2. Liliana
— ? —
Liliana
Days ago I woke up to a song and a man who couldn’t keep his hands off me.
This morning I wake up alone.
That’s how it goes now. The good days arrive as a dream I get to visit, warm and golden that it’s almost convincing, and then the clock runs out and I open my eyes back to the real version of my life, the one where the other side of the bed is cold and my husband is already gone.
The realization settles over me slowly, the way it does every morning now.
First, the absence of warmth beside me, then the cold stretch of empty sheets, and the familiar ache in my chest that I’ve learned to ignore. I reach across the bed anyway, my fingers searching for what they already know isn’t there, and find nothing but the indent where his body should have been.
The pillow still smells of him, clean and impossibly familiar, the scent I used to bury my face in when he was on tour and I missed him so much I couldn’t breathe. Now he’s in the same city, sometimes the same building, and I miss him anyway.
My phone glows on the nightstand. I already know what it says before I reach for it.
Tristan: Studio ran late. Didn’t want to wake you. Love you.
I stare at the words for a long moment, watching them blur and refocus as my eyes adjust to the light. I’ve memorized this text. Every variation of it, every slight change in wording that still amounts to the same thing: I’m not there. I wasn’t there. I won’t be there.
The timestamp says 3:47 a.m. He sent it almost four hours ago, which means he either crashed at the studio or came home and left again before I woke up.
I don’t know which option is worse.
Love you too, I type back, and then I delete it because the words taste false.
It’s not because I don’t love him. I do, desperately, the way you love what’s slowly killing you. It’s that the words have started to feel hollow. We’re both just going through the motions now, reciting lines from a script we wrote back when we actually meant them.
Still, I send it anyway.
Then I get up, shower in a bathroom that’s too big for one person, and try to remember what my life was before it became a series of empty rooms.
Breakfast on the terrace feels different now.
Hollywood is still the same, sprawling out beneath a sky that’s trying too hard to be cheerful, but everything else has changed.
The strawberries in the bowl are overripe, soft and mushy because I bought them thinking Tristan might be home for breakfast and then he wasn’t. The coffee went cold an hour ago while I was staring at nothing, and I can’t summon the energy to make a fresh pot.
Worse, I miss the version of him when it’s just the two of us. The clingy one, the one who used to trail me from room to room and tuck himself against my back while I brushed my teeth and complain when I got out of bed before him.
The world gets the golden boy on the magazine covers. I got the man who couldn’t fall asleep unless some part of him was touching some part of me.
Now I’d give almost anything to be smothered like that again, and the quiet in this penthouse just keeps reminding me how much room he used to take up.
I scroll through the app instead, because apparently I enjoy torturing myself.
His feed is all polish these days, curated by a team, posted on a schedule.
A magazine shoot loads first, Tristan in black and white, jaw tipped down, eyes doing that smolder that isn’t even his real face, the one they build in a studio with three lights and a fan.
The caption is something about the album.
Twelve thousand likes before I’ve finished reading it.
I make the mistake of opening the comments.
@everettsgirl97: i would sell an ORGAN for this [email protected]: not me replaying this 40 times, he’s unreal@sarahloveslive: saw him in Dallas and cried the entire show. THE [email protected]: someone check on his wife because I’d never recover ??
That last one almost makes me laugh.
Someone check on his wife.
Oh, if only they knew.
There’s a video next, a clip from some show, Tristan under the lights with a guitar and thousands of people screaming the words back at him.
He looks lit up from the inside. Happy in a way that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with that stage, that noise, that ocean of people who love a man they’ve never met. I watch it twice.
The Tristan in that video, the Tristan the whole world gets, is a stranger wearing my husband’s face. Magnetic. Untouchable. Everybody’s.
The one who mumbles half-finished songs into my neck at dawn doesn’t exist out there. He only exists here, behind closed doors, and lately he barely exists here at all.
He asked me once, a few weeks back, half-asleep and honest, whether all of it bothered me. The solo events, the distance. The way the world got so much of him and I got the leftovers.
