3. Brooke #2
I don’t even mean it as an accusation against Layla. God, she’s the only one showing up. That’s the whole miserable joke of it.
The person keeping me company through the slow-motion collapse of my marriage is the person selling books with my husband, and she’s better at loving me right now than the man who promised to, and I can’t decide if that’s a comfort or the loneliest sentence I’ve ever thought.
I butter a slice while it’s warm, because she told me to, and I eat it standing over the sink at two-thirty in the morning, and it’s good, and I’m alone, and both of those things are true at once.
Gemma calls some time after, which is a whole event, because Gemma doesn’t call. Gemma texts in fragments and expects you to assemble them. A phone call from my cousin means she’s decided a text won’t survive the trip.
“Okay,” she says, no hello, which runs in the family apparently. “I’m going to ask you a question and you’re going to answer it like a person and not like a press release.”
“Good afternoon to you too.”
“Where’s your husband, Brooke?”
I laugh. It comes out wrong, a little too fast, a little too high. “He’s at an editing session. Or an interview. Honestly I’ve lost track, the man needs a color-coded calendar and a handler, it’s a whole thing.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“That’s the answer, though.”
“It’s the answer to a different question.
” There’s a pause, and I can hear her deciding how hard to push, which for Gemma is its own kind of tenderness.
“I’ve seen the promo stuff. It’s everywhere, you can’t not see it.
And every time it’s him and Layla, him and Layla, big smiles, hand on the arm.
And I keep waiting to see you somewhere in it.
In the background, in a photo, anywhere. And I don’t.”
“It’s a book campaign, Gem. I’m not on the cover. I’m the wife. The wife doesn’t do the promo, that would be weird.”
“I’m not talking about the promo.” Her voice gentles, which is worse, honestly, than if she’d stayed cold. “I’m talking about you. You sound like you’re doing that thing you do.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you make yourself small enough to fit into whatever room somebody left you, and then you tell everyone the room is a great size.”
And that lands somewhere I wasn’t guarding, right under the ribs, because it’s exactly true and I’ve never heard anybody say it out loud before, least of all me.
“That’s very poetic,” I manage. “Did you read that on a candle?”
“Brooke.”
“I’m fine, Gemma. Really. It’s a hard few weeks, the launch is enormous, he’s stretched thin, it gets better after.” I hear myself use the sentence, everybody’s sentence, the door that leads outside, and I hate that it’s in my mouth now too. “It’s temporary.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Because from where I’m standing it looks like your husband found a shinier co-star and you’re in here baking bread for one and calling it fine.”
The joke I reach for dies before it gets out, because there’s no joke that survives being seen that clearly. And I don’t tell her about the bread or the kiss he turned away from, or the sketchbook full of empty chairs.
I don’t tell her any of it, because saying it to Gemma would make it real in a way I’m not ready for, and as long as I don’t say it out loud it’s still just a hard few weeks and not the thing it’s actually becoming.
“I’ve got to go,” I say. “I love you. I’m fine. Stop worrying.”
“I’m going to keep worrying,” she says. “That’s the job. But okay. Go. Call me when you’re ready to say the real thing.”
She hangs up before I can pretend I don’t know what she means.
***
I should have just gone to bed.
That’s the lesson here, the one I never learn. When you’ve survived a day being seen that clearly, you do not, under any circumstances, open the app.
But still, I open the app.
It’s late, and I’m tired, and I tell myself I’m just checking messages, and my thumb does the thing thumbs do, and there it is at the top of my feed, posted an hour ago, already climbing.
It’s Layla’s post. A behind-the-scenes shot from the shoot, the kind that’s supposed to look candid and takes forty tries to get.
Adrian is laughing at a joke off-camera, head tipped back, that real laugh, the one I used to be the cause of.
He looks happy. He looks lit up. He looks like the man who used to lose his page because I moved.
And Layla’s caption, under all that:
Best work partner I could ask for. ?? Can’t wait for you all to see what we made.
I don’t even have to scroll to the comments to know what’s in them, but I scroll anyway, because I’m a person and I have a thumb and apparently no survival instinct left at all. And they’re worse than the last time.
There’s a hashtag now, their two names smashed into one word, and people are using it like it’s a real thing, like they’re a real thing. Somebody’s made an edit, the two of them set to music, slowed down, and it has more views than anything I’ve ever made in my life.
I look at my husband laughing in my best friend’s post, tagged with a name that isn’t mine, and I think a very calm, very clear thought.
Everyone can see it. The whole internet can see it. Two thousand strangers saw it three weeks ago and now it’s a hashtag, and the only two people who can’t seem to see it are the two people it’s actually happening to.
I close the phone and I set it face-down on the nightstand where I can’t reach it.
Then I get my sketchbook, and I open it to the empty chair, and I pick up my pencil, because it’s the one thing left in this apartment that still does what I tell it to.