12. Liliana
— ? —
Liliana
“Okay, but this one has forty thousand likes.”
Danica angles her phone at me for the ninth time in an hour, entirely too pleased with herself.
“Forty thousand people agree that you, and I’m quoting the caption directly, ‘walked into that gala and committed a war crime in a red dress.’ A war crime, Lily. You’re a criminal now. I’ve never been prouder!”
“I’m trying to watch the movie.”
“You are not watching the movie. Nobody has watched a frame of this movie.”
She scrolls, cackling.
“Oh, this is my favorite… Someone made a whole video. It’s you walking in, in slow motion, set to dramatic music, and then it cuts to his face when he sees you, and then there’s this caption that says, and I need you to appreciate this: ‘the way this man’s entire soul left his body. ’ Two million views! Crazy!”
I stare very hard at the television, where two actors I couldn’t name are having a conversation I’m not following. “I hate everything about this.”
“Liar. You love it. You’re doing the thing with your mouth.”
“I’m not doing a thing with my mouth.”
“You’re fighting a smile. You’ve been fighting it for ten minutes and you’re losing.
” She flops back against the couch cushions, delighted.
“I’m just saying, the internet has fully turned on the whole placeholder narrative, and now everyone wants you two back together, and honestly?
Maybe showbiz is your calling after all.
You’ve got the face for a redemption arc. ”
“Please stop talking.”
“Never.” She pops another handful of popcorn into her mouth, grinning around it. “This is the best week of my entire life and I will not apologize for enjoying it.”
I roll my eyes and burrow deeper into my blanket, and I do not tell her that I have looked at that slow-motion video of his face maybe six times when she wasn’t watching. Some things a woman keeps to herself.
The teasing goes on that way for a while, easy and warm, and it’s almost enough to make me forget that my life is still technically on fire.
Then Danica goes quiet.
I don’t notice right away. But the silence stretches a beat too long, and when I glance over, she’s frowning at her phone, her thumb frozen mid-scroll, and the delight has drained clean off her face.
“What?” I sit up. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” She turns the phone face-down against her knee, too fast. “It’s nothing, don’t worry about it. Let’s just watch the movie, you were right, we should watch the movie.”
“Danica.” I hold out my hand. “Give me the phone.”
“Lily…”
“Give me the phone.”
She sighs, the fight going out of her, and she hands it over as if she’s handing me a thing that might break. And I look down at the screen, and the headline sitting there knocks the air right out of me.
[ EXCLUSIVE SCOOP: Was Everett Marriage Rocked by HER Betrayal First? Insider Reveals Shocking Twist. ]
I read it. Then I make myself read the whole thing, every poisonous anonymous word of it, a “source close to the couple” spinning a careful, plausible little story about how maybe the real reason the marriage fell apart was that Liliana strayed first.
How maybe that heartbreak was what drove a devoted husband to pour his pain into an old song, how maybe the woman everyone’s been feeling sorry for isn’t the victim she’s been playing at all.
It’s clever. It’s so clever, so deniable, every sentence hedged with a reportedly and a sources say, nothing you could ever pin down or sue over, just enough poison to reframe the entire story and make me the villain of my own destruction.
And I know exactly who wrote it.
I don’t have a single scrap of proof, but I don’t need one, because I can feel her fingerprints all over it, the specific cruelty of it, the way it takes my genuine pain and turns it inside out.
Only one person hates me enough and knows me well enough to aim this precisely.
“Hallie,” I say. The name tastes of rot.
“You don’t know that.” But Danica’s already wincing, because she knows it too.
“I know that.” I hand the phone back before I do anything stupid with it. “This is her. The ‘source close to the couple,’ the ‘insider,’ it’s her, Dani, or it’s someone she fed it to. This is exactly her. She couldn’t get the reaction she wanted at the gala, so now she’s trying a new angle.”
“Then let’s ruin her.” Danica sits up straight, fully vibrating now, phone abandoned.
“I mean it. I know people. We sue her into the ground for defamation… Or, alternatively, I find out where she’s getting brunch on Sunday and I pull every single one of those bleached extensions out of her scalp with my bare hands! Your choice.”
