Chapter Twenty-Three
Nadia’s piece ran two days later, above the fold again, a photograph of the great room mid-screening that somebody’s phone had caught better than her own camera had, headline reading MARSH BASECAMP SCREENS THE TRUE STORY, HUSBAND SAYS SO HIMSELF.
It traveled further than the first one had — a regional outlet picked it up by Day Forty-Eight, and by Day Forty-Nine a trade paper I recognized from a dozen award-season mentions ran a shorter version under a headline that used the word “reckoning,” which I understood, reading it over coffee with Birdie’s hair half-braided in my other hand, was the closest the industry ever got to admitting out loud that it had been complicit in something.
I didn’t feel triumphant reading it. I felt, mostly, the bone-deep tiredness of a woman who has finally set down a weight she’d stopped noticing she was carrying, which is its own kind of relief, quieter than the one you’d expect.
Rhys stayed in Larkspur Falls that whole stretch, Day Forty-Six through Fifty, in a way he hadn’t stayed anywhere in this whole reckoning — not a visit with a return flight already booked, but an open-ended presence that unsettled me for the first two days before I understood it wasn’t performance.
He rented a small cabin on the county road rather than assuming a room at the lodge, which I noted and understood as its own kind of respect, a man giving both of us the room to figure out whether close was something we were choosing or something we were defaulting back into out of exhaustion.
He came by most mornings anyway, helped Frankie run the rope wall for a group booked through the weekend, fixed a gutter nobody had asked him to fix, and left most evenings before dinner, unless one of the kids specifically asked him to stay, which they did, more often than either of us commented on out loud.
Elena Kass called on the morning of Day Forty-Seven to confirm the last of the paperwork had cleared both sides’ counsel — the archival license, Juno’s producer credit, the revised chain-of-title language on the one picture the guarantee still covered — and told me, in the same dry economy she’d used on our very first call, that she’d handled a lot of entertainment contracts in her career and couldn’t remember the last time one had actually made her client’s life better rather than merely less bad.
“I don’t say that often,” she said. “Most of what I do is damage control dressed up as a deal. This one’s the other kind.
Congratulations, Hollis. You built the whole shape of it yourself, and I just made sure the language held.
” I thanked her, and meant it, and sat a long moment afterward with the confirmation email open on my laptop, understanding that some fights end not with a dramatic gesture but with a lawyer’s routine confirmation that the paperwork finally says what was always true.
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Juno drove up on Day Forty-Nine, not for business this time, no laptop bag, no printed page folded in thirds — just herself, and a bottle of something decent she set on the trestle table without ceremony, and told me she was heading back to Meridian the next morning to start prep on the picture, the real one, the one with both their names on it now.
“I wanted to see the room again before I left,” she said, looking around the great room the way she had the first time, cataloguing, except this time there was nothing assessing in it at all, just a woman taking a fact in properly before she let herself leave it behind for a while.
“Feels different, empty. I keep picturing it full of folding chairs.”
“It’ll fill up again,” I said. “Priya’s crew starts in three weeks.”
“I know.” She turned the bottle a quarter turn on the table, an old habit I recognized now as hers the way I recognized my own reach for a mug.
“I wanted to say something to you before I go, and I don’t know a version of it that doesn’t sound like a documentary voiceover, so I’m just going to say it plain.
” She looked at me directly, the way she’d looked at me on the rope wall the first week we’d met, testing rather than admiring.
“I came up here the first time half-convinced I was going to have to manage you, the way I’d learned to manage everyone else in this business.
I didn’t expect to end up trusting somebody’s read on a room more than my own.
That’s not a small thing, coming from me. I wanted you to know I know it.”
“I know it too,” I said, and we sat a while longer in the emptied-out great room, the two of us, not needing to fill the quiet with anything more than that.
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I sat both of them down on Day Forty-Eight, at the trestle table, because I had decided somewhere in the last week that Wyatt and Birdie deserved a real conversation rather than another fact delivered in passing on the way to school.
Rhys was there too, which was its own small negotiation we’d had the night before — whether this was a conversation I gave alone or one we built together, and we’d decided, both of us, that it needed to be together, because whatever came next for this family, they deserved to see us decide something as a unit rather than in sequence.
“We want to tell you where things actually are,” I said, “because you’ve both been asking versions of this question for two months, and I think you deserve better than ‘we’re working on it’ one more time.
” Wyatt sat very still, the way he did when a conversation mattered enough that he didn’t trust himself not to interrupt it.
Birdie had the stuffed fox in her lap, gripping it tightly, the way she gripped things during anything that felt uncertain.
“We’re not back together the way we were before the movie came out,” I said, straight out, because I’d promised myself accuracy over comfort a long time ago and I wasn’t going to break that promise on the one conversation that mattered most. “I don’t know yet if we’re going to get all the way back to that, or to something different that’s better, or something else entirely.
What I do know, and what I need both of you to actually hear, is that your dad and I are both choosing, every single day right now, to keep trying, honestly, instead of pretending everything’s fixed because that would be easier for everyone to hear. ”
“I moved into town,” Rhys said, picking it up the way we’d rehearsed, though I noted, watching him say it, that none of the rehearsal showed — just a father telling his kids something true, straight out, without needing the words to sound impressive.
“Not far. Fifteen minutes. I’m going to be here most days, whether your mom and I figure the rest of it out or not, because I already missed enough of your lives being somewhere else, and I’m not doing that anymore, regardless of what happens with the marriage part.
” He looked at Wyatt directly. “That’s not a promise about your mom and me getting back together.
I’m not going to make you a promise I might not keep.
It’s a promise about me being here. That one I can actually keep, and I intend to. ”
Wyatt was quiet a long moment, turning something over the careful, gathering way he turned over most hard information now. “Is it okay if I’m still a little mad,” he asked, “even though tonight was good and the movie was good and you said the true thing on the stage?”
“It’s more than okay,” I said, before Rhys could answer, because I understood this one was mine to answer honestly.
“You get to be mad as long as you actually are mad, Wyatt. Nobody in this family gets to tell you your own feelings have an expiration date just because the adults finally said some hard things out loud in front of a crowd. Being proud of your dad for that speech and still being angry at him for twelve years of not giving it sooner — those are both allowed to be true at the same time. I’d trust you less if you told me they weren’t. ”
Birdie, who had been quiet through most of it, looked up from the fox and asked the question with the flat directness she brought to everything. “Are you going to fight again?”
“Probably,” Rhys said, before I could soften it, and I let him have the sentence because it was the truest possible answer and he’d earned the right to be the one who said it.
“Grown-ups who are actually trying to fix something hard usually do, along the way. What I can tell you is that when we fight now, we’re going to fight about the actual thing instead of around it, and we’re going to let you see that we came back from it afterward, instead of hiding the whole process from you like it wasn’t happening.
You’re both old enough to watch us do this honestly.
I think you deserve that more than you deserve a fairy tale where nothing hard ever happens again. ”
Birdie considered this with the same gravity she gave most adult information, and asked whether the fox could come to the wedding if there was going to be one, which broke something open in the room that had needed breaking, and Rhys laughed, real and unguarded, and told her there wasn’t a wedding planned yet, but if there ever was one, the fox had a standing invitation, and I watched my daughter accept that as an entirely satisfactory answer to a question none of the rest of us had been brave enough to ask directly.
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