Chapter 9
Jill called at ten past six in the morning on the fourth of January, which is not a time anybody calls with good news.
"Are you awake."
"I am now."
"Sit down."
Jenna sat down on the mattress in the dark with her feet on the cold floor.
"It's out," Jill said. "The baby. It's out."
The bike shop compressor was not running yet. That was the thing she noticed, absurdly, in the four seconds before she could make her mouth work. The building was completely silent because it was ten past six.
"How."
"A photograph. From the Wheelwright." Jill's voice was doing the thing it did when she was furious and being useful at the same time. "You're on a stairwell with your coat open. It's — Jenna, it's not ambiguous. There's no version where it's ambiguous."
"Which one has it?"
Jill told her.
The headline had the word pregnant in it and the word estranged in it and the phrase timing raises questions, which is the phrase that does the work in that kind of story, because it does not have to mean anything.
"How long?"
"It went up at eleven last night. It's on four aggregators already." A pause; Jill was scrolling. "By lunchtime it'll be everywhere. There's no getting it back, honey. I'm sorry."
Jenna sat in the dark in a room over a bike shop.
Twenty-one weeks she had held it. She had held it through a confrontation and a departure and a lawyer and a filing and four days in a barn.
She had held it from her husband, from a man she loved, deliberately, at real cost, because it was the one decision left that was entirely hers to make and she had not been ready to make it.
She had been about eight days from telling him. That was the part she would carry the longest. She had decided on the drive down the mountain on New Year's Eve, and had picked the week, and had not picked the words yet.
"Jenna. Are you there."
"I'm here."
"What do you need?"
"I need about a minute," Jenna said, and put the phone down on the floor, and did not cry, and got up and put the kettle on because the kettle was a thing she could do.
It was national by nine.
Not music press. Actual national — the morning shows, the wire services, the sites your aunt reads.
A famous man had stood on a stage in December and confessed something enormous, and the country had spent two weeks deciding he was remarkable, and now there was a photograph that made it a story, with a shape, with a next episode.
The shape it took was this: she was pregnant, they were separated, he had just signed over a catalogue worth sixty million dollars, and timing raises questions.
By ten there were people saying she had known for months and stayed quiet to run the price up. Before noon there was a woman on television who had never met either of them explaining, with great warmth, that a baby often brings people back together.
By noon somebody had done the arithmetic in public, backward from twenty-one weeks, and arrived at August, and observed that the affair — they all called it an affair; nobody had ever once said it wasn't, because a correction is not a story — had been going on at the time.
Jenna read that one standing up.
That was the sentence that told her what the next four months were going to be. Not cruelty. Arithmetic. Strangers doing sums about the inside of her body on a Tuesday morning.
Shane found out from a screen.
She got it from Micah that afternoon, in a voice she had never heard him use.
He had been at Marbury in Nashville since eight, in a long room with Vic Sandell and about a dozen other people, having a meeting about the March record.
Somebody's phone went off, and then somebody else's, and then a woman two seats down turned a laptop around because she thought she was being helpful.
"He didn't say anything," Micah said. "He read it. Whole thing, top to bottom, in a room with fourteen people watching him find out he's going to be a father." A breath. "Then he said 'excuse me' and went out into the hall."
"And?"
"And Hal followed him out, and about nine minutes later the two of them came back in, and Hal was on the phone."
Jenna closed her eyes.
"Micah."
"Yeah."
"How did he look?"
There was a long silence on the line.
"Jenna, I've known that man since we were fifteen," Micah said. "He looked like somebody had taken something off him."
Hal Fitch called her at four.
She let it ring out. He called again. She let it ring out.
The third time she answered because she wanted, quite badly, to say something to somebody, and Hal Fitch had been elected.
"Honey, listen — "
"Don't."
"I know. I know. Two minutes." He was in a car; she could hear it.
"We are going to have to say something. That's not a request and I'm not enjoying it.
There is a photograph of you on every phone in America and there are forty outlets holding, and if nothing comes from us by tonight, the story for the rest of the week is the one they've already written. "
"Then let them write it."
