14. Eliza
— ? —
Eliza
The headline is everywhere.
I step out of the elevator into all those eyes.
Twelve people, maybe fifteen, still exactly where they were when the doors opened, nobody even pretending to work anymore.
The senior designer at the cutting table with her scissors suspended mid-cut.
Two interns by the fabric rack, their conversation dead on their lips.
The pattern-maker at his station, his pencil hovering over the paper.
They’ve all seen it. Every single one of them has seen it.
I keep my face neutral. I keep my pace steady. I don’t speed up and I don’t slow down, just walk through the room like I walk through it every other day, like nothing is different, like my husband’s alleged affair isn’t splashed across every gossip site on the internet.
No one says anything. That’s almost worse than if they did. The silence follows me the whole way across the room, pressing against my back, filling the space between my footsteps.
I make it through the room to the elevator, ride it down one floor alone, and then I’m standing outside the fitting room where Gordon is probably still getting dressed, and I have to stop and breathe for a second because I’m vibrating down to my teeth.
Twenty minutes ago I was in that room with his hands in my hair.
Twenty minutes ago the worst thing in my life was what I’d just let happen on that counter.
It already feels like a story about two other people.
The door opens.
Gordon steps out, fully dressed now, his phone in his hand, his face gray. He’s read it too. Of course he has. The whole world has read it by now.
The fitting room is still sitting between us. That mirror, that counter, that mistake. The scattered pins I picked up off the floor. Neither of us mentions it.
“We need to talk,” I say. “Not here.”
“Where?”
“Your car. Now.”
We walk to the elevator in silence. I can feel people watching us, feel their eyes on my back, but I don’t turn around.
There was a stretch of my life when I couldn’t get this man on the phone, and now the whole city gets to watch us leave a building together and guess.
There’s a joke in that somewhere. Neither of us is laughing.
The elevator arrives and we step inside and the doors close and we still don’t speak.
The silence continues through the lobby, past the reception desk where the woman who checked Gordon in this morning is very carefully not looking at either of us, through the glass doors and into the parking structure, our footsteps echoing off concrete walls.
His car is on the third level, black and expensive, worth more than most people make in a year. He unlocks it with a click and we get in and he starts the engine but doesn’t put it in gear.
“Tell me exactly what happened with Sloane,” I say. “Everything. From the beginning.”
He takes a breath. His hands are resting on the steering wheel, knuckles white, like he needs something to hold onto.
“She came on as my publicist about six years ago. She was good at her job. Really good. She knew how to manage my image, how to handle the press, how to make me look like someone people wanted to do business with.”
I think about six years ago. We’d just moved into the big house. Gordon’s company was taking off, his face starting to appear in magazines, his name starting to mean something. I was so proud of him. So happy that all those years of sacrifice were finally paying off.
“And?”
“And at some point, she decided you were a liability.” His jaw tightens.
“She never said it directly, not at first. She’d just drop little comments.
About how I should focus on my career, about how distractions were dangerous, about how the most successful men she knew kept their personal lives completely separate from their public ones. ”
I remember those comments. Not from Sloane directly, but filtered through Gordon.
Him coming home from work and mentioning, casually, that maybe I didn’t need to come to the next event.
Him suggesting that I might be more comfortable staying home.
Him slowly, gradually, building a life that didn’t include me.
“Distractions meaning me.”
“Yes.” He meets my eyes, and I can see the guilt there, the shame. “I didn’t see it at first. Or maybe I didn’t want to see it. She was making me money, she was making me famous, and I told myself she was just being professional. Just looking out for my interests.”
“When did it change?”
“When she started controlling my schedule. When she started deciding who I saw and when. When she started moving things around without asking me, canceling plans, keeping people away.” He pauses. “Keeping you away.”
I think about all the times I called his office and got sent to voicemail. His assistant’s voice, polite and apologetic. Mr. Bryce is in a meeting. Mr. Bryce is unavailable. Mr. Bryce asked me to take a message. I thought it was just busy. I thought it was just the price of success.
Then the surprise visits. Showing up and being told he was somewhere else, the receptionist checking her computer, frowning, telling me he’d left for lunch an hour ago even though he’d told me he was working through.
The confusion on her face when I asked where, the way she looked at me like I should already know.
And the invitations, every one he couldn’t make because Sloane had scheduled something else.
A dinner I’d been planning for weeks, moved to accommodate a meeting that couldn’t be moved.
A weekend trip we’d talked about for months, canceled because something came up.
My birthday, three years ago, when he showed up two hours late because Sloane had booked a call he couldn’t miss.
All those moments. All those small cuts. And Sloane’s fingerprints on every single one.
“Did you sleep with her?”
The question comes out hard. Flat. I need to hear him say it.
