17. Eliza
— ? —
Eliza
My call time is four in the afternoon, five hours before the broadcast.
I ride over in the van with two other assistants and a rack of garment bags worth more than everything I own, and we spend the first hour finding our dressing rooms, checking each piece against the run sheet, steaming what traveled badly.
The building hums the whole time, sound checks and rolling equipment and people speaking into headsets in a shorthand I’m starting to understand.
I have a laminated schedule, a marked-up floor plan, and a job to do, and for five hours nobody in this building is going to ask me a single question about my marriage.
That’s the plan, anyway.
The presenter’s zipper jams fifteen minutes before she’s supposed to go on.
I’m backstage in a cramped dressing room, surrounded by racks of clothes and nervous assistants and the particular chaos that happens when something goes wrong at exactly the wrong moment.
The presenter, an actress whose name I’ve seen on magazine covers my whole life, is standing in front of a mirror in her underwear, her face pale with panic.
“It won’t move,” she says. “It just stopped.”
“Let me see.” I kneel behind her, examining the zipper. The teeth are misaligned about halfway up, one side bunched and the other pulled tight. It’s fixable, but not quickly, and not without tools I don’t have in this room.
“Can you fix it?” Her voice is thin, strained. “I’m on in fifteen minutes.”
“I can fix it. Just hold still.”
I dig through my bag for the emergency kit I started carrying after my second week at the internship, needle-nose pliers, seam ripper, safety pins, a travel sewing kit. Charlie laughed when he saw it the first time. He’s not laughing now.
I ease the pliers along the zipper track, gently realigning the teeth, working the slider back down and then up again. It catches once, twice, and then glides smoothly to the top.
“Done.”
The presenter exhales. “Oh my god. Thank you. You just saved my life.”
“That’s a bit dramatic.”
“No, seriously.” She turns and grabs my hands. “I’ve had stylists twice your age who couldn’t have done that. What’s your name?”
“Eliza.”
“Eliza.” She squeezes my hands. “I’m going to remember that. When you have your own label, I’m going to tell everyone I knew you when.”
I have no idea what to do with that, so I just smile and help her into her heels and walk her to the stage door, where a handler takes over and I’m suddenly alone in the corridor, my heart still pounding from the adrenaline.
I did it. I actually did it. Something went wrong and I fixed it and nobody died and the show goes on.
This is what I’m supposed to be doing. This is who I’m supposed to be.
The venue is enormous, a convention center converted into a glittering awards show set. The front of house is all red carpet and flashing cameras and celebrities in designer gowns, but back here it’s a maze of corridors and loading docks and people with headsets shouting into radios.
Gordon is somewhere in the building. I know this because the label dressed him for tonight, a contract that was signed weeks ago, before the interview blew everything up, and because I pressed the jacket myself two days ago at the studio and pretended it was any other jacket.
Charlie offered to reassign the piece and I told him no, it’s fabric, I can handle fabric.
I’ve been avoiding his side of the venue all evening, staying backstage, staying busy, staying invisible.
Twice I’ve heard his name in passing conversation, once from a producer and once from two publicists whose whole job tonight is knowing where everyone is, and both times I kept walking.
It’s working until it isn’t.
I’m taking a shortcut through the press area, trying to get from the dressing rooms to the loading dock where the van is waiting, when someone recognizes me.
“Eliza! Eliza Bryce! Over here!”
I freeze.
A dozen cameras swing in my direction. The flash of bulbs is blinding, one after another after another. Voices shouting questions, overlapping, impossible to distinguish.
“What’s your response to Sloane’s interview?”
“Are you and Gordon reconciling?”
“Is it true you had her fired?”
“Eliza, can you comment on the affair allegations?”
I can’t move. My pulse has swallowed every other sound. This is exactly what Gordon warned me about. This is why he made himself the story so I wouldn’t be. This is why he went on national television and confessed to being a terrible husband.
And now I’m in the middle of it with no idea what to do.
My whole body wants to be back at the gala checkpoint, wants to be the woman who froze at one company event years ago, the one everybody decided couldn’t handle any of this.
And the worst part is that for two full seconds, they’re right.
I can’t speak. I can’t move. The cameras eat those two seconds up.
Then I feel a hand on my back.
Gordon.
He came through the crowd to reach me. I don’t know how he knew I was here, don’t know how he found me in the chaos, but he’s beside me now, his hand warm and steady against my spine.
“Come on,” he says, low enough that only I can hear. “I’ll get you out of here.”
He’s pulling at my arm, trying to guide me away, trying to shield me with his body. Trying to save me again.
“No.” I stop him. Right there, in front of everyone. “I’ve got this.”