"That's a lovely idea and it does not survive contact with Thursday." His voice was so reasonable. It was always so reasonable. "I'll send you a draft. Two lines. You say yes or no. That's all I need."
"Send it."
"Thank you."
"Hal." She was standing at the window looking down at Haywood Road. "Send it to me. Not to him. To me."
"Of course," Hal said.
It went out at twenty past six.
She found out about it the way she had found out about everything else that autumn, which was from the internet.
A JOINT STATEMENT FROM SHANE AND JENNA BISHOP
We are expecting our first child in the spring. This is a private and joyful thing in a difficult year and we are working through it together as a family. We ask for privacy and grace as we do.
Jenna read it four times on a folding table in a room over a bike shop.
We.
Our first child.
Working through it together as a family.
Nobody had sent her a draft. Nobody had called. Hal had said of course at four o'clock, in a car, on the phone, and had then done what he had been doing for twenty-two years, which was handle it.
And the man who let him — the man whose name was on the top of it, the man who had stood on a stage two weeks ago and said I've taken enough that's hers — had, within nine hours of finding out he was going to be a father, put his wife's name on a document she had never seen, about her own body, describing a marriage that did not exist.
Something in her chest went from heat to cold, and she recognized it — she had felt it once before, at a kitchen table in September, with a laptop turned around.
It's the same crime.
It was exactly, precisely, identically the same crime.
Not a similar one. The same one. He had taken a true thing that belonged to her, and put both their names on it, and let it go out into the world without asking, because it was easier and because there was a schedule and because a man he paid told him it was fine.
Fifteen years of credits. Six albums. And now this.
"Okay," Jenna said, out loud, to the empty room.
She wrote her own in about four minutes, which was the fastest she had ever written anything, and sent it to Angela, who read it and called her back inside a minute and said, "Do you want me to talk you out of this?"
"No."
"Then I won't. It's clean, it's true, and there's nothing in it a lawyer can use." A pause. "Jenna. He will not recover from this in public."
"He shouldn't."
It went out at ten past seven under her own name, from her own account, which had four thousand followers and had not been used since 2019.
I am pregnant. That part is true.
I did not see the statement that went out under my name this evening and I did not agree to it. My husband and I are not working through anything together.
I'll speak for myself from now on.
— Jenna Bishop
It did nine million views before midnight.
She turned the phone off at half past seven, which was the smartest thing she did that whole month, and sat in the dark and ate a bowl of cereal standing up at the counter.
There were two vans on Haywood Road by nine the next morning.
By noon there were six, and a man with a long lens sitting in a rental car outside the bike shop, and the kid in the apron came upstairs and knocked and told her, with enormous seriousness, that she could go out through the shop's back door into the alley any time she wanted and that his boss said so.
She thanked him. She went back inside. She did not go out.
Angela called and used the word harassment and started a file. Grady called and said one sentence — "Whatever you need, and I'm not going to ask you for anything this month" — and hung up, which she thought about for a long time afterward.
Maxine Gault called on the second afternoon, from a landline, which nobody had done to Jenna in a decade.
"You don't have to talk," Maxine said. "I'm going to talk and you can hang up whenever."
"Yes ma'am."
"In 1979 a magazine printed that I'd had a baby in a hospital in El Paso and given it up.
It was not true. It was a different woman with a similar name and the magazine knew that by the second week and ran it anyway because it was a good week for them.
" A chair creaked somewhere in Tennessee.
"I did not leave my house for two months.
I want you to hear the next part. That was the mistake. Not the leaving — the two months."
Jenna stood at the window with her forehead against the cold glass.
"There are six vans on my street."
"There will be six vans on your street next week and four the week after and none by March, and the whole time you'll be thinking about them and they will not be thinking about you at all," Maxine said. "They're at work, honey. It's a job. You're the Tuesday."
"That's supposed to help?"
"It helped me. I'm not a warm person, I'm just an accurate one." A pause. "Now. That statement you put out."
"Which one."
"Don't be smart, you know which one." Something rustled. "I read it about nine times. Three sentences and not one wasted word in it. You want my honest opinion?"
"Please."