8. Brooke
— ? —
Brooke
I should leave.
That’s the sane thought, the one standing at the back of my own head with its coat already on. I got my answer.
My husband walked out into the light and never once looked for me. The whole question I came here to ask, is answered, and done. A smarter woman would already be in the car.
Instead I stay, because I have never once been able to look away from a wreck, and this specific wreck is mine.
The press moment stretches out across the front of the room, all lights and choreography, and I stand at the back near the bar where the good sense of the lighting designer has left it dim, and I watch my husband do the thing he does better than anyone, which is be brilliant in public.
Adrian talks about the book in that low even voice, the one he used to read to me in, and the whole room leans toward him. I used to lean too. I know exactly how it feels to be the thing that voice is aimed at. I just don’t remember the last time it was aimed at me.
A man steps up beside them with a microphone, some host, some handler, the kind of person whose whole job is momentum, and he says the thing.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the man of the hour, and I think we can all agree the woman who brought his story to life, the author and his muse.”
The author and his muse.
The room applauds. Cameras go off in a wave, and the sound of them is a physical thing, a stutter of light across the front of the room, and I feel each one somewhere behind my sternum.
I stand twenty feet away in a dress I bought myself and earrings my husband forgot he gave me, and I wait for one of them to correct it.
To laugh it off. To say, oh, no, muse is a strong word, or she’s a colleague, or anything at all that leaves a door open where a wife might fit.
Neither of them says a word.
Adrian smiles, that public smile that’s a cousin of the real one, and Layla does the thing where she ducks her head like she’s flattered, like it’s all so much, and she puts her hand flat on his chest for half a second in mock protest, oh stop, and the cameras eat it, and nobody in this entire glittering room finds it strange, because to all of them it isn’t strange.
It’s the story. It’s been the story for weeks.
I’m the only person here reading a different book, and I wrote half of it.
I think about the character. Vivienne.
The woman I sat on his desk and fixed, whose sadness I told him was performed until he made her real.
They just called Layla the woman who brought her to life, in front of the whole room, and the truth is that if any one person in the world brought Vivienne to life it was me, in the dark, in the margins, for free, and I will never once get to say that out loud, because saying it would make me exactly the woman that host just implied I’m not.
The foolish wife who thinks she matters more than she does.
Standing there, I can’t stop once it starts.
It isn’t even about Layla. I need to say that to myself, standing in the dark at the back, because there’s a small ugly flare in my chest watching Layla’s hand rest on my husband’s like it belongs there, and I catch it and I stamp it out, because that flare is exactly the thing everyone already thinks I am.
The jealous wife, the cloud in the corner.
Layla is doing her job. This is a book campaign, it’s theater, it’s the whole reason the launch is this big, and if I let myself resent my best friend for being good at the thing she was hired to do, then I really am the small person the whole internet has decided I am.
So I put the flare down. I’ve had a lot of practice putting it down.
Twelve years of friendship earns her that much, and more, it earns her all my doubt every single time, because you don’t get to keep a person that long by believing the worst of them over a feeling you can’t even name.
No. The thing breaking open in me, standing here, has his name on it.
Because I watch him up there in the light, glowing, gracious, giving that room the full weight of the attention I have been starving for since the promo started, and I understand with a terrible flat clarity that this is who he is now.
Adrian has walked into the biggest night of his life and it did not once occur to him that his wife might want to be in it, that she might be standing right here, that there is a version of tonight where he pulls me up into that light beside him instead of leaving me to find out from a gossip account whether I’m still married.
A waiter stops in front of me with a tray of champagne, the first person to look at me in twenty minutes.
“Are you with the publisher or the talent, ma’am?”
“Neither,” I say. “I’m nobody.”
He blinks, unsure if it’s a joke, and moves on. Behind me two women are talking, close enough that I catch it whole, not even lowering their voices, because why would they, nobody in the back of this room matters.
“…told you they’d end up together. You can just tell. Did he ever even have a wife, or was that a rumor?”
“He’s married, I think. She’s just never around. Which, honestly, if that were my husband up there, I’d be around.”