Of course not, I told him. This is your dream. I knew what I was marrying.
But I lied.
I lie about it all the time, and I keep lying, because the truth is I don’t have it in me to be the woman who asks him to want it less.
I fell in love with this exact thing, the fire, the hunger, the way music lights him up from the inside.
Taking him away from a stage would be like clipping something vital out of him, and I could never.
So I swallow it. I tell myself that missing him is just the tax on loving a man built for a thing bigger than one marriage, and most days I can almost make the math work.
Although some days I can’t.
Today, I can’t.
His publicist said the solo appearances were better this way.
“You two are always together,” she’d said, as though it was a problem, as though loving my husband was some kind of PR crisis. “People are starting to talk. It looks codependent, not cute. Let him do some events solo. It’s good for both of your images.”
I wanted to ask her when my image became a problem that needed managing.
I wanted to ask her why being in love with my husband was suddenly a liability.
Instead, I smiled and nodded and let myself be managed, because that’s what good wives do, apparently.
That’s what supportive partners do when their husbands are building empires.
I close the app before I can torture myself with a single frame more.
He’s happy, I tell myself. He’s thriving. This is what you wanted for him.
But there’s a small, treacherous part of me that whispers back: He’s happy without you. He’s thriving without you. When did you stop being part of the equation?
I push the strawberries away. I’m not hungry anymore.
***
The Canyon Café is crowded for a Tuesday, but Danica managed to snag us a table in the back corner where we can talk without being overheard.
She’s already nursing a sweet tea when I arrive, her keen eyes tracking me as I weave through the tables, and I can tell from her expression that she’s noticed what I was hoping to hide.
“Well,” Danica says as I slide into the booth across from her, already narrowing her eyes at my face. “That didn’t take long.”
“What?”
“The glow. It’s gone.” She stirs her sweet tea and studies me over the rim. “Last I saw you, you were floating around that benefit like a woman on her honeymoon, all doe-eyed and disgusting. Now look at you. Back to the sad eyes already, huh?”
“I’m just tired.”
“You’re just tired.” She says it flat, unconvinced. She’s never bought my bullshit, not since we were kids and I tried to convince her I wasn’t afraid of the dark. “You told me it was passing, Lil. The rough patch. You said you had him back.”
“I thought I did.” The words come out smaller than I mean them to. I reach for the menu I’ve already memorized so I don’t have to watch her watch me. “Turns out I had him for exactly one good day. Then the studio swallowed him again and I’m right back where I started. Can we order? I’m starving.”
It’s an excuse. The thought of food turns my stomach. But she lets it go, at least for now, and we flag down a waitress and order things I know I won’t finish, a salad for me, a burger for her, sweet tea for both of us because some things never change.
“So,” Danica says once the waitress is gone. “How’s the empire builder?”
The question lands with the force of a punch I wasn’t braced for. I take a long sip of water to buy myself time. Danica loves me. She also has opinions, loud ones, and I’m not sure I can handle them right now.
“He’s good. Busy. You know how it is before a release.” I keep my voice light. “Everything’s chaos. Ford has him booked solid, studio sessions, press, promo. He barely has time to breathe.”
“When’s the last time you actually saw him? Awake and present, not passing in a hallway.”
I open my mouth to answer and realize I can’t remember. There was a dinner recently, I think, before Ford called about some emergency and he left before we’d finished. There was a night I fell asleep on the couch waiting up and woke to an empty house and a text.
The good day at the benefit, and then nothing. Days have started to blur into one long stretch of his absence.
“He’s building something huge,” I say, because it’s easier than admitting the truth. “This album is everything to him. I need to be supportive.”
“Lily.” Danica sets her tea down. “Stop that. Right now.”
“Stop what?”
“Doing that thing where you talk yourself out of your own feelings before anyone else can.” Her voice softens, but the edge underneath it doesn’t.
“I’m not going to sit here and let you convince yourself you’re being dramatic.
You’re not. You’re lonely in your own marriage and that is a real thing to be, so quit apologizing for it. ”
My throat goes tight. “He’s a good man, Danica.”