Despite everything, a laugh scrapes out of me. “As satisfying as that mental image is.”
“It’s very satisfying. I’ve been picturing it for a full minute.”
“We’re not doing either of those.”
I pull my blanket tighter and shake my head.
“Because that’s the whole point, Dani. That’s the entire thing she wants.
She wants me to react. She wants me to sue her, or scream about her, or go on the record denying it, because every single one of those things puts her name right next to mine in a headline, and that’s all she’s ever actually wanted.
To be attached to a life bigger than hers. ”
My jaw tightens. “She’s a woman clawing for relevance. If I fight her in public, I hand her exactly the spotlight she’s starving for. So I won’t. I refuse to be the rung she climbs.”
Danica stares at me for a second, then sags back against the cushions, half-impressed and half-frustrated. “That is annoyingly mature and correct of you.”
“I know. I’ve grown wise.”
“But I really wanted to do the extensions thing.”
“I know you did.” I bump her shoulder with mine. “You always were the one willing to get arrested for me.”
“Since we were nine.” She sighs. “God, she’s evil! You know I never trusted her, right? Even way back. There was always this hungry quality to the way she looked at your life. Like she was doing inventory.” She shakes her head. “I thought I was being paranoid.”
Before I can answer, her phone lights up and buzzes, an actual call this time, and the name on the screen makes her groan from the bottom of her soul.
“No. No, no… not today.” She glares at it. “It’s work. On a Saturday. Because the universe is cruel and my boss is worse!”
“Take it.”
“I’m not taking it, I’m ignoring it aggressively until it goes away.”
“Danica.” I nudge her with my foot. “Take the call. It’s fine. I’m fine, I promise.”
She hesitates, phone still buzzing in her hand, and gives me a searching look. “You sure? I can tell them to drop dead. I would genuinely love to tell them to drop dead.”
“I’m sure. Go.”
She holds my gaze one more second, then huffs and stands, already swiping to answer as she walks toward the kitchen. “This had better be an actual emergency and not another spreadsheet,” she’s saying, and then the door swings shut behind her.
Her voice fades, and the apartment goes quiet around me.
Alone, the silence settles in, and to my surprise it doesn’t press on me the way it used to.
For years, being alone meant being lonely, meant sitting in a beautiful empty penthouse waiting for a man to remember I existed, the silence a thing that closed around my throat.
But this quiet is different.
This is my quiet. Nobody’s coming home late to it. Nobody’s disappointing me in it. It’s just mine, and I can breathe all the way to the bottom of it.
I curl into the corner of the couch and let myself actually think. Really think, about what I want.
Not what Tristan wants, not what the internet is demanding. Not the divorce or the headlines or the man on my cousin’s curb.
Just me. What I want.
And what surfaces surprises me. I want to go back to the foundation, really go back, not just sign checks and show up for galas but do the work, the way I used to before my whole world narrowed down to the size of one marriage.
That gala reminded me how it felt to be Liliana who built a thing of her own, Liliana whose name meant a thing on its own. I felt fuller for those few hours than I have in two years.
I also want to make things again. I want to feel clay under my hands. I haven’t touched my wheel since before the wedding, let the whole hobby go quiet because there was always somewhere to be.
Some appearance, some version of myself to maintain for someone else.
I let all of it go. I let myself go, one small surrender at a time, until my entire life orbited a single person and I called that love.
This time, I’m learning to love myself instead. It’s slow, and it’s clumsy, and some days I still cry in the shower.
But I’m doing it. I’m the person I’m building a life around.
I’m halfway through the thought, warm with it, almost peaceful, when I hear the guitar.
At first, I think I’m imagining it.
A few notes, drifting up from the street, soft enough that they could be coming from a neighbor’s open window or a car radio idling at the curb. I almost don’t register them over the low hum of the movie still playing to no one.
But then they come again. Clearer this time, deliberate, a slow progression of chords picked out on an acoustic guitar, and my whole body goes still.
Because I know that sound. I’d know that sound anywhere.
