8. Liliana
— ? —
Liliana
I wake up in a bed that isn’t mine, in a room that isn’t mine, in a life that stopped being mine somewhere around the second verse of a song I’ll never be able to unhear.
For one merciful second I don’t remember. Then I do, all of it, and the weight of it settles back onto my chest like a body lying down on top of me.
Danica’s guest room is soft and gray and quiet, morning light pushing pale through the blinds. I don’t know what time it is and honestly, I don’t care.
I lie there and take inventory of the damage instead, the ache behind my eyes from crying myself dry, the raw scrape at the back of my throat, the hollow, scooped-out feeling in the center of me where a marriage used to be. My eyes feel like they’ve been sanded.
When I finally drag myself up and into the little guest bathroom, the mirror confirms it.
I look like a thing the tide left behind.
Puffy eyes, gray skin, mascara I never fully washed off tracked down in ghostly smudges. My hair is a disaster. I look like exactly what I am, a woman whose whole life detonated in front of twenty thousand people and then got up the next morning anyway.
I turn on the tap and splash cold water over my face until my skin stops feeling as if it belongs to a stranger, and I finger-comb my hair into place pressing a cool washcloth to my swollen eyes until they look slightly less like I spent the night sobbing on my cousin’s couch.
It doesn’t help much. But it’s the only thing I can control right now, so I do it. I put myself back together in the only small way that’s available to me, because if I can’t fix anything else, I can at least fix my face.
Then I sit on the edge of the bed, and I turn on my phone.
I shut it off last night in the car, somewhere between the arena and Danica’s door, when the notifications started coming faster than I could throw the thing across a room.
Now it wakes up and immediately starts vibrating in my hand.
Buzz after buzz, days of the world’s attention crammed into one long night, all landing at once.
Most of it is my mother.
Mother: Liliana, call me.Mother: I’ve seen the news. Call me at once.Mother: Liliana, I am not asking. Pick up the phone.Mother: Where are you? Are you safe? Call me.
A dozen of them, escalating from cold to a register that in Aurelia Astor almost passes for panic.
Of course she’s seen it. The whole world has seen it. My humiliation was the number one trending topic in the country before I even made it out of the building, so naturally it reached my mother, who has spent my entire life waiting to be proven right about the boy with the guitar.
I can’t deal with this. At least not yet and not her. I swipe the messages away without answering, and I keep scrolling, and that’s when it hits me.
There’s nothing from Tristan or Hallie.
The two people who took a wrecking ball to my life last night, the husband who sang about another woman to a sold-out arena and the best friend who dressed me up to watch it happen, and neither one of them has sent me a single word.
The silence from both of them sits in my chest, and I can’t decide which one hurts worse.
Fine. Good. I don’t want to hear from either of them anyway.
I open my settings to deactivate my accounts, because I cannot survive another hour of strangers dissecting my life, and my thumb is halfway to the button when a notification slides down from the top of the screen and I tap it purely on reflex, the muscle memory of a woman who’s spent two years checking on her husband.
[ @TristanEverettOfficial posted. ]
And then I’m looking at his face, and his words, and I forget how to breathe.
It isn’t a press release. That’s the first thing I notice.
There’s no polish to it, no publicist’s careful phrasing, none of the hollow corporate language Ford’s people usually wrap around him.
It’s just his profile picture and a block of plain text, and it reads as if he typed it himself at three in the morning with shaking hands.
Tristan Everett ?@TristanEverettOfficial
I’m writing this myself. No team, no PR, no statement. Just me.
I’m not going to explain anything here, because the person who deserves an explanation isn’t the internet. But I need every single one of you to hear this clearly:
Stop going after Liliana. Leave her out of this. She did nothing wrong last night and she does not owe a single one of you her pain. Say whatever you want about me. I’ve earned it. But leave my wife alone.
I read it again, and then again. My eyes keep catching on those last words.
Leave my wife alone. Not “my ex.” Not “Liliana.” My wife. Present tense, as if the ring isn’t sitting in his pocket right now, as if I didn’t already tell him we’re over.
The comments are a war zone. I scroll before I can stop myself, and they blur past faster than I can brace for.
@everettdevotee: not him going scorched earth to protect her ?? KING behavior@sadgirlhours22: I am ON THE FLOOR.
protect Liliana at all costs@strawhat56: too little too late babe.
you did this. a tweet doesn’t undo the concert@countrymusicdaily: ok but he’s single now?
