8. Flora
— ? —
Flora
My phone explodes at eleven at night.
I’m in bed with a book, actually feeling okay for the first time in days because Aster is coming home tomorrow and we’re finally going to have that conversation.
I’ve been practicing what I want to say, rehearsing it in my head while I walk the dogs at the shelter and water the plants and do all the mundane things that fill my days while my husband is off being famous somewhere else.
Then my phone starts buzzing and doesn’t stop.
I pick it up and see dozens of notifications, text messages and missed calls and tags on social media. Everyone is asking if I’m okay, asking if I’ve seen it, asking what happened.
Some of these names I haven’t seen on my screen in two years. A woman I waited tables with before I ever met Aster. A publicist who once spent an entire dinner explaining to me what my role was. My old roommate. Whatever this is, it’s big enough to make people who don’t like me pretend they do.
My heart starts pounding before I even know why.
I open a text from Mara that contains nothing but a link and the words I’m so sorry.
The article loads.
ASTER GOLDING AND CECILIA WINSLEY: A WORKPLACE ROMANCE TURNS TO AFFAIR?
The words don’t make sense at first. I read them twice, three times, waiting for them to rearrange into something that isn’t this, but they stay exactly the same, bold and black against my phone screen, and underneath them is a photo.
Aster. Cecilia. His hand on her waist, her hand wrapped around the back of his neck, their mouths pressed together.
It’s unmistakably a kiss.
The room tilts sideways and I have to grab the headboard to keep from falling off the bed. My vision goes fuzzy at the edges and there’s a roaring in my ears, this sense of the whole world shifting underneath me while I sit perfectly still.
I force myself to keep reading even though every word carves something out of me.
Sources close to the production confirm that Golding and Winsley have been engaged in a romantic relationship for several months, with the affair beginning during pre-production of their joint project.
“Everyone on set knew,” one insider revealed. “They weren’t exactly subtle about it. Late nights in his trailer, private dinners, the way they looked at each other. It was obvious.”
“Aster told her his marriage was basically over,” another source claimed. “He said he and Flora were just staying together for appearances at this point.”
The article is careful, I notice through the haze. Every accusation is hedged with allegedly or sources claim or reportedly, so that nothing could ever be proven false because nothing is stated as fact. It’s innuendo dressed up as journalism, unfalsifiable and devastating.
Golding and Winsley are confirmed to continue on to New York next week for a further round of joint appearances.
And then there’s a paragraph about me.
Golding’s wife Flora, a former waitress with no career of her own, has reportedly struggled to adjust to her husband’s level of fame. “She’s sweet but she’s not built for this life,” one insider said. “Everyone could see it was only a matter of time before he outgrew her.”
I read those words three times before they actually penetrate.
The phone slips out of my fingers and lands on the bedspread. I’m shaking so hard my teeth are chattering, and there’s a horrible sound filling the room that I realize after a moment is coming out of me.
I call him.
The phone rings once, twice, three times, and then goes to voicemail. That cheerful greeting he recorded years ago when we were happy and none of this seemed possible. Hey, you’ve reached Aster. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.
I call again, and again, and again, my fingers stabbing at the screen, and every single time I get that same greeting until I want to throw the phone against the wall and watch it shatter.
On the eleventh try I remember that he lost his phone and he’s been using Dylan’s.
I find Dylan’s number in my contacts and dial it with shaking hands.
It rings four times, then five, and I’m about to hang up when somebody finally picks up.
“Hello?” It’s Aster’s voice, groggy with sleep but warm, happy even, like he’s pleased to hear from me. “Flora? Baby, is that you?”
I try to speak and nothing comes out.
“I was going to call you from the airport,” he continues, completely oblivious.
“My phone disappeared and I’ve been going crazy without it.
God, I miss you so much. I can’t wait to see you.
Just a few more hours and I’ll be home and we can finally have that talk, and I’ve been thinking about everything you said and you’re right, you’re completely right, I need to be more present and I’m going to be, I promise. ”
He keeps talking. He keeps talking like nothing is wrong, like my whole world isn’t collapsing around me, like there isn’t a photo of him kissing another woman on every screen in America.
He doesn’t know I know.
He’s been walking around for days with another woman’s kiss on his mouth and he has no idea that I’ve seen the evidence. He sounds so happy. So eager to come home. So sure that everything is going to be fine.
“And I was thinking maybe we could take that vacation you wanted, just the two of us, somewhere without cameras or schedules or any of it. What do you think? Flora?”
