15. Hendrix #2
“Hiding from what?” Her voice is flat. Testing. Handing me nothing to lean on.
“From you.” The word costs me the whole of what I have. “From how much I feel for you. From the size of it. Because the size of it terrifies me in a way I have never known how to say out loud without sounding like a man building an excuse out of his own failure.”
“Then don’t make excuses.”
“I’m not. I’m telling you why I ran, because you deserve to know, and the reason is ugly, and it’s this.”
I make myself look at her. Straight at her, in the blue light, with nothing left to hide behind.
“I love you so much that the loving makes me stupid. It makes me hide. It makes me build walls out of deadlines and manuscripts and the endless grinding work of being Hendrix Carver, because being Hendrix Carver is safe, and being your husband is not. Being your husband means standing still. It means being in the room. It means looking at you and feeling the entire weight of what I feel and not flinching away from it. And I flinched, Imogen. Every day for three years, I flinched.”
The rain hammers the skylights above us. In the blue dark her face hasn’t changed, but her hands have.
They’ve come loose from the crossed-arm barricade and moved to grip her own elbows, fingers pressed hard into the fabric of her sleeves, holding herself together in a way I recognize because I have been doing the same thing my whole life.
“The novel I couldn’t write,” I say, because stopping now would be so much worse than finishing.
“A year of blank pages. A year of sitting in front of a screen making nothing while the cursor blinked and the deadline came and went, and Shane and Tiana and every last person kept asking me when. Do you want to know why it wouldn’t come? ”
“Tell me.”
“Because I stopped looking at you.”
My voice breaks on the last word. A small fracture, right down the middle of it, and I don’t try to smooth it over.
“The book was always going to be about a thing I couldn’t name.
A feeling, an ache. The kind of truth that only shows itself when you’re paying close attention to the right person.
For a year, I wasn’t paying attention to anyone and I couldn’t walk through the door.
Because walking through the door meant feeling all of it at once.
And feeling all of it at once meant admitting that I needed you more than I needed the work, and needing you that much it consumes me.
I’m not good with emotions. Maybe because even if I didn’t want to, unknowingly, I begin to look too much like… ”
“Your father.”
Two words. She says them quietly, and the precision of them goes through me hard enough that I lose my next breath entirely.
“Yeah.” It comes out barely a sound. “My father. Loving my mother from across a distance. Losing her by inches, year after year, while he told himself that providing for her was the same as being with her. I spent my whole life terrified of turning into that man, and the terror walked me straight into his exact footprint. Same absence, same excuse. Same quiet, respectable ruin of the one person who actually mattered.”
The gallery is silent except for the rain.
Imogen is looking at me, and her expression has changed. The guard is still there, the crossed posture, the straight spine, the readiness of a woman who has been let down too many times to lower anything on the strength of one speech in the dark.
But her eyes are doing a different thing now.
They’re seeing me. Just me.
She’s looking at the man underneath all of it, and the man underneath all of it is terrified and honest and so far gone in love with her that the confession has left him with nothing at all to hide behind.
The silence holds for a long time, the silence of a woman deciding whether to believe a man who has handed her every reason in the world not to.
I wait. I have learned, finally, at a cost I will be paying for years, that waiting is the only thing I can offer her that costs me what it should.
The words are out. The truth is on the floor between us in the blue light.
What she does with it was never mine to decide.
“You said there was more,” she says eventually. Quiet, testing again. “At the studio. Before Bridget showed up. You started to tell me about a plan you’d figured out. About the leak?”
“There’s more.”
“Then tell me. All of it. I also want to know.”
I reach into my jacket and take out my phone.
The screen lights up in the blue dark and throws a pale rectangle across the space between us, and I open the photographs I took in the archive room. The whole ugly architecture of a plan built to blow up my marriage for someone else’s headlines.
“The leak wasn’t an accident.” I hold the phone out to her. “It was bought. Shane leaked the manuscript on purpose, on a schedule, to a list of outlets picked for maximum reach. And the person who paid him to do it was Bridget.”
