you.”
I look at my coffee.
“It’s not just them,” I say. “I know that’s what it looks like from the outside, but it’s not just that.
” I pause, trying to find the right words.
“I’ve never had a place that felt like something was actually happening in it.
Not my parents’ house, not Richard’s apartment, not my room in Europe.
Everywhere I’ve ever lived has felt like a waiting room.
” I look up at her. “That station doesn’t feel like a waiting room. ”
Callie is quiet.
“It feels like the thing itself,” I say. “I don’t know how to explain it better than that.”
“You don’t have to,” she says. “I get it.”
She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand once, briefly, the way she does when something matters and she doesn't want to make a speech about it.
Then she sits back and picks up her coffee. “Do you want another cup?”
“I'll get it,” I say. “You got the first round.”
She slides her empty cup across. “Mine's oat milk, no sugar.”
“I know your order, Callie,” I say.
I go to the counter and reach into my bag for cash I've been keeping there since Weston started paying me. It's not much, we agreed on a modest weekly amount given the circumstances, but I earned, and I have been paying for small things with it and feeling unreasonably proud every single time.
I put the cash on the counter.
The barista looks at it, then at me. “Sorry, we're card only now. Changed over last month.”
I stare at her.
“Card only?” I say.
“Card only,” she confirms, with the apologetic expression of someone who delivers this news multiple times a day.
I reach for my bag and pull out my card. I tap it against the reader.
It declines.
“Sorry,” I say, keeping my voice even. “Let me try the other one.”
The other one declines, too.
I stand there at the counter with both cards in my hand and the line forming behind me.
Callie is already beside me, her own card out, tapping the reader before I can say anything. “I’ve got it,” she says, in a tone that closes the subject entirely.
We go back to our table.
I sit down, look at my cards on the table in front of me, then pick up my phone, open my messages, and find my mother’s thread, which I have not opened in eleven days. I read it.
There are fourteen messages.
The first four are variations on call me immediately, each one slightly more controlled than the last, which is the opposite of most people. The fifth one is a summary of the PR situation and what she has decided to tell the press, which includes nothing resembling the truth.
The sixth and seventh are about Richard, about the Montgomery family, about the damage done to relationships that took years to build.
The eighth is about appearances. The ninth is about legacy.
The tenth is about my father, and what this is doing to him, and I read it twice and feel something that I recognize as grief, not for the family I’m losing but for the one I never quite had.
The eleventh message is the one.
It is two sentences.
Your accounts have been frozen effective immediately. Until you demonstrate that you are prepared to conduct yourself in a manner befitting this family, you will not have access to any Hayes assets or funds.
I read it once.
Then I put the phone down on the table.
Callie is watching me. She doesn’t say anything, which is the right call, and I’m grateful for it because I need a moment to sit with this without anyone putting words around it.
The thing is, I knew this was coming. It was always coming, the moment I stopped being what she needed me to be. My mother does not issue warnings; she issues consequences, and the only surprise here is that it took eleven days.
What I didn’t know, sitting here now with my frozen cards on the table and my mother’s two sentences on my phone screen, is how it would feel.
It feels like something is being finished.
Not taken. Finished. Like the last page of something I should have stopped reading a long time ago.
“She cut me off,” I say.
“I know,” Callie says. “I was waiting for you to read it.”
“You knew?”
“Your father called mine last week,” she says. “I don’t know what they talked about but I should have asked.”
“It’s fine,” I say.
“Is it?”
I look at my cards on the table. I have a job. An unofficial one technically, but that’s a conversation I can have with Weston now that the circumstances have changed. I have a roof over my head. I have people around me who are not waiting for me to be something I’m not.
I am twenty-six years old, and my mother has told me in two sentences that I am on my own.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think it actually is.”
Callie looks at me for a long moment. Then she reaches across the table and picks up my frozen cards and slides them into her jacket pocket.
“I’ll hold onto these,” she says. “In case they unfreeze them to mess with you.”
“Callie.”
“Practical,” she says. “I’m being practical.” She finishes her coffee. “Also, I’m going to lend you one of mine. You’re going to pay me back when you’re rich and famous from my film.”
“I haven’t said yes to the film,” I say.
“You haven’t said no,” she says.
She’s right.
I haven’t.