4. Wilson
— ? —
Wilson
Crisis mode. It’s the only thing I know how to do.
I’m on my feet before the tears dry on my face. The note goes in my pocket. The rings go in after it, and they burn there, two little circles of everything I ruined, pressed against my thigh through the fabric.
Cole picks up on the first ring.
“Sir? Go ahead.”
“The video.” I sound like I’ve been screaming. “Who filmed it. Who paid them. I want it by sunrise.”
“Already on it, sir. It was an intern in Tokyo. Someone paid him to be at that window.” He pauses. “You sound…”
“I don’t care what I sound like. Find me the money behind it.”
I hang up and call Robert, and I’m dialing with one hand and grabbing my keys with the other, and the keys jump off the bowl and hit the floor.
“Wilson.” Robert exhales into the phone. “Thank God. The board is…”
“She left me.” Saying it out loud rips it open all over again. “She left her rings on my kitchen island, Robert. Her rings.”
“Okay. Okay. Listen to me, the board is calling an emergency…”
“Let them meet without me.” I’m in the elevator now, watching a wild-eyed stranger in the mirrored doors. “Get me everything on the video. I’m getting my wife back.”
By nine I have everything I need.
The full footage from that night. The names of everyone who was in the room. Proof that someone paid that intern to take the video in the first place, though Cole is still trying to figure out who.
It’s all in a folder on the passenger seat. And I run every red light between the office and the West Village with my heart pounding so hard the edges of my vision start to blur.
None of it matters if she won’t hear me out.
But I have to try. I have to at least try.
Cole’s text sits on my screen at the light I finally catch.
Cole: Mrs. Carter is at the Helena Castillo residence. West Village.
Her mother’s brownstone. She went to her mother.
She didn’t run to a friend. She didn’t run to a hotel where I could send flowers up. She went home, to the one house in this city where I’ve never been welcome.
I take the front steps two at a time and lean on the bell.
Helena opens the door and looks at me the way you look at weather. Silver hair pulled back. Arms already crossed.
“Wilson. It’s early.”
“I need to see her.” I hold up the folder like it’s a passport. “Please. I have proof. The video was staged, Helena, someone paid to…”
“You think this is about a video?” Her voice never rises. It doesn’t have to.
“Please.” The word cracks straight down the middle. “I am begging you on your own doorstep. Let me see my wife.”
She studies my face for a long, terrible moment. Whatever she finds there makes her step aside.
“Living room.” She turns toward the kitchen. “She’s been crying since dawn. If you make it worse, I will bury you in my garden, and Wilson, I keep a beautiful garden.”
The hallway is lined with framed photographs, and I make the mistake of looking. Izzy gap-toothed in pigtails. Izzy in a graduation cap. Izzy on our wedding day, laughing in white cotton, holding grocery store champagne.
My hand comes up and touches the glass before I know I’m doing it.
I used to make her look like that.
She’s on the worn velvet sofa when I come in, jeans and a sweater I’ve never seen, hair in a ponytail, eyes swollen nearly shut. Her hands are folded in her lap so tightly the knuckles have gone white.
The divorce papers are on the coffee table, squared and waiting.
“Izzy. Hi.”
“You shouldn’t be here.” Her voice is sandpaper. “I told Mom not to let you in.”
“Five minutes.” I cross the room and drop into the armchair before she can order me out, folder on my knees. “Five minutes, then throw me out, call the police, anything you want.”
“A folder.” She stares at it and the horrible laugh that comes out of her hurts to hear. “You brought a folder. To the end of our marriage. You brought a folder.”
“It’s proof.” I flip it open, spread pages, hit play on my phone and hold the screen toward her, the conference room, every angle, my hands flat on the table. “Look. Look at my hands. She was translating, her father was right there, the whole thing was filmed by a kid who was paid to…”
“Turn it off.”
“Izzy, just look…”
“TURN IT OFF, WILSON!” She’s on her feet, and the scream cracks in the middle, and somewhere behind me a cabinet in the kitchen goes very quiet.
“I don’t need your footage! I believed you from the island!
I stood in that villa in a red dress you never saw and I believed you, because in seven years you have never once lied to me, you just never showed up! ”
The phone is still playing in my hand. Tiny me, moving papers around a table, an ocean away from her. I stop it.
“You believe me.” Relief floods in so fast I could be sick with it. “Then, Izzy, then come home. If you know nothing happened…”
“I believe you didn’t sleep with her.” She wraps her arms around her own body. “I’m still divorcing you.”
The room tilts.
