6. Liliana
— ? —
Liliana
The flashes come so fast the world turns into a strobe, and I can’t see. I can’t think, I can’t do anything but throw a hand up in front of my face and stumble backward into a wall of bodies that won’t move.
“Liliana, look here!”“Did you know about Hallie? Did you know?”“Give the cameras a smile, darling, come on!”
They press in from every side, cameras where faces should be, shouting over each other, and I turn one way but there’s also another lens. Turn the other way again and there’s a different one while the velvet rope is at my back and there’s nowhere left to go.
My breath is coming in these thin, useless sips that don’t reach the bottom of my lungs. I’m going to suffocate right here on a red carpet, on camera, and they’ll sell the photos of it.
Then I hear it over the shouting, the whip of fabric cutting through the air, and darkness drops over me like a hood.
A jacket. His jacket.
I’d know the smell of it anywhere; cedar, mint, and him. Then his arm comes around my shoulders and his whole body folds over mine, turning me into his chest, shielding me from all of it with the broad line of his back.
“Back off.” Tristan’s voice is above my head, harder than I’ve ever heard it. “I said back off, all of you. Now.”
“Tristan! Tristan, is the marriage over?”
“Move.”
He doesn’t ask again. He just carves a path straight through them with his shoulder, one arm locked around me, the other shoving lenses out of our way, and I let him steer me because I have nothing left to steer myself with.
My face is buried in his shirt. My feet move because his move. The flashes keep firing, blind and relentless, but they can’t reach me under here, under him, and some animal part of my brain registers only that the thing hurting me can’t get through.
“Watch her head.” A door. A hand on my nape guiding me down. “Careful, careful. I’ve got her.”
I fall into leather as the door slams. And all at once the shouting cuts to nothing, the flashes die against glass so dark it turns the whole world to shadow, and the car pulls away from the curb into a silence so sudden it rings.
I don’t remember the drive. I know he’s saying my name, low and steady, over and over, and I know at some point his hand finds mine in the dark and I don’t have it in me to pull away.
But the rest of it blurs. The city sliding by, the turns, the stop, the walk through a lobby I don’t see, an elevator, a hallway. Shock has wrapped me in cotton and I let it, because the alternative is feeling all of this, and I’m not ready. I’m nowhere close to ready.
The next thing I know with any clarity is the click of a hotel room door closing behind us, and the two of us alone.
I walk ahead of him into the middle of the room and drag air into my lungs like I’ve just broken the surface of deep water.
The cotton is peeling off me. I can feel it going, the numbness thinning out, and underneath it everything is starting to burn. I shove both hands into my hair and press hard against my skull, trying to hold my own head together and breathe.
Just breathe. The room too bright, too quiet, and too full of him behind me.
“Lily…” His voice is careful, wrecked. I hear him take a step. “Baby, are you okay? Talk to me. Please, just… Are you hurt anywhere? Did they…”
His hand touches my arm.
Every raw nerve in me detonates at once.
I spin and my palm cracks across his face before I’ve decided to do it, the sound of it shocking in the quiet, and my hand stings all the way up to the wrist.
Tristan rocks back a half-step. His head turns with the force of it. And then he just stands there, cheek reddening, and he doesn’t lift a hand to it, doesn’t say a word, doesn’t defend himself at all, and somehow that’s worse.
“Don’t.” My voice comes out shaking. “Don’t you dare ask me if I’m okay. Don’t you dare.”
“Okay…” He swallows. “Okay.”
“How could you?!” It rips out of me, louder now, my eyes already flooding, my whole body vibrating with it.
“How could you do that to me?! In front of everyone, Tristan! In front of everyone, you stood up on that stage and you humiliated me! You made me a punchline! Do you understand that?! Do you have any idea what tonight did to me?!”
He opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.
For the first time since I’ve known him, the man who can charm thousands of strangers has absolutely nothing to say, and he just stands there taking it, his eyes glassy, his hands hanging useless at his sides.
So I ask him the thing that’s been clawing up my throat since the second verse.
“Are you having an affair with her?” My voice cracks down the middle. “With Hallie. Is that what this is? Is that what I’ve been too stupid to see?”
