24. Geo
— ? —
Geo
The garment bag arrives with a courier who needs a signature, which means I have to put down the knife and the half-chopped onion and answer the door for a package I didn’t order.
I’m not expecting anything. The invitation to my mother’s anniversary party came last week, cream cardstock with gold embossing, Linda’s handwriting on the envelope.
I already know I’m going. I already know Harrison is coming with me.
We’ve had the conversation, the careful negotiation of what it means to walk into a room where Vivian will be, where Richard will be, where a room full of people will watch us like we’re performing for them.
What I don’t expect is the gold spilling into my hands when I unzip the bag.
My breath catches.
“Ooh.”
Val abandons her coloring book, scrambling off the couch to see. “Is that for a party?”
“It’s for Grammy’s party.”
“Are you gonna wear it?”
I don’t answer right away. My fingers find the note tucked into the garment bag, Harrison’s handwriting slanting across the cream paper.
For Saturday. If you want it. If not, that’s okay too. I just wanted you to have the choice, H
The gold dress. The one I wore to the studio the night he said “nice” and turned back to the piano like I wasn’t even there. The one that’s been hanging in a closet for over a year, a reminder of everything he threw away. Everything I tried to be and wasn’t enough.
He had it cleaned. Pressed. Sent to me like a question.
I stand in my kitchen with the fabric pooling through my fingers, remembering the woman I was when I bought this dress. Hopeful. Trying so hard. Still believing that if I just showed up pretty enough, present enough, he’d look at me the way he used to.
He hadn’t.
But he’s looking now. He’s been looking for months.
“Mommy?”
Val tugs at my sleeve. “Mommy. Are you gonna?”
I think about the last time I put this dress on.
How I’d spent an hour on my hair, my makeup, choosing earrings that caught the light.
How I’d walked into that studio feeling like maybe, maybe this time he’d see me.
How he’d glanced up and said “nice” and gone back to his music, and I’d stood there in gold silk feeling like I was disappearing.
I think about Harrison now. The way he looks at me across the breakfast table, the way he asks permission before he touches me. The way he’s spent months proving that he sees me, that he’s always seen me, that he was just too stupid and broken to act like it mattered.
“Yeah, baby.”
I fold the dress back into the bag. “I think I am.”
I pick up my phone. Type three words.
I’ll wear it.
I can almost feel him stop breathing on the other end.
***
He comes to the door twenty minutes early, which I clock and say nothing about. When I come down the stairs in the gold dress, he’s crouched retying one of Val’s sparkly shoes. He looks up mid-knot and just stops. Forgets the shoe. Forgets the knot. Val has to say his name twice.
“You’re gaping,” I say.
“I’m very aware.” He straightens slowly, eyes traveling up the length of gold like he’s paying off a debt. “I said one word the last time you wore this. I’ve had a year to think about the word I should have said.”
“Which is?”
He crosses the room, close but not touching, and drops his voice under Val’s chatter.
“Can’t say in front of our daughter. Ask me again tonight when she’s asleep.
” His thumb barely grazes the strap at my shoulder, there and gone, and my whole arm lights up like a struck match.
“You look like the best decision I ever made and the worst one I ever wasted. Come on. Let’s go be brave. ”
I grew up coming to the Nguyens’ house on the cliff, and I still can’t walk up the drive without feeling twelve years old and out of place.
I used to come here for holidays, for summers, for the awkward family dinners where Vivian and I tried to figure out how to be sisters.
The house is ridiculous, all glass and white stone, photographed more often than it’s lived in.
My stepfather bought it a few years after he married my mother, back when the market was good to him.
I haven’t been back since before the scandal.
Harrison’s hand is warm in mine as we walk up the drive. Val is between us, holding both our hands, wearing the pink dress she picked out herself and the sparkly shoes she’s been showing everyone for a week.
“This house is big,” Val announces.
“It is,” I agree.
“Is Aunt Vivian here?”
My step falters. Harrison’s hand tightens on mine.
“Yes, sweetheart. Aunt Vivian is here.”
“Oh.”
Val takes a moment with that, the way she does when the adults have obviously left a part out. “Is she still in trouble?”
“Aunt Vivian and Mommy are figuring some things out. That’s grown-up stuff.”
“Okay.”
Val is quiet for a moment. Then: “Can I have cake?”
“After dinner.”
We reach the front door. Inside I can hear music, conversation, the hum of a party in full swing. A room full of people who watched my marriage implode on the internet, who read the headlines and picked sides, who have opinions about me and Harrison and everything we’ve done wrong.
