15. Brooke
— ? —
Brooke
Layla picks the restaurant. A bright expensive place in the middle of the day where the tables are close and the acoustics carry and everyone is exactly the kind of person who films things.
She’s chosen her battlefield. I let her have it, because I’m not walking in there to win a fight. I’m walking in there to say a thing I’ve been carrying for twelve years, and then I’m going to leave, and I don’t need privacy for either.
She’s already seated when I arrive, camera-ready, hair done, a soft white dress that photographs like innocence, and she stands up when she sees me and reaches for me like we’re going to embrace, and I sit down before she can, and her arms close on nothing, and I watch her file that away.
“Brooke.” She sits too, arranging her face into a mask of the wounded and brave.
“Thank you for coming. I’ve been going out of my mind.
I keep replaying everything, trying to figure out what I did, because one day we’re us and the next day you won’t return my calls and Adrian’s saying these insane things to me, and I just, I don’t understand what happened.
I don’t understand what I did wrong. I was just doing my job. ”
“You were just doing your job,” I repeat.
“The campaign, the promo, all of it, that was work, Brooke. That was a book launch. I was helping your husband, our friend, and somewhere in there it got twisted into this, this story where I’m the villain, and I don’t even know how.
” Her eyes are wet, right on cue, she’s very good, she’s always been very good.
“I miss you. I miss my best friend. Whatever you think I did, can we please just talk about it like the family we are.”
A month ago this would have worked.
Two months ago I’d have already been apologizing, reaching across the table, telling her of course, of course, I know you’d never, I’ve just been so stressed.
That’s the muscle I built over twelve years, the one that makes me the problem so she never has to be.
I can feel it even now, the pull of it, the old reflex reaching for the version where I comfort her.
But I let the reflex die.
“I know, Layla,” I say.
She blinks. “You know what?”
“I know.”
I keep my voice even, almost gentle, because gentle is scarier and because I mean it to be the last calm thing I ever say to her.
“I don’t have proof. I want to be clear about that, in case you’re already planning how to spin this.
I can’t prove a single thing, and I know you’ve made sure of that, because making sure of that is the thing you’re best at.
But I don’t need proof, because you told me yourself.
At the launch. In that corridor, when you thought no one could hear you, you looked me in the face and you told me I was the arrangement and you were what comes after.
You told me to go home before I embarrassed myself. You said it smiling.”
I tilt my head. “So let’s not do the part where you cry and I comfort you. We’re past that part. I know.”
For one second, one single second, the mask slips all the way off.
I’ve been waiting twelve years to see what’s underneath, and now I have, twice, and it’s the same both times, cold and flat and calculating and entirely without warmth, a woman doing math about whether anyone’s close enough to hear.
She checks the room. She finds it too public and she puts the face back on, but slower this time, because she knows I’ve seen.
“You’re not well, Brooke,” she says quietly, switching tactics, going for concern. “You’re pregnant and you’re alone and your marriage fell apart and I understand why you need a villain, I do, but this paranoia, this is not, this isn’t like you…”
“You wanted my husband.” I say it flat, and I watch it land.
“You used our friendship for two years to get close to him, and you spent this whole campaign getting closer, and when I finally showed up to fight for my own marriage you made sure he never saw me, so you could have the field to yourself. That’s not paranoia.
That’s just what happened. I was there. You were there. We both know.”
“You’re being ridiculous. You’re being paranoid and ridiculous and frankly a little scary, and I came here in good faith…”
I pick up my wine.
It’s a full glass, deep red, and Layla’s watching my face so she doesn’t see my hand move until it’s already moving, and I stand up, unhurried, and I pour it down the front of her soft white innocent dress.
Slow, deliberate, a steady red line spreading across the fabric while she gasps and shoves back from the table and knocks her chair into the woman behind her.
The whole restaurant turns, phones are already up. I knew they would be, that’s why she picked this place, and I want to laugh at how completely it’s backfired on her, because she built a stage for my breakdown and I’m not going to give her one.
I’m not shaking. I’m not shouting. I set the empty glass down on the table with a small precise click, and I look at her sitting there dripping merlot down twelve hundred dollars of white silk, and I say the thing I came to say.
