22. Luisa
— ? —
Luisa
The studio was empty.
I stood in the center of the hardwood floor, staring at the door like it might suddenly produce Wade Buckley in his usual Tuesday evening attire, dark jeans, button-down shirt, that infuriating smile he wore whenever he caught me watching him.
He wasn’t coming.
Class had officially ended ten minutes ago, and I’d been the only one here. No Agnes, no Doris, no Fern or Maude. No Wade. The grandmothers had texted their apologies earlier, a bridge tournament running late, allegedly, but Wade hadn’t texted anything at all.
Not that I was expecting him to text.
Not that I’d been checking my phone every three minutes since noon.
I sat down on the floor, my back against the mirror, and pulled my knees to my chest. The late afternoon light slanted through the windows, painting golden rectangles on the hardwood.
I should go home. Poppy was with the nanny, probably demanding an extra bedtime story, and I had laundry to do and emails to answer and a hundred other things that didn’t involve wondering why Wade Buckley had missed dance class.
My phone buzzed.
Honey, I think you should see this.
Mom. The message was followed by a link, one of those shortened URLs that could lead anywhere. I frowned at it, my thumb hovering over the screen.
What is it?
Just watch it. Trust me.
I clicked the link.
A video player loaded. A local news station in Portland, their morning talk show set. And there, in a charcoal suit that made his shoulders look impossibly broad, sat Wade.
The air stalled in my throat.
I sat frozen as the interview played. Heard him talk about rebuilding his life, and shut the door on any mention of Poppy, refusing to let them so much as print her name, protecting her even now.
And then heard him do the thing he’d sworn to me he never would: say my name out loud, on national television, to a whole country of strangers.
Heard him call me the love of his life and set fire to his own rule to do it.
Heard his voice crack when he said he was trying to earn back his family’s trust.
Near the end, his voice went flat and careful, and he said his father had been guilty of far more than financial crimes, that he’d used his power to control the people closest to him, his own son included.
My hand trembled.
“He made me leave my wife.”
The words knocked the air clean out of me. I paused the video, my pulse roaring in my ears. Made him leave. Not chose to leave. Made him.
I had questions.
So many questions I couldn’t think straight.
After the divorce, I’d done what any self-respecting woman would do. I’d muted everything related to Wade Buckley. Blocked news alerts. Asked my mother, my friends, everyone I knew, to never mention him or his famous family. I’d built a wall between my life and his, and I’d refused to look over it.
But now…
I opened a new browser tab. Typed “Alton Buckley trial” into the search bar. Hit enter.
The results loaded.
I gasped.
Article after article, headline after headline. BUCKLEY PATRIARCH SENTENCED TO TWENTY YEARS FOR FINANCIAL FRAUD. ALTON BUCKLEY’S EMPIRE OF LIES: A TIMELINE. SON WADE BUCKLEY TESTIFIES AGAINST FATHER IN DRAMATIC COURT APPEARANCE.
I read enough to understand the shape of it. A years-long investigation. A father convicted on a dozen counts. And, threaded through every story, the same detail I had to reread three times before I could believe it: the case against Alton Buckley had been built with the help of his own son.
Wade hadn’t taken the throne. He’d burned it to the ground. He’d spent the four years I’d been hating him taking his father apart in a courtroom, piece by piece.
None of it fit the story I’d told myself since the night I left, the one where Wade got bored, chose Dolores, chose the Buckley name over his wife.
That story was a lie. I could feel the real one underneath it, enormous and dark, and I couldn’t read fast enough to reach the bottom.
The headlines told me what he’d done. Not one of them told me why.
“What the actual fuck,” I whispered to the empty studio.
I didn’t hear the door open.
I didn’t hear his footsteps crossing the floor.
“Luisa.”
I jumped so hard my phone flew out of my hands. I scrambled to catch it, my fingers fumbling against the screen, and somehow I hit play, Wade’s interview voice started blaring through the speaker, his recorded words filling the studio.
“-I made the worst decision of my life because I believed I was protecting her-”
I jabbed at the pause button. Looked up.
Wade stood a few paces away, wearing a charcoal suit that looked exactly like the one in the video. His tie was loosened, his hair slightly disheveled. He’d come straight from the interview, I realized. Driven all the way back from Portland.
