17. Brooke
— ? —
Brooke
I’ve decided the trick to surviving being the most hated woman on the internet is to simply stop looking at the internet, which turns out to be both very simple and completely impossible.
Simple, because I turn my phone off. I power it down all the way, the little apple, the black screen, gone, and I put it in the kitchen drawer at my mother’s under the takeout menus and I do not take it out.
Impossible, because the internet does not require my participation to keep talking about me.
I don’t have to see it to know it’s there, humming away in the background of every room, in the way the barista at the coffee place near the firm looks at me a beat too long, in the way a woman on the bus keeps glancing between me and her phone until I get off two stops early.
I go to work. That’s the thing I hold onto.
Marisol doesn’t say a word about any of it, just puts more on my desk, harder projects, the good kind, and when a client makes a comment in a meeting she cuts him off so cleanly and so coldly that he apologizes to me twice and I fall a little in love with her.
Work is the one place where I’m not the wine woman. I’m the woman who can fix your lobby flow. I go there and I build things that don’t exist yet and for eight hours a day I get to be that instead of a thirty-second clip.
Then I come home to my mother’s, and I eat dinner, and I do not turn my phone on, and I get through another day.
Two days of this. Two days of grimly, deliberately not-looking, which is its own kind of exhausting, holding a door shut against a flood.
On the second night Gemma shows up with a stack of printer paper and a lighter and a look on her face I recognize from childhood, the one that meant she’d decided we were doing a thing and I didn’t get a vote.
“Backyard,” she says. “Bring the marshmallows.”
“Gem, it’s forty degrees out.”
“Backyard, Brooke.”
So I follow her out to my mother’s little backyard in the cold, and she’s got the metal fire pit going, the one my dad used to use, and she’s holding the stack of paper, and I realize as I get closer that it’s printed, pages and pages of it, small text in columns, and my stomach drops.
“Please tell me that isn’t what I think it is.”
“It’s the comments.” She says it cheerfully, feeding the first page into the fire. “The worst ones. I went through and I copied out every single vile thing those anonymous cowards said about you, and I printed them, all forty pages, and we are going to burn every last one.”
“Gemma, that’s insane. Why would you read those, why would you print…”
“Because you’re not going to, and somebody should look right at the worst of it and then set it on fire, so it’s a thing that got burned and not a thing that lives in your head.”
She feeds in another page. It curls and blackens.
“This one said you have, and I quote, ‘the energy of a woman who keys cars.’ Into the fire. This one called you a ‘jealous freak.’ Into the fire. This one, oh, this one’s a masterpiece, this one said Layla was ‘too pretty to be lying,’ as if beauty were a polygraph, into the fire it goes. ”
And I don’t know when it happens, but somewhere around the tenth page, watching my furious cousin narrate the internet’s cruelty in a game-show-host voice and then incinerate it one sheet at a time in my dead father’s fire pit, I start to laugh.
It comes out wrong at first, closer to crying, and then it rights itself, and then I’m properly laughing, the kind that bends you over, the kind I haven’t done in weeks.
“‘Too pretty to be lying,’” I wheeze. “Give me that one. I want to burn that one myself.”
“That’s my girl.” Gemma hands me the page and I feed it into the flames and we watch it go, and my mother comes out with the marshmallows and three sticks and doesn’t ask what we’re burning, and the three of us sit around a fire pit full of my hate mail eating marshmallows in the cold, and it is, against every possible odd, one of the better nights I’ve had in a month.
“You know it’s not true,” Gemma says, quieter, when the pages are gone and it’s just embers. “All of it. You know that.”
“I know it’s not true. Knowing it’s not true has never once stopped people from believing it.
” I poke the fire. “That’s the part nobody warns you about.
Being right doesn’t save you. Layla’s beautiful and she cried on television and I poured wine on her, and that’s the whole story as far as the world’s concerned, and no amount of me being actually right is going to outrun a pretty woman’s tears. ”
Gemma doesn’t argue, because she can’t, because I’m right, and being right, as we’ve established, changes nothing.
We let the fire die and we go inside and I sleep better than I have in days, and I think that’s the end of it, the fire, the marshmallows, the grim endurance settling into a new normal where I’m just a woman the internet decided to hate and I learn to live under it.
