2. Liliana #3
Tristan: I’m so sorry, baby. Something came up here and I can’t get away. Tristan: Rain check? Tomorrow, I promise. Tristan: I love you.
I read it three times. Four. I count the words, willing them to reveal some hidden meaning, some secret code that translates to I’m on my way and You matter more than whatever this is.
There’s nothing hidden in them. They’re exactly what they appear to be: another broken promise wearing the disguise of a future one. It’s from the same mouth that promised me earlier, looking right at me, telling me he’d make it all up to me.
‘I love you.’
The words stare back at me and I wait to feel something. The anger, the hurt, the familiar hot sting behind my eyes. Instead there’s just a flat, spreading nothing, as if some wire in me finally came loose. I read the I love you again and it doesn’t land anywhere.
It used to fix things, those three words.
Now it’s static.
My thumbs move on autopilot. It’s okay, I type. I understand. I stare at the lie sitting there in the little bubble, then delete it, letter by letter, until the box is empty again.
I try again. Okay. Love you too. Delete.
In the end, I don’t send anything at all.
A single tear slips down my cheek before I even register that I’m crying, and I wipe it away fast with the back of my hand, angry at it, angry at myself for the wasted mascara and the wasted hours and the wasted, stupid hope.
I look around at all of it, the candles I lit for no one, the wine breathing for no one, the dress he loves and the dinner going cold in his honor. I got dressed up and brave for a man who couldn’t clear one evening.
“God, I’m so fucking pathetic,” I whisper to the empty room, and then I actually laugh, a small broken sound, because the whole scene is so absurd it circles right back around to funny.
A grown woman in a gift dress, crying over garlic tenderloin, in a penthouse the size of a hotel.
I think about all the tomorrows he’s promised me.
I think about the folder on my phone where I’ve started saving screenshots of these texts, not consciously, not on purpose, just…
evidence. Proof that I’m not imagining this.
Proof that the distance between us is real and growing and I’m not crazy for feeling invisible.
Then I blow out the candles and watch the smoke curl up toward the ceiling, carrying my expectations with it.
As I’m scraping the untouched dinner into the trash, my phone buzzes again.
For one stupid, hopeful moment, I think it’s Tristan, that he changed his mind, that he’s on his way, that the beef tenderloin can be reheated and the candles can be relit and everything can still be saved.
But when I grab my phone, the name on the screen isn’t my husband’s.
It’s Hallie’s.
Hallie: Girl, have you SEEN the trends?!
I frown at the message.
Hallie Wilder was my best friend in college. We latched onto each other freshman year and somehow never let go, and we’re still close now, all these years later.
These days she models a little, does the influencer thing, floats around the edges of the music industry with her pretty face and her thousands of followers, never quite famous but always somehow in the room where things happen.
She’s warm and effusive and knows every piece of gossip before anyone else, which is exactly why her next message makes my stomach clench.
Hallie: a track called First Light just leaked !! everyone’s losing their minds !!Hallie: is that about you???
I don’t know what she’s talking about. First Light isn’t a song I recognize, not from the album Tristan’s been working on, not from his back catalog, not from anything he’s played for me in the months of late nights and early mornings and “I’ll tell you about it later, baby, I promise.”
So I open the app with shaking hands.
The trending list hits me across the face. His name, right at the top, climbing by the second.
#FirstLight sits above it, and under that, a wall of posts stacked one on top of the next, each louder than the last.
@caitlinhearts: THE LYRICS??? i am on the FLOOR who is she !!@honeyfordays: tristan everett you sly dog this is NOT about his wife lmaooo@bittersweetbex: “golden hair” ok so def not liliana then ???? make it make sense
Someone’s made a meme already, split-screen, a cartoon detective with a corkboard and red string on one side, the lyrics on the other.
Another one just says POV: you’re Liliana Everett hearing this for the first time over a clip of a woman blinking in slow motion.
Thousands of likes. My stomach turns over.
Then the mean ones come, because there are always mean ones.
@ranivibes: imagine being married and finding out online with the rest of us. couldn’t be me ??@lolaonline: she probably knew. rich wives always know and stay for the money.
I keep scrolling because I can’t make myself stop, and then I see it. A clip, pinned to the top of the thread, already passed around tens of thousands of times.
I press play before I can talk myself out of it.
Tristan’s voice fills the kitchen.
It’s younger, rougher, recorded in some room with bad acoustics a long time ago, but there is not a doubt in my body about whose voice it is. I’d know it anywhere. I’ve fallen asleep to it. It’s my husband, years before he was mine, singing with a rawness he doesn’t let himself have anymore.
“Golden hair in the morning light,reckless laugh, my warning sign.One long summer, in over my head,gone by morning, better off, I said…”
My whole body goes cold as I listen to the words.
Because I have dark hair. I have never in my life been called reckless. There was no long summer that we shared. We met in the worst week of mine, in a black dress at my father’s funeral, in the dead of winter.
Every line of this song is a door opening onto a room I’ve never been in, a version of him that existed before me, aching over a girl who is the opposite of me in every way that counts.
This isn’t about me.
The crack that’s been forming in my chest for months splits wide open.
My phone buzzes again.
Hallie: Lil? You okay? Call me.
And then another notification, the app this time, someone tagging me in a post:
[ @LilianaEverett girl… we need to talk about who First Light is actually about because it’s definitely not you ?? ]
I lower myself onto one of the kitchen chairs, still in my evening dress, still surrounded by the wreckage of a dinner he didn’t come home for.
The song plays on a loop in my head.
Golden hair. Reckless laugh. One long summer.
I don’t know who it’s about yet but all I know is she isn’t me, and I know my husband wrote a whole aching song about her, buried it, carried it around all these years, and never once said a word to me about it.
Little did I know, as I got dressed tonight, thousands of strangers were already three drinks deep into a song about the woman who came before me. The whole world heard it before I did.
The whole world is out there right now, laughing, tagging me, turning my marriage into a punchline and I was here. Waiting foolishly, lighting candles for a man who was never going to walk through that door, feeling grateful he’d promised me a spare evening.
My hand tightens around the phone until the case creaks, the screen still lit with their laughter, and I can’t make myself put it down. I can’t stop reading. It’s the digital equivalent of pressing on a bruise, over and over, just to prove it still hurts.
Then I stand, and I don’t know if it’s to walk away or to be sick, but my hip clips the edge of the table on the way up. The vase rocks. I reach for it a beat too slow, my hands clumsy and far away, and it tips off the edge and hits the floor.
Glass everywhere. Water. The white lilies he always says remind me of him, scattered across the hardwood in a spreading puddle, stems bent, petals already bruising.
I stand over the wreckage in my beautiful dress and I don’t move to clean it up.
There was already a crack in this marriage months ago, quiet and hidden, so small I kept telling myself I was imagining it.
Tonight it finally breaks all the way open, and there’s no pretending I can’t hear it anymore.