7. Tristan #2
“Tristan…” Ford’s voice chases me across the room, and there’s an edge of real panic in it now. “Tristan, think about this! If you walk out that door tonight you are making the biggest mistake of your life, do you understand me?! You cannot come back from this one!”
I don’t stop. I don’t turn around.
Because I’ve already made the biggest mistake of my life tonight, and it wasn’t the one he’s talking about.
***
Getting home takes twice as long as it should.
There’s a knot of paparazzi camped outside the building, so I have the driver loop around and I go in through the service entrance as if I’m a thief in my own life. Hood up, head down, and heart pounding.
Two weeks ago, I’d have signed autographs on the way past.
Tonight, I press myself into the corner of the freight elevator and pray nobody recognizes me, and the whole way up, I keep my wife’s ring closed inside my fist because it’s the only solid thing left in the world.
Then the doors open on our floor, and I let myself into the penthouse as the silence hits me.
I’ve come home to an empty apartment before. But it was never empty like this.
There was always the warmth of her somewhere in it, a light left on, a mug in the sink, the low sound of her music through a door, the knowledge that she was here even when I’d failed to be.
Now there’s nothing. The rooms are dark and cold and they don’t expect me. The whole place has the stillness of a house that someone has already grieved and left.
I walk through it slowly, and every step makes it more real.
The kitchen where she cooked me a dinner I never showed up for. The couch where I found her crying in the dark. The window where she must have stood a hundred nights watching the road for headlights that didn’t come.
I move through the ruins of my own marriage as if I’m a man touring a place he used to live, and I understand, distantly, that I am seeing it clearly for the first time.
This is what she came home to.
Every night. This exact quiet, this exact cold, while I told myself I was building her a gift.
I make it as far as the bedroom before my phone rings.
The screen lights up in my hand, and for half a heartbeat, some desperate, stupid part of me hopes.
It isn’t her.
Hallie Wilder.
Her name sits there glowing in my palm, and I feel my lip curl. She’s still on my phone only because she was Lily’s best friend and we never really had a conversation before.
I let it ring out. It dies, and three dots appear almost instantly as the text lands.
Hallie Wilder: I heard she left. Are you okay, Tris? Hallie Wilder: Do you want to talk? You shouldn’t be alone tonight. Hallie Wilder: I’m here if you need someone.
I read it twice, and a slow, clean fury moves through me.
The audacity of her. The sheer nerve, to sit in that front row and then to text me hours later playing the soft place to land.
Her hair. It snags at me now, sitting here in the dark with her message glowing in my hand. I saw her tonight, in the chaos out front, when I was shoving through that mob of cameras searching for Lily.
Hallie was off to the side of it, unbothered, letting a reporter angle a phone at her face, and I barely spared her a glance because all I cared about was finding my wife before they ate her alive. But it registered, even then, even in a full-blown panic.
The hair. Gone gold, pale and loose. The last time I saw Hallie out anywhere with my wife she was nowhere near blonde. How convenient that she turned up tonight looking like a lyric I wrote a lifetime ago.
And she shouldn’t have been there at all. She didn’t get any invite to my VIP. Which means she was there the only way she could have been, through Lily. My wife gave her that seat.
I’ve made mistakes lately. God knows I’ve made more than my share, enough to lose her.
But being a fool about my own marriage and being blind to what’s right in front of me are two different things, and whatever else I am, I’m not stupid.
Not like this. Definitely not anymore, not now, with everything finally coming into focus too late to have saved me from any of it.
I can read what’s underneath these three tidy little sentences, the concern that isn’t concern, the door held open, the patient hand reaching into the wreckage she helped make.
It makes my blood run hot. Every word of it, because every word drags Lily back in front of me, ruined and disappearing into a crowd.
Cutting her off costs me nothing. There is no version of my life that needs Hallie Wilder in it.
So I block her number. Maybe I should have done it a long time ago.
It doesn’t fix anything, and I’m not fool enough to pretend it does. What I did to Lily is mine. Blocking Hallie doesn’t unbreak a single thing I broke tonight.
But I don’t have room for this woman. She isn’t a door I’m going to stand around agonizing over. There’s only one thing that matters now, and it’s Lily, getting her back, becoming someone who deserves to.
