Chapter 28 – MADDIE
MADDIE
The footage reached me the way everything about Damon reached me now, from a distance, on my own terms. Ellie forwarded a headline with three exclamation points and the words HOLY SHIT in all capitals.
Curtis, who had never once lied to me, sent a longer message a day later, the real account, what Damon had done in that ballroom before and after the evidence on the screen and the words on record. And then he said something else.
He fucked up, Maddie. He's been doing little else for eight years and I've seen it all from the outside.
This is the first time I've ever felt like he sees it too.
The first time I've ever thought my brother had it in him to change.
I'm not asking you to do anything with that.
I just thought you should hear it from someone who loves you both.
So the woman in the coat over pajamas had been paid.
The cardiac scare had never had a thing to do with the drug, and Emily had known it, had checked, had chosen to exploit the situation for exactly that reason.
She'd written the script that broke my marriage in front of three hundred people and wired money to a sick man's daughter to perform it.
All of it manufactured, all of it aimed.
To make herself the hero. To make her indispensable. As if Damon hadn't already treated her as just that.
I waited to feel vindicated. I'd earned vindicated. I'd been called selfish for asking the right question, and here was the proof.
I'd watched the footage ten times, and hearing Damon deliver that proof never got any less shocking even if I could memorize his words by heart now. But I didn't feel triumphant.
What I felt instead was quiet. Because being proven right about why a thing was unbearable doesn't make it bearable.
Because the marriage didn't break the night Emily lit the match.
It broke over eight years of a man not turning his head, and Emily found a marriage already full of dry tinder and did what people like her do.
And because, mostly, I'd built a life by then that didn't run on Damon Sterling.
I was in a small, manageable apartment across town, as far from our neighborhood of mansions as you could get, because I didn't need more than a bedroom and a room for a studio with a little balcony to drink my coffee on in the mornings. It felt like more than I'd had our entire marriage.
But it also felt… empty.
So had our home, though. I had learned to live with it and I had learned to live without him.
The question was… did I want to?
His message came that night. I knew it would. But it wasn't like the others.
For months, he'd been pleading with me. Now, he just sounded… broken. And resigned.
I assume you've probably seen the video by now, and I need you to know I meant every word.
But there's so much more I have to say to you, so much you deserve to hear, if you're willing.
It doesn't have to be now, or next week.
If you're never ready to hear it, I understand that too.
You lived eight years on my timeline and it's only fair I wait on yours.
But if you do want to hear it, I'll come.
Wherever you are, whenever it is, I'll come.
I read it on my balcony, sipping coffee and watching the light play in the trees. I just stared at the text on the screen for a while, words I never thought I would see.
Words that weren't enough anyway. No words ever could be. But he was right about one thing, I deserved to hear them. And more.
I thought about leaving him on red. He'd done that to me enough times, but at this point, revenge felt as hollow as everything else.
I was tired too. We had that in common, at least.
Then I answered. Because I noticed I wasn't afraid of it anymore.
I'd left him terrified of what hearing him out might cost me, certain I'd fold, certain I'd file the unbearable somewhere it wouldn't show and climb back into the car.
And somewhere over an ocean and a few months and a wall of windows, I'd stopped being able to lose myself that way, because I finally had a self that wasn't his to misplace.
Hearing him out couldn't cost me me. Not anymore.
So it was safe, at last, to let him say what he had to say.
I'm in town. I can meet you Sunday, preferably somewhere that's not the house or your office.
He could take it or leave it.