“Eliza-”
“I said I’ve got it.”
He lets go. Steps back.
I turn to the cameras. I give them nothing.
“I’m here for work tonight,” I say, my voice steady. “Any questions about my personal life can be directed elsewhere.”
“But Mrs. Bryce-”
“My name is Eliza. And I’m not making any statements.”
I turn and walk inside. The cameras keep flashing. The questions keep coming.
I don’t answer a single one.
I make it through the doors and into the backstage area and I keep walking until I find a quiet corner where no one can see me, behind a rack of garment bags near the freight elevator, where the noise of the venue drops away and there’s just me and my own pulse.
Then I lean against the wall and close my eyes and focus on breathing, in and out, in and out, until my heart slows down and my hands remember they belong to me.
I did it. I handled it. I froze for two seconds and then I un-froze, which is the part nobody tells you is possible, and I stood in front of a wall of cameras and I spoke and I walked away on my own terms.
Gordon appears a few minutes later. He must have come in through a different entrance, circled around to find me. He looks flushed, worried, his eyes scanning my face for signs of damage.
“You were incredible,” he says.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Exactly.” He’s staring at me with an expression I can’t quite read, surprise and admiration and a third thing that makes my stomach flutter. “You were always gonna be good at this, huh?”
I don’t know what to do with him saying that.
“I need to find my client,” I say.
“Yeah. Of course.” He steps back, giving me space. “I’ll see you at the next fitting.”
I start to walk away, then stop.
“Gordon.”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For trying to help.”
His smile is small and sad and hopeful all at once.
“Any time.”
He disappears into the crowd.
I find my presenter in the wings, waiting to go on. Her zipper is holding. Her makeup is perfect. She squeezes my hand when she sees me and mouths a thank you before the handler guides her toward the stage.
I watch from the wings as she walks out to thunderous applause, hits her mark, delivers her lines flawlessly. The award goes to someone I’ve never heard of, and the presenter hugs them and poses for photos and exits through the opposite wing, and I never see her again for the rest of the night.
But I remember the way she looked at me when I fixed her zipper. The way she said she’d remember my name.
The work happened, and it was mine.
The rest of the evening passes in a blur of small tasks and quiet competence, steaming a wrinkled hem, finding a missing earring, calming a nervous assistant who dropped her clipboard in a puddle of spilled champagne.
Nothing dramatic, nothing heroic, just the steady work of making sure everything goes smoothly.
At some point one of the senior stylists hands me half her sandwich without being asked and says the zipper story is already going around, and that the presenter asked Charlie for my name a second time on her way out.
I eat the sandwich standing up in a hallway, and it’s one of the better meals of my life.
By the time the show wraps and the loading begins, I’m exhausted in the best possible way.
I help pack up the garment bags and load them into the van and count the pieces twice against the run sheet, because things go missing on nights like this and it isn’t going to be on my watch.
One of the assistants falls asleep against the window on the ride back, and the driver has the radio on low, and the city slides by lit up and indifferent, and I sit there with my kit in my lap and think that not so long ago I was setting a table for a man who wasn’t coming home, and tonight a woman whose face is on bus ads knows my name.
I drive home from the studio lot in the dark, my mind finally quiet for the first time all day.
The next morning, the red carpet photos are everywhere.
Not of me giving my non-statement. Of Gordon.
He’s standing behind me in the photo, a few feet back, watching me speak. His face is completely unguarded. He’s looking at me like I’m the only person in the room.
The comments are divided.
Look at his face. That’s not a man who cheated. That’s a man who’s completely gone for her.
He doesn’t deserve her. Did everyone forget the talk show already?
She handled that press ambush like a boss. Queen behavior.
He’s manipulating her. This whole thing is a performance.
I don’t care what anyone says, that look is REAL.
She said like three words and walked away. Why is everyone acting like she cured cancer?
The way he stepped back when she said she’s got it. He actually listened for once.
Too little too late. Team Eliza deserves better.
They’re both right. The people who think he loves me and the people who think he doesn’t deserve me.
They’re both completely right, and I keep scrolling anyway, reading strangers argue about my marriage like it’s a show they’re watching, and the strangest part is that some of them understand it better than I did while I was living in it.
I screenshot the photo and zoom in on his face. On the way he’s looking at me. On the raw, unfiltered love that even the cameras couldn’t miss.
I stare at it for a long time. I know what the smart thing to do is.
The smart thing is to close the photo, block the gossip sites, and get ready for work, because a look on a man’s face at a press line is not eleven years, and it is not a table set for two, and it is not a single dinner eaten on time.
I know all of that.
Then I save it.