“What?” I’m standing without deciding to stand. “No. No, that doesn’t… if you believe me, then what is this? What are we doing?”
“You want the list?” Her voice climbs, cracks, keeps climbing anyway. “You want the goddamn list, Wilson? Our fifth anniversary, I ate alone while a waiter refilled my water out of pity. My father’s funeral. My FATHER, Wilson!”
“The deal was…” I hear the word leave my mouth and I would give anything to eat it. Her whole face convulses.
“SAY IT.” She shoves my chest with both hands and I let her, I’d let her do it forever. “Say ‘the deal,’ say it one more time, I swear to God…”
“Izzy, I know…”
“I called you at two in the morning crying and you told me you’d call me back!
” She’s stammering now, gulping air between words.
“You didn’t… you never… I buried my father with your assistant holding the umbrella, Wilson!
Your assistant! You were supposed to be there. So why weren’t you? WHY WEREN’T YOU?”
“I know.” My eyes are streaming and I don’t wipe them. “I know, and I can’t… tell me how to fix it, tell me what to do, I’ll do anything…”
“You can’t FIX it! It’s not a…” She swats the folder and it spins across the coffee table, pages fanning out over the divorce papers, timestamps and statements sliding to the floor. “It’s not a THING, it’s not a DEAL, it’s seven years of me sitting in empty rooms teaching myself not to expect you!”
I go down.
It isn’t a decision. My knees just quit, right there on Helena’s rug, and I’m looking up at my wife with the wreckage of my evidence scattered around me.
“Put them back on.” I’m digging in my pocket, and the rings spill loose, one of them hits the floor and rolls, and I go after it on my hands and knees, scrabbling under the coffee table like a man chasing his whole life across a rug, and when I come up I hold both of them out to her in an open palm.
“Please. Please, Izzy. Put them back on. I’ll fix everything else, I swear on my life, just, put them on. ”
She looks at the rings for a long time. Her chin is trembling. One tear lets go and slides all the way to her jaw.
Then she reaches out and closes my fingers over them, and pushes my fist gently back toward my chest.
“Take them with you.”
I break. Whatever sound comes out of me, I’ve never made it before.
“Give me a chance.” I’m clutching the rings so hard the diamond cuts into my palm. “One chance. I’ll cancel everything. I’ll be home every night. I swear to you, Izzy, I’ll…”
“For how long though?” She’s crying and pacing, arms wrapped around herself. “A week? Maybe a month if I’m lucky? And then another emergency comes up and you’re gone again?”
She stops and looks at me.
“I’ve heard all of this before. You know that, right? I’ve heard every single promise you’re making right now.”
“Then I’ll sell it!” It comes out louder than I mean it to, almost a shout. “The company. All of it. I’ll sign the papers tomorrow. I’ll walk away from the whole thing. Just please, please don’t leave me.”
She goes completely still.
“You’d really do that.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “Now. With divorce papers on the table. Now you’d give it up.”
“Yes. Right now. Today. Whatever you need me to do, I’ll…”
“I kept telling myself it would be enough eventually.” She’s not even looking at me anymore, just staring at the wall. “That one day the company would be big enough or successful enough or whatever enough, and you’d finally be satisfied. And then you’d come home.”
She laughs but there’s no humor in it.
“But it was never enough, was it? There was always the next thing. The next deal. The next problem only you could solve.”
She finally looks at me.
“And I just kept waiting. Like an idiot, I kept waiting for my turn.”
“Izzy, that’s not…”
“Do you remember our old apartment?” Her voice goes soft and it almost hurts more than the yelling. “The one with the kitchen so small we kept bumping into each other?”
I nod because I don’t trust my voice.
“We were so broke, Wilson. We had nothing. And I was so happy.” She wipes her face but the tears keep coming.
“We’d eat cheap takeout on the floor because we didn’t have a table yet.
We’d talk for hours about everything and nothing.
You used to look at me like I was the most important thing in your world. ”
Her voice cracks.
“I miss that. I miss us. I miss who we were before all of this.”
“We can get that back. Izzy, I swear we can…”
“I needed you to come home for dinner.” Her voice shakes. “That’s it. That’s all I wanted. Just you, walking through the door, asking me about my day. I needed you to hold me when my dad died.”
She presses her fist against her chest.
“I needed you to remember our anniversary because you wanted to, not because your assistant put it on your calendar.”
“I can do that. I can learn to…”
“I needed the small stuff, Wilson.” Tears are streaming down her face. “Not the empire. Not the money. Not the penthouse. Just you. Being here. Being present. Being the guy I married.”
She shakes her head slowly.