Chapter 2
Cole
Two weeks before Jenna Farrow walks back into my life, my publicist calls to tell me she's coming, and I do the thing I always do when I get bad news, which is say "okay" in a voice so calm it makes people more nervous than yelling would.
"Okay?" Marisol says. "That's it? Okay?"
"Okay."
"Cole. I need more than 'okay.' I have prepared three options and I have color-coded them."
"You color-coded my options."
"Green is decline. Yellow is cooperate. Red is let the team's PR office build a wall around you so high she needs a permit to see your face."
"What's red's actual name?"
"'Managed Access.' But it's red because it's the angry one."
I'm in my kitchen, which I keep very clean, because a clean kitchen is one of maybe four things in my life I have complete control over.
The other three are my shot, my schedule, and what I choose to say to a microphone.
I have learned to be very protective of the things I can control, because I spent twenty-two to twenty-six being a person with control over basically nothing, including himself.
"Yellow," I say.
There's a silence on the line that I would describe as stunned.
"Yellow," Marisol repeats. "You want to cooperate. With Jenna Farrow. Who wrote the piece."
"I read the piece," I say. "Recently, actually. Read it again last week."
"Why would you do that to yourself?"
"Because I wanted to check something."
"And?"
I pour myself a glass of water, because at twenty-eight, when the boys go out, I'm the guy who drinks water now, which is a sentence that would have made the twenty-three-year-old version of me laugh himself off a barstool.
"It's fair," I tell Marisol. "The piece.
It's accurate. Everything in it is true. "
"It ended your relationship with—"
"It's still true." I drink the water. "She wrote what she had. I didn't give her anything else. That's not her fault, that's mine. The party photos were real. I cancelled the appearances. The agent stonewalled her because I told him to. Every fact in that article is a fact."
"Then why are we picking yellow?"
And here's the part I don't say to Marisol, because Marisol is excellent at her job and her job is not the inside of my chest.
What Jenna Farrow didn't have — what she couldn't have had, because I made sure of it — is the Tuesday thing.
The literacy program. The little community center twenty minutes from the rink with the carpet that's seen things and the picture books with the corners chewed soft. Four years now. Every Tuesday I'm in town. The kids who think a chapter book is a mountain and then climb it anyway.
The reason I cancelled one of the appearances she named — the big one, the gala, the one that looked the worst — is that a kid I'd been reading with, a serious eight-year-old named Marcus who had decided we were going to get through the whole dragon series together or die trying, had a hospital appointment that ran long, and I sat in a plastic chair in a waiting room until ten p.m. because his mom was working a double and somebody should be there, and I didn't say a single word about it to anybody, because his parents asked me not to.
They didn't want their kid to be a story.
They didn't want him to be the thing that made me look good.
So I ate the gala. I ate the headline. I ate two years of being the punchline, and I would do it again, because I made those people a promise and I have made very few promises in my life that I've actually kept and that one I am keeping until the wheels come off.
I'm not angry at Jenna Farrow. I want to be. It would be simpler. But you can't be angry at somebody for solving a puzzle when you're the one who hid the pieces.
"Yellow," I tell Marisol, one more time. "I'll cooperate."
"This is either very brave or very stupid."
"Why not both."
"Cole."
"Yellow, Mari. Send the email."
She sends the email.
So now it's the first day, and Jenna Farrow is in my building, and I have a plan, which is roughly: be normal, be boring, give her nothing to write and nothing to fight.
I see her in the corridor outside the weight room.
I knew I would; I read the schedule. She's smaller than the version of her I've been carrying around in my head for two years, the one with the prosecutor's spreadsheet and the cold competent prose.
This version is just a person in a good coat with a lanyard and eyes that take inventory of a room in about half a second.
She sees me. I see her see me.
I look away. I keep walking. I'm proud of myself, honestly. Olympic-level not-reacting. I should get a medal and then decline to comment on the medal.
I am boring in the media room. I am so boring I bore myself.
A guy asks me about the power play and I give an answer so flat it could be slid under a door.
Jenna doesn't ask anything. She just watches, which is worse, because the watching is the part she's good at, and I can feel her building something behind her eyes, tile by tile, the way she built it last time.
The thing is — and I figure this out somewhere around the second period of the second day — boring isn't going to work.
Boring is what I've been doing for two years, and being boring at Jenna Farrow specifically is like trying to win a staring contest with a lighthouse.
She'll outlast me. She'll outwork me. She'll find the Tuesday thing eventually, because Theo can't keep a story in his mouth to save his life, and when she finds it she'll find it the way she finds everything, sideways and secondhand and slightly wrong.
I'd rather she got it right.
That's the decision. It arrives quietly, the way the important ones do. I'd rather she got it right, and the only way she gets it right is if I show her.
So after media availability on the second day, while she's coiling the cord on her recorder with the brisk competence of somebody who's done it ten thousand times, I walk over. Not close. Close enough.
She looks up. Wary. Fair.
"Tuesday mornings," I say. "I'm somewhere you can come. If you want."
That's it. That's the whole pitch. I don't explain. Explaining would ruin it — explaining would make it a press release, and the entire point is that it's the opposite of a press release.
Her face does something interesting, which is nothing, on purpose, the same trick I've been pulling all day, and it's strange to watch somebody do your own move back at you.
I walk away before she can ask a question, because if she asks a question I'll answer it, and I don't want to answer it. I want her to come find out.
She'll come. I know she'll come.
She's the most curious person I've ever met. It's why she wrecked me two years ago.
It might be why she fixes it now.