“What?” His head snaps up, and the horror on his face is instant and complete. “No… God, no, Lily, never. I would never do that to you, I swear to you. There is nothing, there has never been anything…”
“You told me it was handled.”
The words come out low and terrible, and they stop him cold.
“You held my face nights ago and you swore to me that the song was old and it was nothing. That it was going away. And I believed you. I let it go.” My breath stutters and I push through it.
“I even let it pass the first time, when it leaked and it went viral and the whole internet was laughing at me, calling me pathetic… I swallowed all of it, because I trusted you when you said you’d fix it. ”
“Lily…”
“And this is what I get?” The tears are streaming now and I don’t bother wiping them.
“You said you fixed it, Tristan. You said you’d do better.
Well, I don’t think standing on a stage and singing a love song about another woman while I sit in that audience looking like a fucking fool counts as doing better! ”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen.” He says it fast, desperate, taking a step toward me with his hands half-raised. “Lily, please, you have to let me explain, because I swear on my life it did not go the way it looked…”
“Then explain.” I fold my arms so he can’t see them shaking. “Go ahead. I’m dying to hear it.”
He drags in a breath as if he’s bracing for a hit.
“I never leaked that song. I told you I found it was trending way too late, that’s the truth.
I’m not sure who accessed and posted it.
But these last two weeks, that night I made a promise, I was getting the label to kill it.
They agreed. They were pulling it down, filing the copyright claims, taking the videos offline, making it disappear.
I was handling it, exactly like I told you. ”
“That’s not…”
“Let me finish. Please.” His voice shakes.
“Tonight was supposed to be different. There was a plan… a whole plan, and at the very end, it went wrong up there, in a way I didn’t see coming, and I got put in a position where I…
where it felt like there was no way out of it that didn’t blow up into something ten times worse.
I made a call in about three seconds with the whole world watching, and it was the wrong one, I know it was the wrong one…
I knew it the second my hands hit the strings. ”
“You keep saying that.” My voice is flat. “That it felt like there was no way out. What does that even mean?”
He looks at me, and there’s a wildness in his eyes, a man trying to explain a fire while he’s still standing in it.
“I thought finishing it was the way to keep it from blowing up. I thought I was protecting you.” He rakes a hand through his hair. “I thought if I’d stopped, it would have been a thousand times worse because of how the industry works, Lily. But it was a mistake and…”
“Bullshit.”
The word drops out of me flat and final, and it stops him mid-sentence. He blinks as if I’ve slapped him a second time.
“Do you hear yourself right now?”
I take a step toward him, and everything I’ve been holding back all night comes up my throat at once.
“Do you actually hear the words coming out of your mouth? A plan, the industry, the machine, the way it works… You’re standing here in the wreckage of our marriage giving me a press strategy.
” I drag a hand down my wet face. “Even now. Even at the very end of it, you’re still worried about the story.
About the backlash. About your fucking career. ”
“That’s not what I…”
“I didn’t need you to manage the media, Tristan.”
My voice cracks and I let it.
“Don’t you get that? I never needed you to handle the press or protect the narrative or keep the leak from doubling. They were going to tear me apart either way. There was no version of tonight where I walked out clean.”
I press my hand flat against my own chest, hard, as if I can hold the pieces together from the outside.
“For once, I just wanted you to choose me. To look at that stage and that crowd and all of it and think: no, not tonight, tonight my wife matters more. And be damned with everything else. That’s it. That’s all I ever wanted. Is that really so hard?”
He stares at me as if the question physically hurts. His jaw working, his eyes shining.
“No,” he says hoarsely. “It’s not hard. It should never have been hard.
Lily, I’m sorry… I am so sorry, you have no idea, I made a mistake up there in the space of a breath and I have been sick about it since the second it happened…
It looked terrible. It was terrible. It’s my fault, all of it, and I will spend as long as it takes making it right, but I need you to believe me about one thing. ”
He takes a step closer, his voice dropping, urgent and raw. “Hallie is nothing to me. She has never been anything to me. That song, it isn’t what you think it is.”
“Stop.” My eyes sting. “Stop with the excuses. Don’t lie to me. Not right now.”
“Please, just let me say it once…”
His hands come up, pleading.