17. Liliana
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Liliana
“It’s too tight,” Tristan complains, tugging at his collar as if he’s a kid being marched to church. “I can’t breathe… You’re trying to strangle me. Is this a soft assassination? Are you finally getting rid of me?”
“If I were getting rid of you, I’d be more creative than a necktie.
” I bat his hands away from his throat and take over the knot myself, loosening it a quarter inch, smoothing it flat against his chest. “There. You big baby. You’ve worn a tux to a hundred red carpets and now you can’t survive one press conference? ”
“Red carpets are different.” He submits to my fussing, his hands falling to his sides, watching me work with a soft look I can feel even without glancing up.
“On a red carpet I’m just standing there being handsome.
Today I’m about to blow up two people’s entire lives on live television. Different energy. Requires airflow.”
“You’ll live.” I give the knot one last pat and step back to survey him, and God, he cleans up unfairly well, dark suit, jaw freshly shaved, that steady dangerous calm sitting on him like he was born in it. “There. You’re perfect. Are you ready?”
“Ready?” A slow grin spreads across his face, and it isn’t the nervous one, it’s the other one, the wicked one, the one that used to charm arenas and is currently aimed at the prospect of destroying the two people who tried to destroy us.
“Lily, I have never been more excited to ruin anyone in my entire life. I might actually enjoy this too much.”
“You’re a menace.” I can’t help the laugh. I reach up, straighten his lapel one last unnecessary time, and go up on my toes to press a quick kiss to his mouth. “Go get them.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He catches my hand, kisses the back of it, and then he’s gone, striding off toward the doors with a little wave over his shoulder, and I watch him go with my heart doing a warm and enormous thing in my chest.
There’s a TV propped on a cart in the corner of the backstage room, tuned to the feed, and I turn to it and wrap my arms around myself and wait.
Tristan appears on the screen a moment later, walking out to the little table with its cluster of microphones, and the room he’s walking into detonates with camera flashes, a hundred shutters going off at once, a wall of white light.
He doesn’t flinch. He sits, adjusts the mic, folds his hands on the table, and waits for the noise to settle, and when it does, when the room goes quiet and hungry, he begins.
“Thank you all for coming.” His voice comes through the speakers steady and low. “I’m not going to be taking questions today. This is just a statement. But it’s one I should have made a long time ago, so I’d appreciate it if you’d let me get through it.”
I grip my own elbows. On screen, his jaw works once before he continues.
“Everyone in this room knows what happened at my last concert.”
A muscle tightens in his cheek.
“I stood on that stage and I hurt my wife, publicly. And I have regretted it every single day since. I got lost, somewhere along the way. I got so wrapped up in the machine of all this, the shows, the fame, the noise, that I lost sight of the only thing that ever actually mattered to me. That’s on me.
I made mistakes I will be making up for the rest of my life, and I’m not going to stand here and pretend otherwise. ”
My throat goes tight. Because he could stop there. A lesser man would stop there, take the sympathy, let the apology be the whole story.
But his hands shift on the table, and his voice hardens, and he keeps going.
“But there’s a part of that night the public never got told.”
On the screen, he reaches into his jacket and pulls out a folded sheet, and unfolds it, and holds it up to the cameras, and even through the TV feed I recognize the grainy long-lens shot, Hallie and Ford, heads bent together over that envelope.
“What happened at that concert was not an accident. The song that played, the whole story that got sold to all of you afterward, it was engineered. My former manager and a woman named Hallie Wilder coordinated to sabotage that performance, to leak a specific song, and to manufacture a scandal they could both profit from. I have the evidence. Some of you will be getting a much closer look at it very soon.”
The murmur that goes through the press room is audible even through the speakers. I press a hand to my mouth.
“I also want to be clear about one thing, because it’s been twisted enough.”
He sets the paper down, and his voice changes, goes quieter, goes true.
“There’s been a lot of speculation about who my songs are about. Let me end it. Every love song I have ever written, from the very first one to the last, is about one person. My wife. There has only ever been one muse. There will only ever be one. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you a lie.”
I’m crying a little now. I don’t even try to stop it.
“As for what’s next…”
Tristan exhales, and the set of his shoulders eases.
“If I make music again someday, I’ll do it on my own terms, independently. But that’s a someday. Right now I have more important priorities, and I intend to actually show up for them this time.”
He looks up, then, straight down the barrel of the lens, straight, it feels like, at me.
“To everyone who’s supported me through all of this, thank you. I don’t take it for granted. And to my wife.” His voice catches, just slightly, just enough. “Thank you for giving me a second chance I know I don’t deserve. I’m going to spend the rest of my life earning it.”
Then he stands, buttons his jacket, gives the stunned room a small nod that’s almost a bow, and walks off, leaving a hundred shouted questions crashing uselessly against his back.
I’m still wiping my face when the door bangs open.
Tristan comes through it fast, a knot of handlers and shouting reporters spilling in behind him, flashes still popping down the hall.
None of it touches him, because the second he clears the doorway his eyes find me and everything else just falls away. He crosses the room in about four strides.
“Well,” he says, a little breathless, that grin tugging back up. “I think that went okay.”
