2. Brooke
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Brooke
I wake up to the other side of the bed already cold, and I know before I open my eyes that the text won.
It always wins. I don’t even mean that bitterly, not yet, it’s just a fact about the man I married, the way you know a fact about the weather.
Adrian reaches for his phone the way a drowning man reaches for the thing that floats, and last night the thing that floats had Wyatt’s name on it, and I fell asleep before I got to see him decide anything. I didn’t need to see it. The empty half of the bed tells me plenty.
I lie there a minute with my face in his pillow because I’m allowed one pathetic minute before I have to be a whole person.
His pillow still smells like him. That’s the thing about being married to someone you actually like.
Even the annoying parts come attached to a smell you’d follow across a parking lot.
Then I get up, because the alternative is lying here sniffing a pillow, and I have more dignity than a dog waiting by a door. Barely. But I have it.
I hear him before I see him. His voice carries down the hall from the kitchen, low and quick and awake in a way I haven’t heard him in weeks, the words tumbling out of him faster than his usual careful pace.
“…no, I hear you, but say the number again… say it slower, Wyatt, I want to make sure I’m not hallucinating…”
I round the corner into the kitchen and there he is, barefoot, hair a mess, one hand braced on the counter and the other holding the phone to his ear, and the second he sees me his whole face does a thing. Lights up and then apologizes at the same time.
He mouths sorry and holds up one finger, the universal husband sign for I know, I know, sixty more seconds, and I’ve learned that finger is a liar but I love the man attached to it, so I nod.
“Yeah, keep going,” he says into the phone. “I’m listening.”
He’s not going to be sixty seconds, I know this the way I know my own name.
So I do what I’ve gotten very good at, which is making myself a small pleasant fixture in my own home.
I go to the coffee maker. I pour my own cup because his is already sitting there half-drunk and forgotten by the sink, going cold, which honestly feels like a metaphor I’m too tired to unpack this early.
I take my coffee to the counter and sit on the stool and wrap both hands around the mug and wait.
Because I’m good at waiting.
I want that on my headstone: She was so good at waiting. They can carve it right under my name.
Adrian paces the length of the kitchen while Wyatt talks, and I watch him move, and I try to catch pieces of it. Numbers, mostly. A word that might be preorders. The name of his publisher. And then, twice, a name that lands somewhere in my chest and sits there without asking permission.
Layla.
I sip my coffee and tell myself that’s normal.
Of course her name comes up. She’s an actress and he’s an author and they run in the same overlapping world of people who get photographed, and my best friend and my husband existing in the same sentence is not, in itself, a reason to feel anything.
I have decided this. I am a reasonable woman having a reasonable coffee.
“Okay,” Adrian says finally. “Okay. Yes. Set the meeting. No, today, I don’t want to sit on this… Wyatt. Wyatt, I could kiss you. I won’t, but I could.”
He hangs up. He actually sets the phone down, face-down even, which for Adrian is basically a marriage proposal, and he turns to me with his eyes wide and bright and he looks about nine years old.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay, so.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“Good morning, I love you, I’m so sorry, I have to tell you a thing and you have to promise not to be normal about it, you have to be excited, I need you to be excited with me.”
He said it. I love you. Tossed it into the middle of a sentence like it’s a word he uses all the time, like it isn’t the thing I’ve been quietly waiting eleven months to hear him say on purpose. And I know he doesn’t mean it the way I’d mean it.
I know he means it the way you say it to a person when your whole chest is full of good news and they happen to be standing there. It’s the caffeine of the sentence, not the point of it.
I catch the little ache before it can do anything embarrassing to my face and I put it in the drawer where I keep those, and I smile at my ridiculous husband.
“I make no promises about being normal,” I say. “Normal is my whole personality. But go ahead. Tell me.”
He comes around the counter and takes the stool next to mine and turns it so he’s facing me, knees bumping mine, and he takes both my hands, coffee and all, and I let him, because when he looks at me like this the drawer with all my little aches in it doesn’t feel quite so full.
“The publisher wants to do a whole big thing for the launch,” he says. “Not a normal launch. A campaign. Real reach, real money behind it, the kind of push they usually save for people who are already famous.”
“You are already famous.”