That’s the version of the night I fall asleep believing.
***
The landline rings at seven-forty the next morning, which is already strange, because nobody calls the landline except telemarketers and my mother’s book club, and I’m at the counter with my coffee when my mother answers it and goes quiet and then holds the receiver out to me with a look I can’t read.
“It’s Adrian,” she says. “He called the house phone. He said you’d have yours off.”
“Hello.”
“Brooke.” His voice is careful, wound tight with a feeling underneath it, controlled excitement or dread, I can’t tell.
“I need you to do a thing for me, and I need you to not ask me why until it’s done, because if I explain it first you’ll tell me not to, and this one isn’t yours to tell me not to. ”
“That’s an alarming way to start a phone call.”
“Turn your phone on. This afternoon. Around three.” A breath.
“A thing is going to go live at three, and I need you to see it when it does, and I need you to be sitting down, and I need you to know before you see it that whatever you feel about me, whatever’s still broken between us, this isn’t me trying to fix that.
This isn’t a move. I want to be very clear that this is not me trying to win anything. ”
“Adrian, what did you do?”
“Three o’clock.” I can hear him not-answering on purpose.
“Turn your phone on at three. And Brooke, whatever happens after, however the day goes, I need you to remember one thing, that you were right. About all of it. You were right the whole time, and you’re about to have the receipts, and I’m sorry it took me this long to help you get them. ”
And he hangs up, before I can push, before I can demand, before I can tell him not to do whatever reckless enormous thing he’s clearly already done, and I stand in my mother’s kitchen holding a dead landline for the second time in my life, staring at the drawer where my phone has been powered off for two days.
“What did he do?” my mother asks.
“I have no idea,” I say. “But he told me to sit down for it.”
And some part of me, the part that has spent two years learning not to hope, whispers that I should leave the phone off, protect myself, not let him do this to me again, whatever this is.
The other part, the newer part, the one that watched a man burn down his own career and build me a house out of cardboard and drive an hour for fruit he was allergic to, reaches for the drawer.
Three o’clock. I have until three o’clock to decide whether I trust him.
It doesn’t take me that long.
At three o’clock I’m sitting at my mother’s kitchen table with my phone face-up in front of me, powered on and it does not so much light up as detonate.
The notifications come in a wave, and then a flood, and then a thing that isn’t countable anymore, the little number on every app spinning up past ninety-nine and then just giving up and showing a plus sign, and I set the phone down and I breathe, and I do the thing Adrian told me to do, which is find the one thing at the center of it before the noise buries it.
It’s a statement. His statement, posted under his own name, on his own account, the account he never uses, and it’s long, and it’s plain, and there’s no photo, no drama, just words on a white background, and I read them with my mother reading over my shoulder and neither of us breathing.
“Over the past several days, a narrative has circulated about my wife, Brooke, painting her as a jealous or unstable woman who sabotaged a professional relationship and attacked a friend without cause. I’m writing to correct the record, because she has been too dignified to defend herself and I was, for two years, too absent to deserve her. I can at least do this.
“The promotional partnership between my book and Layla was not organic, and it was not the publisher’s idea.
It was arranged. Layla paid my former manager, Wyatt, to engineer it, to position herself beside me, and to shape the campaign so that she became the public face of the work.
I have the record of those payments. My mother spent the last month assembling it, quietly and carefully, and it is not ambiguous.
This was not a coincidence that got out of hand. It was bought.”
I stop reading. I have to stop reading, because the room has gone strange and swimmy, and my mother’s hand has landed on my shoulder.
Because I knew.
I knew in the corridor at the launch when Layla told me I was the arrangement.
I knew when I poured the wine. I have known in my body for months that this woman engineered her way into my marriage on purpose, and every single time I let myself know it I also called myself paranoid, because I never had the one thing that makes knowing count.
Proof. A thing outside my own gut that says, no, you weren’t crazy, it was exactly as bad as it felt.
Now it’s here, on a white screen, in my husband’s plain flat words. It was bought. Not paranoia. Not a jealous wife’s fantasy. A transaction, with a record, that my mother-in-law dug out of the dark while I was busy convincing myself I’d imagined the whole thing.