10. Flora
— ? —
Flora
I booked the flight from the driveway with the engine running.
There was one seat left on the two-fifteen and I took it without looking at the price, and then I sent Dylan an email I’ll probably regret, and then I drove to the airport with my hands at ten and two like a student driver because I didn’t trust myself to do anything automatically.
I kept catching my own face in the rearview mirror and being surprised by how normal it looked.
I expected to look destroyed. I mostly just look tired.
Long-term parking, because I have no idea when I’m coming back for the car, or whether I am.
That’s a decision for a version of me that has slept.
I take the shuttle to the terminal sitting between a family going to Orlando and a man asleep against the window, and none of them look at me twice, and I have about nine minutes of being nobody before it ends.
LAX is a nightmare on a good day. Today it’s something worse.
I keep my head down as I move through the terminal, sunglasses on even though we’re indoors, a baseball cap pulled low over my hair.
It’s not much of a disguise but it’s all I have, because I didn’t exactly have time to plan a covert escape while I was filling trash bags with my husband’s suits at two in the morning.
The terminal is a wall of noise, travelers and luggage carts and crying children and announcements about delayed flights that nobody in the building is listening to.
I weave through it toward the security checkpoint with my suitcase rolling behind me and my phone burning a hole in my pocket, full of notifications I’m refusing to look at.
A woman brushes past me and does a double take. I watch the recognition move across her face, watch her hand go toward her phone, and I walk faster.
This is new. Being recognized alone, I mean.
For three years I’ve been recognized as an accessory to somebody, the person standing next to him in the photograph, and the recognition came with a warmth in it because I was part of a thing people liked.
This woman is not warm. This woman is looking at me the way you look at a car accident on the other side of the highway, slowing down without admitting to yourself that you’re slowing down.
I’m almost to security. Twenty feet from the line, then fifteen, then ten.
“Flora!”
His voice cuts through the noise of the terminal and I feel every head in the vicinity turn. Of course they do. He’s Aster Golding, and even devastated and desperate, even with red eyes and rumpled clothes, he draws attention everywhere he goes.
I don’t turn around. I keep my eyes forward and walk faster.
“Flora, stop!”
A hand closes on my suitcase handle and jerks me to a halt.
I whirl around and he’s right there, close enough that I can smell his cologne and see the wet tracks on his cheeks where he’s been crying. He looks completely wrecked, hair disheveled, clothes wrinkled, eyes red-rimmed and desperate.
“Let go of my bag.”
“Not until you talk to me.”
“How did you even know which terminal.”
“The confirmation went to the account we share.” He doesn’t look proud of it. “I read it in the driveway.”
“We talked. I’m done talking.”
Around us I can feel the attention shifting, people recognizing him and pulling out phones and whispering to each other, the crowd forming a loose circle around us because a famous man is chasing his wife through an airport and that’s worth missing your flight for.
“Can we please go somewhere private,” he starts.
“No.”
Somebody in the crowd shouts. “Is it true? Are you getting divorced?”
I flinch. Aster goes pale.
“Did you know about the affair?” Another voice, sharper and more accusatory. “Were you covering for him this whole time?”
And then a third one, dripping with contempt. “Pathetic. Standing by a man who cheated on you in public. Have some self-respect.”
The words hit me like a slap. These aren’t his fans defending him. These are strangers who have already decided I’m the fool in this story, the doormat wife who didn’t have the sense to leave sooner.
A photographer pushes through the crowd with his camera raised, trying to get closer, and before I can react Aster steps between us with his arm coming up to block the shot.
“Back off,” he snarls, and his voice is harder than I’ve ever heard it. “Leave her alone.”
The photographer doesn’t listen. He tries to circle around, angling for a better shot of my face, and Aster physically shoves him back, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to make a statement.
“I said back off.”
For one frozen moment I see something I haven’t seen in a year. My husband, choosing me. Putting himself between me and the thing that’s hurting me, even with the cameras watching, even though this will be all over the news by tonight.
But it’s too late. It’s a year too late.
“Flora.” He turns back to me and his eyes are desperate. “Please. Just give me five minutes.”
“You did this here.” I gesture at all the phones and faces and the permanent record being made of our worst moment. “I just showed up to it.”
More people are gathering. I can hear fragments of conversation, speculation about what’s happening and whether the rumors are true and whether I’m going to take him back or leave him standing here, my humiliation broadcast in real time to anyone with a phone and a social media account.