He goes very still.
“No.”
“Gordon.”
“No.” His voice is fierce now, desperate. “I never touched her, Eliza. I never wanted anyone but you.”
I stare at him. I search his face for the lie. For the tell, the flicker, the thing that would give him away.
I don’t find it.
“I believe you,” I say.
The relief that washes over his face is almost painful to watch. He sags all at once, tension draining out of him, and for a second I think he might cry.
“I believe you didn’t sleep with her,” I continue, because I need him to understand this isn’t forgiveness. “That doesn’t mean I forgive you for everything else.”
“I know. I know that.”
“And this is going to get worse before it gets better. You understand that, right? She’s not going to stop at one interview. She’s going to keep going until she gets whatever she’s after.”
“Revenge,” Gordon says flatly. “She’s after revenge. I fired her and damaged her reputation and now she wants to destroy mine.”
“Then we need to fix this.”
“We?”
“Yes, we.” I’m surprised by how firm my voice sounds, how certain.
“As much as I don’t like you right now, I hate her more.
She spent years telling you I was a distraction, a liability, someone who was holding you back.
She kept me off guest lists and out of your life and made me feel crazy for thinking something was wrong.
” I take a breath. “I’m not going to let her rewrite history and make herself the victim. ”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to go public. Set the record straight. Tell people what she really did.”
“No.” His voice is sharp. “Absolutely not.”
“Gordon-”
“It’s my mess, Eliza. I made it. I’m not letting you clean it up.”
“That’s not your decision-”
“You’ve already given up enough for me.” He reaches for my hand, and I don’t pull away, and I hate how natural it feels. His palm is warm and dry and familiar, and my hand fits into his the same way it always has. “I’m not letting you give up your privacy too. I’m not letting you become a target.”
“I’m already a target. She mentioned me by name. The jealous wife who had her fired.”
“Then let me handle it. Let me be the one who takes the heat.”
We stare at each other. The car is quiet except for the hum of the engine, the distant sound of other cars moving through the structure.
“Fine,” I say finally. “Handle it. But Gordon - if you screw this up, I’m going public anyway. And I won’t be kind.”
“Understood.”
I pull my hand free and reach for the door handle.
“Eliza.”
I stop.
“What happened in the fitting room,” he says quietly. “I know you said it was a mistake. I know you said it doesn’t change anything. But I want you to know, it meant something to me. It meant everything.”
I don’t know what to say to that. So I don’t say anything.
I get out of the car and walk away, and I don’t let myself look back.
The rest of the day passes in a blur.
I go back to work because I don’t know what else to do.
The sample room is quieter than usual, people speaking in hushed voices, avoiding my eyes.
I focus on the task in front of me, organizing fabric samples for a project that suddenly seems incredibly unimportant, and I don’t let myself think about Gordon or Sloane or any of it.
Charlie finds me at the end of the day. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t have to be fine. This is a lot.”
“I know. But I’m fine anyway.”
He doesn’t push. He just nods and tells me to take tomorrow off if I need to, and I tell him I’ll be here because work is the only thing keeping me from falling apart right now.
That night, I sit in my apartment and scroll through the coverage.
It’s everywhere. Every entertainment site, every gossip blog, every social media platform. Sloane’s interview has been picked apart and analyzed and shared thousands of times. Her photos are everywhere too, her standing next to Gordon at events, her hand on his arm, her smile aimed at the camera.
The comments are brutal. People calling Gordon a cheater, a predator, a man who used his power to take advantage of his employee. People calling me naive, oblivious, pathetic for not seeing what was happening right in front of my face.
I close the laptop and stare at the wall and try to figure out what I’m feeling.
I’m angry, definitely, at Sloane for lying, at Gordon for letting it get this far, at myself for not seeing the manipulation sooner.
But there’s something else too, something that feels almost like relief. Because for years I thought I was going crazy, thought I was being paranoid, thought I was the problem. And now I know I wasn’t. Now I know that someone was actively working to push me out of my husband’s life.
It doesn’t make anything better. But it makes it make sense.
The next two days are a slow-motion disaster.
The coverage doesn’t die down. If anything, it gets worse. More outlets pick up the story. More people weigh in with their opinions. More photos surface, more quotes, more speculation.
I don’t contact Gordon. He doesn’t contact me. We’re both waiting, I think, for the other shoe to drop.
On the second night, I’m sitting on my couch eating takeout I don’t taste when my phone buzzes with a news alert.
GORDON brYCE TO ADDRESS AFFAIR ALLEGATIONS ON EVENING TALK SHOW - LIVE TONIGHT AT 9 p.m.
He’s on a talk show. Tonight. And he’s about to tell the whole country what kind of husband he really was.