“Ready?”
Harrison asks.
“No.”
“Me neither.”
We go in anyway.
The moment we walk through the door, I feel the shift.
Conversations stutter. Heads turn. Phones appear, held casually at angles that aren’t fooling anyone. I can see them doing the math: the wife and the husband and the gold dress, the same color as the headlines that destroyed them.
Beside me Harrison keeps his face neutral, keeps my hand in his, keeps us both walking.
Linda spots us first. She crosses the room like she has personally decided tonight is going to be fine even if it kills her, and pulls me into a hug that lasts longer than protocol demands.
“You came,” Linda says into my hair. “You actually came.”
“Of course I came. It’s your twentieth anniversary.”
Linda pulls back, her eyes flicking to Harrison. Her expression is complicated, not quite forgiveness and not quite condemnation.
“Harrison. I’m glad you could make it.”
“Thank you for having me,” he says.
Val tugs on Linda’s dress. “Grammy! I wore my sparkly shoes!”
Linda scoops Val up, and for a moment everything is normal. A grandmother, a grandchild, the ordinary joy of family.
“Vivian is here,” Linda says quietly, once Val has run off to find Richard. “I asked her to keep her distance tonight, but I can’t control what she does.”
“Thank you for telling us,” I say.
“Don’t thank me yet.”
Linda’s eyes are wet. “I don’t know how tonight is going to go. But I wanted you here. Both of you. Whatever else happens, I wanted you here.”
We move into the party. A whole room pretending not to watch us.
I escape to the second floor after an hour.
The party is exactly as exhausting as I expected. Polite smiles from people who definitely have opinions. Conversations that skirt around everything that matters. Harrison’s hand on my back, steady and warm, the only thing keeping me grounded.
I need five minutes alone. Just five minutes to breathe.
I’m heading for the bathroom when I hear Patricia’s voice around the corner.
“…can’t believe Linda let her bring him. To a family event. After what he did to Vivian.”
I freeze. My hand is still on the hallway wall.
“She’s her daughter, Pat. What was she supposed to do, ban him?”
“She could have asked Geo to come alone. For one night. For Vivian’s sake.”
Patricia’s voice drops, taking on that particular tone of concerned gossip that isn’t concern at all.
“You know what Vivian was like before all this. Bright and driven. She was going to be somebody. And now she can’t book a session anywhere.
She flinches when people recognize her. That’s what’s left of her. ”
“Vivian made her own choices, Pat.”
“She was twenty-six and in love with a man twice as famous as she’d ever be. He pursued her.”
Patricia’s laugh is ugly. “And Geo just parades back in on his arm, wearing that dress like she won something. She didn’t win. She’s just too stubborn to admit she lost.”
I step around the corner.
Both women freeze. Patricia’s face cycles through surprise, embarrassment, then settles on defiance. She lifts her chin like she’s daring me to challenge her.
“Geo. We were talking.”
“I heard.”
The silence stretches. The other woman, someone’s wife whose name I don’t remember, has the decency to look uncomfortable. Patricia just stares at me.
“Then you heard the truth,” Patricia says finally. “Someone in this family needed to say it.”
“Say it to my face, then.”
I step closer. I’m taller than Patricia in these heels, and I use every inch. “Say that your niece recorded my husband in a hotel room and sent it to my phone at midnight so I’d leave him. Say that part out loud, Patricia. I’ll wait.”
Patricia’s mouth opens and closes and opens again.
Nothing comes out.
“That’s what I thought.”
I smooth the gold fabric at my hip, feeling the silk slide under my fingers, feeling like a version of myself I forgot existed. “Enjoy the party.”
I turn to walk away.
And find Harrison standing at the end of the hallway.
He’s been there long enough to have heard the last thirty seconds. His face has gone very still. I’ve only seen him do that twice and both times somebody got fired.
“Patricia,” he says. Not loud, not angry. Just cold, in a way I’ve never heard from him before.
Patricia actually takes a step back.
“You’ve spent the last year telling everyone who’d listen that I broke Vivian’s heart. That I used her. That I’m the villain of this story.”
He walks toward her, slow and deliberate. “And you’re right. I did. I made choices I’m going to regret for the rest of my life. But so did she. And so did you, every time you chose to blame my wife instead of having an honest conversation about what actually happened.”
“Harrison, that’s enough.”
“I’m not finished.”