“You think it went okay?” I let out a wet laugh and reach up, cupping his face in both hands, his jaw rough under my palms, his eyes bright and searching mine.
“You just lit a bomb under two people’s careers with a smile on your face and told the entire planet I’m the only muse you’ve ever had, and you think it went okay. ”
“Too much?”
“It was perfect.” I stroke my thumb across his cheek, and behind him the noise and the flashes keep clamoring, and I ignore every bit of it. “It was exactly right. Now.”
I lean in and press my mouth to his, soft and quick, then rest my forehead against his.
“Let’s leave. Before someone with a microphone remembers we’re standing here.”
His hand finds mine and laces tight.
“Yeah,” he breathes, already turning us toward the back exit, already pulling me with him away from the lights. “Let’s go home.”
We slip out the side door together, hand in hand, leaving the whole screaming circus behind us.
***
The penthouse looks exactly the same.
I hadn’t been sure I’d ever set foot in here again.
When I walked out weeks ago in the dark it felt like leaving a crime scene, and I braced myself, in the elevator up, for it to feel like one now, cold and haunted, every surface stained with what happened here.
But it doesn’t. The evening light is pouring in gold through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the plants I was sure would be dead are somehow alive, and it just looks like… home.
My home. The one I built a life in, before that life got away from me.
“You okay?” Tristan asks quietly from the doorway, hanging back, giving me room to feel whatever I’m going to feel.
He’s good at that now. He learned it somewhere in the last two months, the art of waiting instead of filling every silence with the wrong thing.
“Yeah.” I run my hand along the back of the couch, the one I used to fold myself into with a book, waiting for a man who never came home on time. “Yeah, I think I am. It’s weird. I thought it would hurt to be back.”
“And it doesn’t?”
“No.” I look around at all of it, the light and the space and the quiet, and I feel it settle into me, warm and certain. “It feels like starting over. In the same place, but as different people.”
I glance back at him, still hovering by the door like he’s not sure he’s allowed all the way in. “Get in here, Everett. You live here too.”
The tension eases out of his face, and he steps inside, and it’s ours again.
Suddenly, I drift to the windows while he carries our bags in, and I stand there looking out at the city going gold and pink below me, and I pull out my phone.
I haven’t opened this app in weeks. Deleted it off my life, changed my number, went dark, disappeared, because for a long time silence was the only armor I had.
Every time I’d surfaced, the world had been there waiting to tear a strip off me, and the safest thing, the only thing, was to give them nothing. To let them say whatever they wanted into the void where I used to be.
But I’m done being a void.
I’ve had the words drafted for days. I wrote them one night at Danica’s without quite knowing why, and I’ve read them over a dozen times since, and now, standing in my own home with the truth finally out and my husband unpacking our life in the next room, I know exactly why I wrote them. Not for them.
For me. Because there’s a difference between choosing silence and being silenced, and I have spent too long letting other people decide which one I was.
I open a new post, and I type the words in fresh, and I read them one last time.
Liliana Everett@lilyasters
For a long time, I let everyone else tell my story.
I stayed quiet and let the internet cast me however it wanted, the placeholder, the fool, the villain, the victim. I’m done with all of it.
Here’s the only version that’s true: I am a woman who knows her own worth, who built a life she’s proud of, and who gets to decide for herself what happens next. That’s all I came here to say. I won’t be explaining myself again.
No hashtags or tagging anyone. No begging to be believed, no point-by-point rebuttal of a single lie they told about me. Just me, planting a flag in my own name.
I hit post.
And then, for the first time, I don’t wait for the reaction.
I don’t refresh. I don’t scroll down into the comments to see how they’ve received me, to measure my own worth against a scroll of strangers’ opinions. I just lock the phone and set it face-down on the windowsill, and I let it go.
Because I meant every word, and their answer to it was never the point.
It feels as if I’m setting down a weight I’ve been carrying my whole life.
I’m still standing at the window, watching the last of the light drain out of the sky, feeling lighter than I have in years, when I sense him behind me.
I don’t hear him, exactly. I just feel it, the warmth of him, the particular gravity he’s always had, and I turn.
Tristan is standing a few feet away, and he’s holding a single white lily.
Just one. Stemmed and perfect, the same flower that’s been showing up on doorsteps and windowsills for weeks, the one he’s used all this time to say the thing he couldn’t figure out how to say out loud.
But this one’s different.
This one he’s not leaving on a step for me to find alone. This one he’s holding out to me himself, here, in the home we’re standing in together, and his eyes are soft and bright and a little wet, and the smile on his face is the realest thing I’ve ever seen.
“Welcome home,” he says.
That’s all it takes. Two words and a flower and the look on his face, and every careful wall I have left just comes down at once.
I cross the room and I throw my arms around him, and the lily gets crushed a little between us and neither of us cares, and he catches me and holds on as if he’s been waiting his whole life to.
His face dropping into my hair, his arms wrapping me up tight and sure, and I press my face into his chest and breathe him in.
Finally, I let myself believe it.
I’m home.
Him. He’s my home.
Tristan always was, from a rooftop in the dead of winter to right here, right now.
Everything in between was just me finding my way back.