They laugh just like the others earlier. Same old sentiment, same old gossip, and one of them clinks the other’s glass, and they drift toward the front for a better view of my husband, and neither of them will ever know they said it to the wife herself, because I’m not a person to them.
I’m a gap in the story where a wife is supposed to be.
That’s the answer I came here for.
That’s the one I let myself finally have. It was never really about whether he’d choose Layla over me. It’s simpler and worse than that. He didn’t choose anyone over me. He just stopped remembering I was a person who could be chosen.
My hands have gone cold. I set my untouched drink on the bar because I don’t trust them.
I should leave now.
Truly. I have my answer, clean and complete, and a smarter woman would already be walking. And I’ve decided about him, I have, it’s done, whatever this marriage was is over and I’m not going to stand in a beautiful dress waiting for a man who forgot to look.
I even turn, halfway, toward the exit.
My body starts the motion and that’s the moment the crowd shifts, a small tidal thing, people leaning to let a photographer through, and the gap opens up clean across the whole floor between me and the front of the room, a straight unbroken line from the bar to the lights.
Across it, in the exact second I’ve decided to go, Layla lifts her head from the cameras and looks out into the dim at the back of the room, right down that open channel, straight at me.
My best friend finds me.
For a second neither of us moves. Despite a room full of people who adore her, my best friend catches sight of me standing where I wasn’t expected, and her eyes go wide, and my stupid heart lifts, because that’s Layla.
That’s my Layla, and some exhausted part of me thinks maybe she’ll come over and stand with me and I won’t have to be alone in the back of this thing after all.
Twelve years. If there’s one person in this whole room who’s on my side, it’s her.
She leans up and says a few words into Adrian’s ear, and he laughs and lets her turn him, a hand light on his shoulder, steering him a quarter-turn toward a cluster of important-looking people with their hands already out to shake his.
His back comes around to the room.
Away from me.
Then, with him safely handed off to a knot of admirers, Layla peels away and starts making her way toward me through the crowd, greeting people as she goes, radiant.
A small flat thought surfaces before I can stop it, watching her turn him so smoothly away from the room, from me: she’s keeping him from seeing you. It arrives fully formed, certain, ugly. And I do what I always do with that voice. I shove it back down.
She’s working the room, that’s all, she’s a professional, she’s handing him to the people who matter so he doesn’t get cornered, it’s the most normal thing in the world and I am the only one determined to read a knife into it.
God, listen to me. My best friend crosses a room to see me and my first instinct is to accuse her of a crime. This is exactly what he’s turned me into, a woman who can’t trust the one person who’s never given her a reason not to.
So I bury it, the way I’ve buried it for months, and by the time she reaches me the guard I’ve held all night has come down an inch, because here comes Layla, here comes the one person in this whole room who’s mine.
She reaches me and takes both my hands as if she’s thrilled.
“Brooke.” Bright, delighted, pitched exactly loud enough for the two people nearest us to hear. “Oh my God, you came! Come here, let me look at you… you look incredible.”
“Thanks, Layla.”
“No, come here, out of the crush, I can’t hear myself think.”
She loops her arm through mine, warm and familiar, and steers me, the way she’s steered a hundred nights out with me, away from the lights and the noise, toward a quiet pocket near a service corridor where the sound drops off and the crowd thins to nobody.
It’s such a Layla thing to do, pull me somewhere we can actually talk, that I let her, and for one second I feel almost normal, almost as if this is any other party and she’s just my friend rescuing me from a bad corner.
Then we’re alone, more or less, and she turns to face me, and her smile stays exactly where it is while her eyes flick once over my shoulder to confirm no one’s close, and when she speaks again the volume’s the same but the temperature isn’t.
“So what are we doing here, exactly?”
“…I came to my husband’s launch.”
“Mm.” She says it lightly, almost fond. “Except you’re not on the list. I’d know, I helped build it.
” A little laugh, for anyone glancing over.
“And you knew that. Did you not see the schedule? Yet you put on a dress and came anyway, to stand in the back, uninvited… at the biggest night of his life.”