Imogen takes the phone from my hand. Our fingers brush in the pass, a contact so brief and incidental it should mean nothing, and it doesn’t mean nothing, a spark of warmth against my knuckle that I feel all the way up to my shoulder and have to ignore.
She scrolls. Slowly. Her face in the pale glow is intent, focused, the expression of a woman taking a stack of pieces she’s been carrying separately for weeks and watching them lock, one after another, into a single terrible picture.
“How long?” she asks.
“Since before the leak ever went public. Shane and Bridget had the whole thing built. The timing, the outlets, the interview placement. Even the cut. Shane called in a favor with the producer at Whitmore’s show to make sure the broadcast kept my confession and lost my defense.
Every piece of what happened to us was purchased and scheduled before it ever touched us. ”
“The interview…” Her voice has gone very controlled, which is worse than if it shook. “The version I saw. The one where you admitted the book was about her and never said one word about me.”
“I said everything about you. Everything I told you afterward that I said, about you being the most important person in my life, about the book meaning nothing next to you. They cut it. Shane made sure they cut it, because the version without my defense was the version that sold Bridget’s story.”
“And the comments. The strangers finding my accounts…”
“That part was probably organic. But it was fed by a leak designed from the first day to frame me as the pining ex and you as the woman I settled for. Every cruel thing the internet decided about you, every caption, the whole shape of the story they told, it started with a single payment from Bridget to Shane.”
Imogen sets the phone down on the bench between us, screen to the wood. She’s quiet for a long moment, her eyes fixed on the painting across from us, a big abstract thing in grays and blues that the emergency light has turned into a canvas made entirely of shadow.
“Everything I went through.” Her voice is low. “The comments, the strangers calling me a rebound. Bridget’s interview, where she wished the family well and let everyone believe you never got over her. All of it was paid for?”
“All of it.”
“What happened to you was horrendous, and the fact that I wasn’t standing next to you for one second of it is the thing I am going to carry for the rest of my life, whether you forgive me or you never do.”
The rain has eased from a hammering to a steady wash against the glass, the kind of rain that settles in for the night, and the sound of it fills the gallery and makes the quiet between us feel a little less like standing exposed on a stage.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” she asks. “If you suspected Shane before, that was weeks ago.”
“Because the last time I brought you an explanation, it landed like an excuse. The interview was cut, the network edited it, and every true thing I said came out sounding exactly like a lie, because I’d already spent a year teaching you not to believe a word out of my mouth.”
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, close enough now that I could reach her if I had any right to.
“I didn’t want to bring you a suspicion, Imogen.
I wanted proof. I wanted the receipts in my hand, so that when I finally told you, there was nothing left to argue with.
No spin. No interpretation. Just the facts, laid out, undeniable. ”
“So you waited?”
“I learned to wait.” A breath that’s almost a laugh, with nothing funny under it. “Slowly. Badly. A year too late to be any use to us. But I learned.”
She’s quiet for a while, turning all of it over.
Her fingers rest on her own knee, and in the low light I can see the small lift of her ring finger, a millimeter off the fabric, the dancer’s habit I wrote to her about in the letter she never answered. She has no idea she’s doing it.
She never has any idea she’s doing it. It’s one of the ten thousand things about her I have spent three years learning by heart and saying to no one.
“There’s one more thing,” I say.
Her eyes come up to mine. Wary. Braced, the way you brace for another blow when you’ve already taken a night full of them.
“It isn’t about Shane. It isn’t about Bridget.” I reach into the other inside pocket of my jacket, not the phone pocket, the one over my chest, the one I’ve kept a thing pressed against my own heartbeat in for longer than I’ve kept anything in my life.
My fingers find the ribbon.
Thin. Frayed at one end. Faded from the pink it started as to a softer, older shade that could be blush and could be memory.
Satin, worn smooth by years of being tied and untied and wound and unwound, wrapped around an ankle that needed the support in the exact way only a dancer’s ankle ever does.
The same faded pink, I realize, holding it out into the blue light, as the roses I’ve been leaving on a sidewalk for weeks.
The flower and the ribbon, two relics bleached by the same amount of time, from the same night, from the same reason I have never once been able to say to her face.