Hallie gets nothing from me. Not my anger, not one more second of my attention.
However, I make the mistake of opening my notifications.
I thumb the screen awake and it floods, hundreds of them, my name attached to words I can’t stand to read but can’t stop reading either.
@stormiewrites: First Light girl vs the wife he settled for.
no contest.@notyourbabygirl_: he had her sitting there while he sang about his EX ?
? diabolical !!@certifiedhater99: imagine being so forgettable ur husband writes a hit abt da girl before u ??@lunaeclipsed: poor Liliana honestly. dead wife walking IJBOLLL
They’re not even the worst ones.
The worst ones are the ones about her, the strangers dissecting my wife, ranking her against a woman she trusted, deciding out loud and in public that she was never enough, that she was a placeholder, that she was the boring safe choice a man makes when he can’t have the real thing.
Every single one of them is a lie. Every single one of them exists because of me. Because I couldn’t clear a calendar, couldn’t finish a conversation, couldn’t stand on a stage and refuse.
She is worth ten thousand of the woman they think that song is about, and the entire world has it exactly backward, and it’s my fault, and there is no press release in the universe that fixes it.
The rage comes up so fast and so hot I don’t decide to do it.
I throw the phone at the wall as hard as I can. It hits with a crack and the screen splinters into a spiderweb, dropping to the floor. Still faintly glowing, still full of people who can’t mind their own business and I stand there breathing hard in the dark but it doesn’t help.
Of course it doesn’t help. Nothing helps.
There’s no one left in this apartment to hear me break anything, and that is the whole horrible lesson of tonight, that I finally have all the time in the world to be here and she is gone.
Suddenly, I see the closet.
The door is standing open, the way she must have left it, and even in the dark, I can see the gaps. Whole sections of the rail bare where her things used to hang.
The good coat gone, the soft sweaters she stole, off my side. The dresses she reaches for when she needs to feel like herself, all of it pulled down in a hurry, hangers left swinging empty, a drawer not quite shut.
Liliana packed in the dark, alone as she took the pieces of herself and she left.
My legs go out from under me.
I sit down hard on the edge of our bed, and the tears come before I can stop them, the ones I’ve been holding back since the stage, since the hotel, since she folded my fingers around her ring and told me to let her go.
My head drops into my hand and my elbows dig into my knees.
Right there, I cry. Ugly, silent, and alone, in the cold dark of the home I emptied.
At some point I open my hand and look at her ring again.
It sits there in my palm, small and gold, still warm from being held, and the sound of my own breathing is enormous in the silence. The apartment is so quiet that I can hear myself falling apart.
It lands on me all at once.
This is it.
This is what it felt like for her.
Every night I texted a coward’s excuse and stayed at the studio.
Every dinner she cooked and covered and threw away.
Every promise I made and broke and made again, every single time she sat alone in these exact rooms in this exact silence waiting for a man who chose to be somewhere else, this is what it felt like.
This hollowed-out, echoing, unbearable quiet.
She lived in it for months. She lived in it while I told myself she understood, while I told myself she was fine, while I built her a monument out of the hours I stole from her and called it love.
I made her feel this. Over and over.
And I never once felt it myself until she was gone.
The realization tears a sob loose from my chest, and I curl forward over her ring, letting it take me, because I deserve every second of it. The tears come hot and fast, dripping off my jaw onto the band in my palm, and my shoulders shake with it.
“Liliana…”
Her name breaks out of me, out loud, into the empty room, as if saying it might call her back.
It doesn’t. The dark just swallows it, and the silence answers the way it must have answered her a hundred nights, with nothing.
“God. I’m so sorry…”
Underneath the grief, past the guilt, in the part of me that has only ever truly wanted one thing, another feeling is rising, and it is not despair.
It is resolve.
I am going to get her back.
Not with an album, not with a grand gesture, a stadium, or a surprise.
I am going to get her back the way I should have loved her all along: one honest day at a time. Showing up again and again, until she believes it.
Because I broke her heart. I know that now, I feel it now, all the way down.
And I am going to spend however long it takes learning how to mend it, and I will do anything, give anything, become anyone she needs me to be.
Liliana let me go tonight.
I’m not going to let her stay gone.
No matter what it takes.