Somewhere behind me a man says her name is Flora, like he’s supplying it to somebody who asked, and it’s such a small thing and it takes the legs out from under me anyway. My name is a piece of information now. It’s a thing you look up now.
“You were protecting yourself,” I say, and the truth of it crystallizes as the words leave my mouth. “You didn’t want to deal with my reaction over the phone. You wanted to wait until you could control the situation. Manage me like you manage everything else.”
“That’s not what I was doing.”
“When I finally asked you to be present,” and the tears are coming now and I can’t stop them, “you couldn’t even give me the truth. You couldn’t give me nine days. You gave her a week instead and you didn’t even tell me.”
He reaches for me and I don’t step back fast enough.
His hands cup my face, thumbs brushing my tears away, and for one aching second I let myself look at him.
At the man who proposed after six months because he said he couldn’t imagine another day without me.
Who used to write songs about the way I laughed and the way I smelled and the way I looked in the morning light.
“I have spent a year begging you to look at me,” I whisper. “And now the whole world is looking at me. And it’s because of you.”
His face crumples.
I pull away.
“Flora.”
“Goodbye, Aster.”
I turn and walk toward security. I don’t look back, because if I look back I’ll break completely.
The TSA agent checks my boarding pass and waves me through. The metal detector beeps clear. I collect my bag off the scanner and keep walking, one foot in front of the other, until I find my gate.
My gate is at the far end of the concourse and I walk the whole length of it without stopping, past the coffee places and the sunglasses kiosk and a bank of televisions I refuse to look at directly.
I sink into a seat in the corner, as far from the other passengers as the seating allows, and finally let myself look back toward the security barrier.
He’s still there, pressed against the glass, watching me, his mouth moving like he’s still trying to say something I can’t hear.
Security guards are approaching him now and he isn’t acknowledging them at all.
He’s just looking at me, and there are still people around him with their phones up, and he doesn’t seem to know they’re there either.
I could go back. That’s the thing nobody tells you about walking away from somebody, that the option stays open the whole time and keeps being open right up until the plane doors close.
A walk back down the concourse and a conversation and I could be in the car with him.
I sit very still in a plastic chair in terminal four and do not take that walk, and it’s the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, and from the outside it looks exactly like a woman sitting down.
I turn away and stare at nothing until they call my flight.
The gate agent scans my pass and says have a nice flight in the flat pleasant voice of somebody who has said it four hundred times today, and it’s the single kindest thing anybody has said to me in twelve hours, because there’s nothing in it.
She wants nothing from me. She doesn’t know who I’m married to.
I have a window seat and the middle seat next to me stays empty, which feels like the universe throwing me a bone so small it’s almost insulting.
A flight attendant asks if I want anything before we push back.
I say water. She brings it without looking at my face for longer than she needs to, and I decide she’s my favorite person alive.
The plane takes off and I watch Los Angeles shrink underneath us until it disappears into the haze.
Somewhere down there is a man standing at a glass barrier in an airport, and somewhere down there is a house with fourteen trash bags in the foyer, and I am leaving both of them behind at five hundred miles an hour.
Somewhere over the midwest I finally turn my phone back on.
The notifications are overwhelming, hundreds of them and maybe thousands, messages from friends and acquaintances and people I haven’t spoken to in years who suddenly want to offer their support and their sympathy and their opinions about what I should do next.
There’s footage of the airport already. Somebody has cut it to music. I watch four seconds of myself with my hand on my husband’s chest and then I close it, and I don’t cry, because I used up whatever was available for that at two in the morning on a marble floor.
Three separate people have sent me the same screenshot of a comment saying I brought this on myself by letting him travel alone.
Two people have asked whether I’m going to make a statement.
One person, a woman I met twice at industry parties and have never once had a real conversation with, has sent me a long message about staying strong and also, at the bottom, has asked whether I’d be interested in doing an interview with a friend of hers.
I ignore all of it except one message.
From Aster, sent while I was going through security.
I know I don’t deserve another chance. But please, don’t sign anything yet.
Don’t make this permanent. Give me time to prove I can be the man you married.
I’m going to fight for you, Flora. I’m going to fight for us. And I won’t stop until you believe me.
I read it once. Then I read it again.
I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t make myself delete it and I can’t make myself answer it, so I just sit there staring at the words on the screen, unable to move forward or back, while the plane carries me toward Vermont and his message sits there asking me for something I don’t know how to give.