“You’ve been chasing my seconds your whole life, Layla. My leftovers. The guy I didn’t want, the part I turned down, the husband I was done with. You’ve never once had a thing that was yours first.”
I pick up my bag. “You can have him. Truly. But understand that you’re not taking him from me, you’re collecting him after I’ve set him down, the same way you’ve collected everything, and some part of you has always known that, and it will eat you alive long after the wine comes out of that dress.”
And I walk out.
I walk out slowly, past the phones, past the staring, past a woman I loved for twelve years who is sitting in a puddle of my wine doing frantic damage control to a crowd she thought she’d stacked in her favor, and I do not hurry, and I do not look back.
I keep my chin exactly level all the way to the door and out into the daylight.
It’s only when the door swings shut behind me and the noise of the restaurant cuts off that my hands start to shake.
But by then no one can see them. That, I’m learning, is the whole trick she taught me without meaning to.
You can fall apart all you want.
Just do it where they can’t sell the footage.
***
By late afternoon the shaking’s long gone, and what’s left in its place is a thing I haven’t felt in months, which is lightness.
I keep waiting for the regret to arrive, on the drive out to the site visit, the firm’s little pool car smelling of other people’s coffee, and it doesn’t come.
I poured wine on my best friend of twelve years in a public restaurant and I feel, if anything, unburdened, the way you feel after you finally set down a bag so loaded you’d stopped noticing you were carrying it.
For twelve years I made myself small around Layla, edited myself, comforted her through the very injuries she was inflicting, and today I said the true thing to her face in the daylight and walked out with my spine intact, and my chest is lighter for it than it has been since before the wedding.
The site is a half-built boutique hotel an hour out of the city, and the walkthrough goes well, better than well, Marisol trusts me with the client now and the client likes the way I see the space, and I stand in a raw concrete stairwell that doesn’t exist yet except in my head and I feel, for a whole afternoon, like a person again.
A woman with a job and a spine and a stairwell to build.
Not the wife of. Not the woman behind. Me.
I’m still riding that feeling on the drive back, the sun going down orange over the hills, the radio low, one hand resting where my chest is lightest, when the car makes a sound it should not make.
It’s a cough, and then a stutter, and then a slow terrible loss of power, the pedal going soft under my foot, and I coast onto the shoulder of an empty two-lane road as the engine dies completely and the dashboard lights up with every warning it has, and then goes dark.
“No,” I tell the car. “No, no, no, not today. Today was a good day. You do not get to ruin today.”
The car does not care about my day. I turn the key and it makes a clicking sound and nothing else. I try again.
Click. Nothing. I’m an hour from the city, on a road with no streetlights, with the last of the daylight bleeding out of the sky, and I have full bars of absolutely nobody I want to call.
That’s the thing that stops me, phone in my hand.
My mother can’t drive out here in the dark. Gemma’s across town without a car. Marisol is my boss, not my roadside assistance. And the firm’s auto club, when I call it, cheerfully informs me the wait is two and a half hours because there’s weather coming.
Weather. Perfect.
I have one more number. I look at it for a long time before I let it happen, and I tell myself it’s practical, it’s just practical, he has a car and he’s the closest and this is an emergency and it does not mean anything.
I don’t even have to call him. He calls me first.
“Hey.” His voice, careful, the way it always is now, testing the temperature. “Your mom said you had a site visit out past the reservoir, and there’s a storm coming in over the hills, I just wanted to make sure you were, are you on the road? Brooke? You’re quiet.”
And I mean to say I’m fine.
I have every intention of saying I’m fine.
But the plain uncomplicated worry in the way he asked gets under the day’s lightness and finds the scared part I’ve been outrunning since the engine died, and what comes out instead is, “The car died. I’m on the shoulder past the reservoir and it’s getting dark and the auto club is two hours out. ”
A pause, and then his voice changes, drops the careful and picks up a quicker urgency. “Don’t get out of the car. Lock the doors. What mile marker, can you see one?”
“Adrian, you don’t have to…”
“What mile marker, Brooke?”
I tell him. And he’s already moving, I can hear it, keys, a door, an engine.