8. Brooke #2
She tilts her head, and the fondness curdles just slightly at the edges, so slightly I could tell myself I imagined it. “That’s a bit much, don’t you think? Even for you.”
Even for you.
I laugh it off, because that’s what you do, it sounds almost as if she’s joking. “It’s a book launch, Layla, not a state dinner. I don’t need a ticket to watch my own husband.”
“See, that. That right there.” She points at my face, gentle, like she’s helping me.
“That thing you do where you make it about ownership. My husband. My launch. You come into his world and you bring this… this heaviness, and everyone can feel it. He’s finally happy, Brooke.
The book is enormous. And you can’t just let him have one clean night, you have to plant yourself in the back to remind everyone there’s a wife at home he’d rather not think about. ”
That one gets under, because it’s cruel. It’s aimed and it has the shape of a thing a friend would never say, and I feel the first real crack run through the floor I’ve been standing on all night.
But I still reach for the version where I’ve misheard her. I still want to.
“That’s a horrible thing to say.”
“Is it? Or is it just the first honest thing anyone’s said to you in months?” She’s still smiling. To anyone watching we’re two old friends catching up. “I’m trying to help you… Somebody should. Look at him up there, and look at you back here, and tell me you don’t already know how this ends.”
That’s when it stops building and simply arrives, all at once, standing in a dead corridor with the party roaring twenty feet away.
I’m not that fucking stupid.
For some time now, I have had a small ugly suspicion about this woman and I have hated myself for it.
Deleted the texts, apologized to her in my own head, called myself paranoid and jealous and cruel for even letting it form.
I gave her every doubt. I chose her over my own gut every single time, because she was my best friend and you do not throw that away over a feeling.
But now she is standing in front of me, letting me see it, letting me, because she’s decided it doesn’t cost her anything anymore.
The feeling was never paranoia. It was recognition.
I have heard this exact voice under all the warm ones for a long, long time, and I turned it down every single time because turning it up meant losing her.
Every loving thing she ever said to me was said in this voice. I just refused to know it.
“Twelve years,” I say. My voice comes out steadier than I am. “Was any of it real, or was I only ever the way in?”
And there it is. The only real crack in her, not mine.
Layla’s smile holds but a stillness settles behind her eyes, and for one second the performance stops entirely, and she looks at me with a flat, cold honesty that is worse than any lie she’s ever told me.
“He was always going to end up with someone like me,” she says quietly.
“You have to know that. Look at him. Look at all of this.” A small gesture at the lights, the room, the life.
“You were the arrangement, Brooke. I’m what comes after.
You were never going to be able to keep him, so really, if you think about it, I’m doing you a kindness.
I’m just moving up the part you already knew was coming. ”
She squeezes my hands, still smiling, and lets them go.
Here is the trap of her, the one I can feel closing even now.
Every word she just said was a blade, and every word was deniable.
If I marched to the front right now and repeated this whole conversation to the microphone, it would come out of my mouth sounding exactly like the thing they’ve all decided I am, the bitter wife inventing a villain to explain why she lost.
There are no witnesses, there is no proof.
There is just her word, radiant and beloved, against mine, jealous and absent, and she knows it, and she built it that way, because she builds everything that way.
“Now be a good girl and go home before you embarrass yourself. He hasn’t seen you. Let’s keep it that way. It’s better for everyone, especially you.” A last radiant beat, for the room. “So good to see you, babe. We’ll do coffee soon.”
Layla turns and walks back toward the light, toward my husband, easy and unhurried, already smiling at someone across the room, and that is the thing that breaks the cold clean surface I’ve been holding together this whole conversation.
Because she gets to just walk away. She gets to say all of that and then stroll back into the party like she set down a coffee cup, and I am supposed to stand here with my emptied hands and take it, the way I’ve taken everything for months.
No.
The heat comes up my neck so fast it makes spots. My hands, which have been going cold all night, close into fists at my sides, the new nails biting little crescents into my palms, and I feel every soft absorbing thing in me finally catch fire at once.
Twelve years. A hundred lunches and a history of friendship. But what? All along she wanted my husband, all this time she’s been scheming to replace me. When did this even start? Why is she doing this and how could she do this to me?
All this, for what? A man, my husband.
It’s as if she’s a stranger right now.
I take a step after Layla even if I don’t even decide to.
My body just goes, fists clenched, some blistering thing already climbing my throat that is going to come out as her name or as a scene or as my hand on her shoulder spinning her around in front of every camera in this room, and I want it, God, I want it and I don’t care anymore.
I want to be the volatile wife for once, I want to make her flinch.
Suddenly, the room tilts.
“Shit, what…”
It comes up under me without warning, the same gray swim from this morning, except now it has the whole night behind it.
The heat, the crush, and the champagne I didn’t drink.
The food I didn’t eat and the twelve years I did not let myself see, and my stomach heaves over hard enough that I taste copper at the back of my teeth.
My foot lands wrong. I grab the edge of a high table and hold on, knuckles white, the whole glittering room swinging slow around me, tipping and sliding at the edges.
For one bad second I am sure I’m going to be sick right here on the polished floor of my husband’s triumph, which would at least be honest.
Then it passes. It drains out of me and leaves me clammy and shaking and, underneath that, strangely, terribly clear.
Because the dizziness caught me by the wrist.
It stopped me half a stride from doing the one thing that would have handed them the whole story, the wife who lost it, the wife who made a scene, the jealous crazy woman they’ve already decided I am.
I would have walked right into the frame Layla built for me and pulled it shut myself.
Two weeks ago I would have.
Two hours ago, even, I came here to.
But the plan died somewhere in the last five minutes, in a stranger’s voice coming out of my best friend’s face, and I am done handing my dignity to people to see if they’ll give it back.
Adrian hasn’t seen me. She made sure of that, she said so, she’s been making sure of it for weeks.
And I am not going to cross this room and tap my own husband on the shoulder and say surprise, I exist, so he can be startled and apologetic in front of the cameras and then go back to the muse on his arm the second I turn my back.
Not anymore.
If he wants to find me, he knows where I live. He put me there.
So I just turn and go, straight down the service corridor she pulled me into, away from the lights, my heels loud on the cheap floor back here where the venue stops pretending, and the whole way my mind is doing one clean furious thing, which is deciding.
Tonight I am going back to that penthouse, and I am going to sit in the dark at that kitchen table in this dress, and I am going to wait for my husband to come home from his triumph, and I am going to say the thing to his face that I have been swallowing for months.
He gets to hear it. He does not get to keep being the man who never had to know.
The corridor spits me out near a side exit, and I push through into the night, and the cool air hits my face, and I do not slow down. Around the front the press line is still going, flashes strobing the dark, and I have to cross the mouth of it to reach my corner, so I put my chin down and move.