“I’m book-famous. That’s like being tall for a hobbit.
” He waves it off. “This is different. They want to pair the launch with a promotional partner. Someone with a huge audience, someone whose crowd overlaps with mine but goes way past it, so the book doesn’t just reach readers, it reaches everybody.
And they have someone in mind. And Wyatt already made the call, and she said yes, and Brooke… ”
He stops. He’s grinning. He’s grinning like the punchline is a gift.
“It’s Layla.”
And here’s the thing I want to be honest about, because I’m the only one in the room who’ll ever know what happened in the half-second after he said her name.
For half a second, my stomach drops.
I don’t have a reason for it. There is no reason for it.
It’s just a small animal lurch, the kind you get when you miss a step you didn’t know was there, and it’s gone almost before I feel it.
And I hate that it happened, because it means some part of me that I don’t like very much heard my husband and my best friend and huge campaign and got to the bad thought before the good one.
But the good one is right there behind it, and the good one is true, so I grab it with both hands.
Because it is great.
It’s genuinely, actually great.
Layla is the biggest rising actress in this whole ridiculous town, she has been clawing her way up for years, and if she can lend that to Adrian’s book then his book is going to fly. And she’s my best friend.
She’s the person who held my hair in a college bathroom and came to my father’s funeral in a black dress she couldn’t afford and sat with my mother when I couldn’t. There is nobody I’d trust more with the biggest moment of my husband’s career.
So the half-second passes, and I let it go, and I mean the smile that comes after it.
“Adrian,” I say. “That’s incredible.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Are you kidding? Layla?” I laugh, and it’s real, the animal lurch already filed away as the paranoid nonsense it was. “That’s perfect. Her audience is enormous. And she’s going to make you look so much better than you deserve, which, frankly, is a public service.”
“See, that’s the excitement I needed.” He’s beaming. “That’s the exact energy.”
“I’m serious, though. This is huge. This is the thing you’ve been working toward since before I met you.
” I squeeze his hands. “You wrote a book. A whole real book, the one you left the entire company to write, and now they’re throwing the kind of launch at it that they throw at movie stars.
Of course I’m excited. I’d have to be dead not to be excited. ”
“You could’ve been normal about it,” he says. “I asked for excited and you gave me a speech. You always give me the speech.”
“You married a woman with strong opinions and a flair for the dramatic. This is a you problem.”
He laughs, and he leans in and kisses my forehead, and it’s quick and warm and completely without agenda, which somehow makes it land better than the ones that come with one.
“I have to get dressed,” he says. “Wyatt set the meeting for eleven. I want to be there early.”
“Go. Be famous. I’ll hold down the fort.”
He’s already up, already halfway to the bedroom, already gone in the way he gets, and then he stops in the doorway and turns back around, and for a second he just looks at me sitting there in the morning light with my coffee.
“Hey,” he says. “You’re happy for me. Right? Actually happy?”
And the thing is, I am. That’s what makes the whole morning so easy to love and so easy to lie to myself inside of. I’m not performing. When I look at him standing in that doorway with his good news lighting him up from the inside, there’s not a single part of me that isn’t glad for him.
“I’m actually happy for you,” I tell him, and I mean every word.
The half-second thing doesn’t count. I’ve already decided it doesn’t count. It was a glitch, a hiccup, the last twitch of some old insecurity that has no business in a marriage as good as ours.
I finish my coffee. He gets dressed. And I don’t think about Layla’s name landing in my chest again, because I have better things to do than pick at the one loose thread in an otherwise perfectly good morning.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
I’ve always been a very good liar. The problem is I mostly only lie to myself.
And I keep lying, right through breakfast, right through him getting dressed, right up until the moment he’s standing at the door with his good news still glowing on him.
He leaves at ten-thirty to be early for an eleven o’clock meeting, which tells you everything about the state of him this morning.
Adrian does not leave early for things. Adrian is a man who has kept a Nobel laureate waiting because he was chasing the end of a sentence.
But today he kisses me at the door twice, once on the mouth and once on the forehead, and he says “wish me luck” even though he doesn’t need luck, he needs a coat, and he’s forgotten his coat.
“Your coat,” I say, holding it out.