10. Adrian #2
“I wasn’t going to be kind to you.” She sets her bag on the counter and crosses her arms. “I was going to be kind to you for about four seconds, which is now over. Have you eaten?”
“I’m fine.”
“That is not the question I asked, and you look like a photograph of a man someone left in the rain.” She moves past me into the kitchen and starts opening cabinets with the brisk fury of a woman who cannot fix her son’s marriage but can absolutely make him a sandwich. “Sit down. You’re swaying.”
I don’t sit. I stand there, and the words come out of me before I can decide whether to let them.
“She left, Mom.”
“I know she left. Laura called me. Laura has been calling me every few hours, mostly to keep herself from calling you, which you should be grateful for.” She finds bread, turns around, sees my face, and stops. “Sit. Down.”
I sit.
She puts food in front of me I don’t touch and she leans back against the counter and she looks at me intently, and then she says the thing she actually drove across the city to say.
“That girl held your entire life together with both hands for two years, and you treated her like the furniture.” She says it evenly, which is worse than shouting.
“Like she came with the apartment. Like she’d always just be there in the background, keeping you fed and edited and loved, no matter how little you gave back, because that’s what she did, so that’s what she’d always do. ”
She shakes her head. “She was never obligated to stay, Adrian. Nobody told you that, because you never had to learn it. You’ve been adored your whole life. You have no idea what it costs the people doing the adoring.”
“I know that now.”
“You know it now.” She lets that sit, cruel and true. “Two days too late and one sketchbook short.”
I look down at it in my lap. “You knew about these?”
“I knew she drew. I didn’t know she’d drawn that.” Alani’s voice softens a fraction, just a fraction. “May I?”
I hand it to her. She turns the pages slowly, and I watch my mother’s face move through the same country mine did an hour ago, the drawings of me, the empty tables, and when she gets to the house with the tomatoes her mouth presses into a line and she closes the book very gently and sets it on the counter, out of my reach, as if she’s decided I’ve had enough.
“Well,” she says. “Now you know exactly what you had. That’s the worst way to find out, but at least you’re not pretending anymore.”
“Tell me how to fix it.”
“You can’t fix it. Get that word out of your vocabulary.
” She picks up her bag. “You don’t fix a thing like this.
You earn it back, if you’re lucky, over a long time, in a hundred small unglamorous ways that nobody claps for.
And you may not get the chance at all. She may be gone, and you may deserve that. ”
She lets me sit with it. “But you don’t get to sit up here in a dirty shirt writing yourself a tragedy about it. That’s just the adoration reflex again, wanting to be the interesting one even in your own disaster. Get up. Shower. Be a person.”
I nod, because she’s right, and because it’s the first instruction anyone’s given me in two days that I actually know how to follow.
She gets to the door and stops with her hand on it, and her posture shifts, and when she turns back around her face has gone careful in a way that makes me sit up.
“There’s one more thing, and I wasn’t sure whether to say it tonight, but you’re going to hear it eventually and I’d rather it came from me.
” She weighs it. “I’ve been making some calls.
About the promotion. About how all of this came together, the campaign, the partner, the whole machine that ate your marriage.
And the story Wyatt sold you, about the publisher’s idea, the organic thing, the audience just happening to fall in love with the two of you. ”
She pauses. “It’s not adding up, Adrian. The timeline’s wrong. The money’s wrong. I don’t have the whole shape of it yet, and I’m not going to throw accusations around until I do. But I’d stake a great deal on the idea that this landed on you far less by accident than anyone told you.”
The room goes very still.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’m looking into it, and I’m saying don’t sign anything Wyatt puts in front of you until I’m done, and I’m saying,” and here her voice drops into the register she uses maybe twice a decade, “that Layla girl is not what she has spent twelve years convincing everyone she is. That’s all I’ll say tonight, because I deal in proof and I don’t have it yet.
But you asked me how you got here. Some of it is you, and you should sit in that.
And some of it, I think, was done to you. Both can be true.”
Then she’s gone, the door clicking shut behind her, and I’m alone with a sandwich I’m not going to eat and a sketchbook I’m not allowed to hold and a new, cold thread of a thought that I can’t put down.
Because she’s right that some of it is me.