I open my mouth to scream at him, to demand answers, to ask him how he could do this to me, to make him explain why he’s been lying to my face for four days while I sat in this house missing him.
But nothing comes out. What is there to say? What words could possibly be enough for this moment?
“Flora? Baby, are you there? Is everything okay?”
I hang up.
The silence afterward is deafening. There’s just me and the darkness and the phone in my shaking hand and the absolute certainty that my marriage is over.
I sit there for a long time, not moving, barely breathing. The phone stays quiet. He doesn’t call back, and he probably fell straight back to sleep thinking the call dropped or I butt-dialed him, or any of the hundred explanations that make more sense than the truth.
My hands have steadied now, which is the strange thing. A minute ago I was shaking so badly I could barely hold the phone, and now I’m completely still and hollow, like everything that used to be inside me has drained out and left the shell behind.
I get out of bed and walk to the closet.
His side is full of clothes he never wears because he’s never here. Suits that cost more than my car. Shoes lined up in neat rows. That ridiculous collection of watches he bought during his first flush of success, back when we still did things together, back when he still remembered I existed.
I pull a suit off its hanger, and then another, and then another.
The navy one with the narrow lapels goes in first, the one he wore to the awards show where he thanked me from the stage and forty million people watched him do it.
Then the tux. Then the ridiculous velvet jacket he bought in Milan that I told him made him look like a lounge singer, which is exactly why he bought it.
I get all the way through the closet without stopping, and then I open the drawer where he keeps his cufflinks and I find the pair I gave him for our first anniversary and I stand there holding them for a long time before I put them in the bag with everything else.
The physical work helps. It gives me something to focus on besides the image burned into my brain. I work methodically, emptying his side of the closet one expensive item at a time, stuffing everything into the black trash bags I find under the kitchen sink.
By midnight I’ve filled six bags. By one in the morning it’s twelve. I drag them down the stairs one at a time and pile them in the center of the foyer, this mountain of fabric and leather and all the physical evidence of the life he built without me.
Somewhere around two, I find myself standing in the middle of the pile surrounded by bags and I start to laugh.
It’s a horrible, broken sound that echoes off the marble floors and the high ceilings of this house that never felt like home.
He bought it for us and then he was never here to live in it, and I’ve been rattling around these rooms alone for a year waiting for somebody who was always somewhere else.
The laughing turns into something else. Not crying exactly, just this raw awful noise that rips out of my chest and won’t stop.
I sink down onto the cold marble floor and sit there among the trash bags with my back against the wall until the sounds finally stop and there’s nothing left but quiet.
Around three I make myself get up. I go to the kitchen and brew coffee I don’t want, just to have something to do with my hands, and I pull the article up again on my laptop and read it one more time, studying every word, looking for anything that will make this make sense.
The photo stares back at me. His hand on her waist. Her hand on his neck. The charcoal suit, the one I helped him pick out last year because I thought it brought out his eyes.
He was wearing a suit I chose while another woman kissed him.
I pour the coffee down the drain and go sit on the stairs in the foyer.
The trash bags cast long shadows in the dim light coming from the kitchen. I count them and there are fourteen, fourteen bags of designer clothes and expensive accessories and all the physical trappings of a life I thought the two of us were building together.
The house is so quiet. I turned my phone off hours ago because I couldn’t stand the buzzing anymore, people I barely know wanting to discuss my humiliation with me. Now it’s just me and the silence and the ticking of the clock in the hallway, counting down the hours until my husband comes home.
Dawn comes slowly, gray light creeping in through the windows. I haven’t moved from the stairs. I’ve just been sitting here running through every possible version of the conversation we’re about to have.
He’ll have explanations. He always has explanations. He’s sorry, he didn’t mean it, it wasn’t what it looked like, he was going to tell me.
At some point in the night I thought about calling my mother, and then I thought about what it would take to explain this to a woman who doesn’t own a television and uses the internet about twice a year, standing on a hill.
I’d have to start at the beginning. I’d have to say the words out loud, my husband, another woman, a photograph, and I’d have to hear how they sounded in my own voice in her kitchen, and I wasn’t ready for that at three in the morning.
I’ll be ready later today. That’s the decision I made somewhere between the second bag and the sixth, that whatever happens in this foyer in a few hours, I’m not staying in this house afterward.
The question is whether I’ll believe any of what he tells me, and the question underneath that one is whether it even matters anymore.