I’ve fallen asleep to it. I’ve woken up to it.
So I set down my blanket and cross to the window, and I already know what I’m going to see before I pull the curtain back.
Tristan.
He’s standing on the sidewalk across the narrow street, in the gray hoodie, his old Martin slung across his body, one boot propped up on the low garden wall. And he’s looking up. Not at the building, not at the windows in general.
At mine.
Right at mine, as if he’s known exactly which one it is this whole time, and the second the curtain moves and my face appears in the glass, his mouth curves. Just slightly, and he keeps playing.
I shove the window up and lean out into the evening air.
“You’re here again?” I call down, and I’m going for exasperated but it comes out breathless. “Tristan, what are you doing? You can’t just… what are you even…”
And then he starts to sing, and every word in my mouth dies.
Because I know the song.
It stops my heart cold, my hands gripping the windowsill.
I’ve heard the bones of it before, the melody, the shape of those opening chords, on a gray morning a lifetime ago when I woke to find him already up, sitting at the foot of our bed with his guitar and a faraway look.
Chasing a tune that wasn’t finished yet.
It’s also the same song I waited all night at the concert to hear. The one I thought was coming, right up until the moment a different one did. I’ve spent weeks not letting myself wonder what it would have been.
And now here it is, drifting up to me on a quiet street.
It’s finished, and I’m finally hearing the words.
They’re about a man who had everything and looked straight past it.
About coming home to a lit window and never once stopping to be grateful for the light.
About realizing that the thing you were chasing was already sitting at your table, waiting, growing quieter and quieter while you looked everywhere else.
Every line lands as if it was written from the inside of my own chest, all the loneliness I never said out loud, all the nights I stopped expecting him, and then, somewhere in the second verse, it turns, and it’s not about the losing anymore.
He’s not performing it. That’s what wrecks me. There’s no stage voice, no showman polish, none of the effortless charm he pours over an arena.
His voice is rougher than that, quieter, cracking just slightly on the high notes, and he’s singing it straight up at my window as if there’s no one else on the entire street, as if the song is a letter he’s reading aloud and I’m the only person it was ever meant for.
Memories rise up with every line, unbidden.
The rooftop. The gala where he first sang for me. Him turning off the burner without looking. A thousand small ordinary mornings I didn’t know to treasure.
And underneath all of it, threaded through every note, the same unbearable message, over and over: I see you. I always saw you. I’m the same man you fell in love with, and I never stopped being him, I just forgot how to show it.
My eyes are burning. I don’t even try to stop them.
The first fat drop of rain lands on the windowsill by my hand.
Then another, on my wrist, cool and startling, and I glance up and the sky has gone low and bruised without my noticing. Clouds crackling somewhere far off, the air gone electric with the smell of coming rain.
The drops start to scatter down around him, darkening the pavement, catching in his hair, and still he plays, right through to the last line, his eyes never leaving mine, and then the final chord rings out and fades into the hush of the rising storm.
For a moment neither of us moves. The rain patters down between us, and I’m leaning half out a window with tears on my face, and he’s standing in the middle of the street getting slowly soaked, his guitar going quiet against his chest.
Then he smiles up at me. And it’s the most disarming thing I’ve ever seen. Half sheepish, half that old familiar charm he could never quite switch off, a boy who just did an enormous foolish thing and isn’t sorry about it at all.
“I thought I owed you a performance,” Tristan calls up, rain running down his face.
I bite down on my lower lip, hard, because I don’t trust what it’ll do if I don’t.
Everything in my chest is a tangled, aching, overflowing mess, weeks of anger and hurt and want all rising up at once, and I don’t have a single thing to say that would be safe.
“I wanted you to hear my new song,” he adds, softer, and it barely carries over the rain. “The way you were supposed to.”
And I stand there at the window, teary-eyed, looking down at him.
Right there below me, my husband is standing in the middle of a public street in the pouring rain, guitar soaked, hair plastered to his forehead, looking absolutely ridiculous.
The whole time, he’s looking up at me.
Only at me.
As if there is nothing else in the world worth getting rained on for.