I’ll carry that for the rest of my life.
But there’s a piece of the last two days that has been snagging on the edge of my mind since Brooke stood in our bedroom with a bag on her shoulder, and I couldn’t look at it directly until my mother handed me the permission.
Layla saw me. She made sure you were turned the other way. She told me to go home before I embarrassed myself.
That’s what Brooke said. In the bedroom. I filed it under the general wreckage because everything was wreckage, but now it stands up on its own and looks back at me.
Layla was at my launch.
Layla saw my wife standing in the back of my launch, uninvited, alone, in a dress she bought herself.
And Layla did not walk twenty feet across a room and tell me.
She did not lean over and say, Adrian, your wife is here.
She steered me the other way, kept my back to the room, and then found Brooke in the crowd and told her to leave.
She kept my wife from me on purpose. At the single worst possible moment.
Then she smiled at me for the cameras.
I stand up so fast the stool scrapes.
I don’t shower or eat. I grab my keys off the counter, and I’m at the elevator before I’ve fully formed the sentence in my head, and the sentence, when it comes, is very simple.
I’m going to see Layla.
***
Layla opens her door in soft clothes with her hair down, and her whole face rearranges when she sees me, surprise sliding into a warmer, more practiced expression, and she says my name the way you say the answer to a prayer.
“Adrian. Oh my God, I’ve been so worried, I heard about you and Brooke and I didn’t know if I should call, come in, come in, you look terrible, let me get you…”
“Don’t.” I stay on the doorstep. “I’m not coming in. This won’t take long.”
She adjusts, smooth as water finding a new level, concern sliding into place. “Okay. Okay. Whatever you need. Talk to me.”
“You saw her at the launch.”
It’s not a question, and I watch it land, watch the exact half-second of calculation behind her eyes before the denial arrives, and it’s the calculation that tells me everything, because an innocent person doesn’t calculate.
“Saw who?”
“Don’t.” My voice stays level, which costs me.
“Brooke. My wife. She was standing in the back of my launch in a dress she bought herself, and you saw her, and instead of walking twenty feet to tell me, you turned me the other way and handed me off to a crowd and kept my back to the room. And then you found her, and you told her to go home before she embarrassed herself.”
I watch her. “She told me. Every word.”
“Adrian.” A soft, wounded laugh. “She’s, okay, I love her, you know I love her, but she’s not in a good place right now, and if she told you I said a thing like that, she’s twisting it, she’s hurt and she’s looking for someone to blame that isn’t…”
“Stop talking.”
She stops.
“For twelve years I have watched you be the warmest person in every room, and I never once questioned it, because why would I? You were her best friend.” I feel the whole edifice of it shifting as I say it out loud.
“And in one night, at the worst moment of her life and the best of mine, you saw a chance to keep us apart, and you took it, without a flicker, and then you smiled at me for the cameras with her standing forty feet behind you in the dark. That’s who you are.
I just needed to say it to your face so you’d know that I know. ”
Her mask doesn’t fully drop, she’s too good for that, but it thins, and for a moment I see the thing underneath it that is not warm at all, that is cold and quick and already recalculating the odds.
“You’re upset,” she says carefully. “You’ve had a horrible few days. You’re not thinking clearly, and you’re going to say things you regret, so let’s not do this now, let’s…”
“It’s over. All of it. The partnership, the appearances, the muse angle, whatever this has been.
Do not contact me. Do not contact Brooke.
If you show up anywhere near either of us, I will make it the most public, most expensive mistake you have ever made.
” I take one step back off her doorstep.
“And Layla? My mother is looking into you. I’d think very hard, if I were you, about what she’s going to find. ”
The cold thing behind her eyes flares, just for an instant, into real fear, and then I turn and walk back to my car and I don’t look back, and it is the first thing I’ve done in two days that doesn’t feel like drowning.
I call the publisher from the car before the anger can cool into caution.
Priyanka picks up on the second ring, delighted, mid-celebration, the numbers still pouring in. “Adrian! My God, have you seen the second-week projections, we are going to have to go back to print again, this is…”
“Pull it.”
A pause. “I’m sorry?”
“The book. Pull it. Stop the print run, cancel the tour, pull it from production, all of it.”