? asking for me and the girls ??@wilder_things_: what’s the deal with Hallie though. are they gonna address that or…
Half of them are people falling over themselves to praise him, crowning him for the bare minimum of decency. But others are the opposite, calling him out. And even the ones on my side land wrong, defending me so hard it curdles into its own kind of cruelty.
The internet really is a crazy place. I don’t have energy to deal with this along with everything.
I lock the screen for a second and breathe. Even his defense of me has become a stage for the exact circus he was trying to send home.
I’m still staring at it, a hot and complicated feeling rising in my throat, when the screen changes.
A message. From him. Landing in real time, as if he somehow knew the exact second I’d finally turn my phone back on.
Tristan: I know you don’t want to hear from me. Tristan: I know you need space but I just needed you to know that I meant every wordTristan: Whatever you decide, I am not giving up on you, Lily.
I don’t answer it.
My hands are shaking too hard, and my eyes are hot. There’s a traitor part of me that felt a crack open in my chest that I need to seal shut immediately, because I know exactly how this works.
I know how good he is with words. Words are the thing he was always best at, better than showing up, better than staying, and I refuse to let a beautiful sentence undo the truth of a hundred empty nights.
So I just sit there, phone burning in my hand, reading it over and over without replying.
That’s how Danica finds me.
“Okay, sunshine, I made the disgusting green smoothie you pretend to hate but secretly…” She stops in the doorway, takes one look at my face, and her whole tone shifts. “Oh, no. No, no, no. What are you looking at?”
“Nothing.” I lock the screen. “It’s nothing.”
“It is very clearly not nothing.” She crosses the room in three strides, plucks the phone right out of my hand with the practiced ease of a woman who has confiscated a lot of phones, and holds it up out of reach. “Nope. This is confiscated. You will not start crying again.”
“I’m not crying.”
“You’re leaking. Same difference.” She thumbs the screen dark and slips it into the back pocket of her jeans, where I have zero intention of retrieving it from. “You get this back when you’ve eaten a real meal and remembered you’re a person.”
Despite everything, the corner of my mouth twitches. “You’re very bossy this morning.”
“It’s my love language. Come on.” She holds out a hand and hauls me up off the bed. “Food. Now. And then, if you want, you can tell me what put that particular look on your face, or we can talk about literally anything else and eat toast like two feral raccoons. Dealer’s choice.”
I let her pull me toward the kitchen, and for the first time since the lights went down at the Forum, I feel as if I might actually survive the day.
***
The kitchen smells of coffee and toast. Danica has arranged an aggressive amount of food on the counter. Eggs, fruit, and the aforementioned green smoothie with a stack of toast that leans slightly.
I eat because it’s easier than not eating with her watching me like a hawk. And slowly, bite by bite, the fog in my head thins just enough to let a single clear thought surface, the one I’ve been circling all night without letting myself land on.
“I want to file for divorce.”
The words come out flat and quiet, and they land in the kitchen as if it’s a dropped glass.
Danica goes still with her mug halfway to her mouth. For a second, she doesn’t say anything at all, and I watch her choose her words carefully, which is not a thing my cousin is known for doing.
“Okay,” she says finally, gently. “Are you sure? And I’m not asking to talk you out of it, I’m asking because I love you and I need to know you’ve actually landed there and you’re not just… you know, standing in the rubble reaching for the nearest exit.”
“I don’t know if I’m sure of anything.” I set down my fork. “I don’t know if I want him back or if I never want to see him again. But after last night, I’m not sure we can fix this. So what exactly am I staying for? What am I holding on to?”
Danica doesn’t answer. She just lets me get there.
My voice steadies as I say, “I’m not going to sit in that penthouse another night hoping he chooses me for once. If he can’t, then I’ll choose me. I have at least that much pride left.”
I meet her eyes.
“So yes. I want to file. At least start it and stop being the one who waits.”
Danica sets her mug down. A fierce, proud look moves across her face, and she reaches over, grabbing my hand to squeeze it hard.
“Alright,” she says. “You’re in luck, because I know people. Discreet people. The kind who eat tabloid lawyers for breakfast and don’t leak a word to anyone.” She squeezes again. “I’ll make a call. We can meet someone today, quietly, if you want.”