His eyebrows rose. “So you saw it.”
I shrugged, trying to look casual despite the tear tracks on my face. “My mom sent it.”
He nodded. Swallowed. Then, slowly, he walked over and sat down on the floor in front of me, crossing his legs like a child at story time. The position should have looked ridiculous, a billionaire in a designer suit sitting on a dance studio floor, but somehow it just looked… vulnerable.
“Lu.” His voice was soft. “I will answer any question you have.”
My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. The articles were still open on my phone, their words burning in my brain. Threats, and the accidents that bought compliance.
“What the fuck happened four years ago?”
Wade closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, they were bright with what looked like relief, like he’d been waiting years for me to ask that question.
“Everything,” he said. “Everything happened.”
“Tell me.”
He took a breath. “My father’s crimes started long before I knew about them. Years of fraud, embezzlement, manipulation. He built his empire on lies, and he maintained it through fear. By the time I realized what he was, I was already in too deep.”
“How deep?”
“Deep enough that he had leverage. Deep enough that he knew exactly what mattered to me, who mattered to me, and how to use that information.”
I felt cold. “Me.”
“You.” His jaw went rigid. “When the investigation started, he called me into his office. Told me that things were going to get complicated, and that I needed to remember where my loyalties lay. I told him my loyalty was to you. To our marriage.”
“What did he say?”
“He smiled.” Wade’s voice went flat. “That fucking smile he always had when he was about to ruin someone’s life. And then he started talking about accidents. Car crashes. Muggings gone wrong. How easily a terrible thing could happen to someone I loved.”
The words landed between us, and neither of us moved.
“He was threatening me,” I whispered.
“He was telling me exactly what he’d do if I didn’t cooperate.
” Wade’s hands were shaking. “He wanted whatever he needed, my silence, distance from you. He gave me time to think about it. And when I took too long, when I couldn’t make myself do it fast enough, he made his point.
That’s what the crash was. Not an accident.
A message. He had someone run that red light the night you left, because I’d dragged my feet, because I hadn’t ended it fast enough to satisfy him. ”
“Cooperate with what?”
“With whatever he needed. And, above all…” He paused. “Distance from you.”
“Why did he want you away from me?”
“Because you made me strong.” His eyes met mine. “Because when I was with you, I wasn’t afraid of him. He couldn’t control me when I had you to come home to, someone who loved me for who I actually was instead of what I could do for the family name. So he needed to break that. Break us.”
Tears were falling down my cheeks now. I didn’t try to stop them.
“The affair,” I said. “Dolores Vandermeer.”
“There was no affair.” His voice was fierce.
“Dolores was… she was my friend. We’d known each other since childhood.
When everything started falling apart, she was one of the few people I could talk to who understood what it was like to grow up in a family like mine.
My father saw an opportunity. He made sure we were photographed together.
Made sure the tabloids got exactly the story he wanted them to tell. ”
“Why would he want people to think you were cheating?”
“Because it would make you leave me. And if you left me, you’d be safe. You’d be out of his reach. He couldn’t use you against me if you weren’t mine anymore.”
I shook my head. “But you could have told me. You could have explained-”
“I couldn’t.” His voice cracked. “He made it very clear that if I told you anything, if I warned you, if I gave you any reason to stay, he would finish what the crash started. He had people watching you, Lu. Watching your routine, your schedule, the routes you took to work. He knew where you were every minute of every day. And he promised me that if I didn’t push you away convincingly, he would take you from me permanently. ”
“The crash.” My voice came out strange, far away. “They told me it was a drunk driver. That he ran a red light. That the police arrested him.”
“That wasn’t an accident, Lu.” Wade’s voice broke clean in half.
“The driver who hit you… my father sent him. He wasn’t some stranger who’d had one too many and blew a red light.
My father put you in that intersection to prove to me he could reach you anywhere.
He nearly killed you… he nearly killed Poppy, and none of us even knew she existed yet.
That was the message. That was him showing me what happened if I didn’t do what he said. ”
The room tilted. For four years I’d carried that night as a random, senseless thing, wrong place, wrong time, bad luck. It had never been luck. Just a man behind a desk deciding my life was a chip he could spend.
“So you…”