16. Hugo
— ? —
Hugo
I watch Ginny’s interview from my living room, and I feel a cold, murderous calm settle into my chest.
She’s good. I’ll give her that. The trembling voice, the careful tears, the way she flinches when the interviewer mentions Lucille’s name, it’s a masterpiece of performance.
If I didn’t know the truth, if I hadn’t spent the past months watching her manipulate every situation to her advantage, I might actually believe she was the victim here.
“She was screaming at me,” Ginny says on screen, her eyes glistening. “Calling me terrible names. And then she just, threw the drink. I felt so violated. So unsafe.”
“Did she give any indication why she was so upset?”
“She’s always been jealous of my connection with Hugo.” Ginny shakes her head sadly. “I tried to be kind to her. I tried to include her in our collaboration. But she couldn’t handle seeing her husband create with someone else.”
The interviewer leans forward, sympathetic. “There’s been speculation that your relationship with Hugo was more than professional. Can you address that?”
Ginny’s pause is perfectly timed, just long enough to suggest there’s a truth she’s not sharing.
“Hugo and I have a deep creative bond,” she says finally. “Whether that makes his wife uncomfortable isn’t a thing I can control.”
I turn off the television before I put my fist through it.
She’s not just attacking Lucille anymore. She’s not just playing the victim. She’s actively implying an affair that never happened, using careful non-denials to suggest a lie that would destroy whatever fragile thing Lucille and I have been building.
And she’s doing it tonight. The night of Lucille’s showcase. The night my wife finally got to stand in the spotlight she deserved, celebrating work that had nothing to do with me or Ginny or any of this mess.
The timing is surgical. Deliberate. Designed to inflict maximum damage at the moment of maximum vulnerability.
I grab my keys and head for the door.
The drive to Lucille’s studio takes twenty minutes, and I spend every one of them trying to figure out what to do.
My mother’s investigator hasn’t found proof yet, just circumstantial evidence that someone with access to old conservatory files leaked the song, and a financial trail that’s suggestive but not conclusive.
Without hard evidence, going public with accusations would just look like a desperate husband trying to protect his wife.
And Lucille doesn’t want me to fight her battles. She made that clear. Whatever I do tonight, it has to be about supporting her, not about charging in to save her like some white knight she didn’t ask for.
But I also can’t stand by while Ginny tears her apart.
I pull onto Spring Street and immediately see the problem.
There’s a crowd outside Lucille’s building. Not a big crowd, maybe fifteen people, but they’re all holding cameras, and they’re all focused on the entrance like sharks circling a bleeding swimmer.
Paparazzi. Here for the follow-up story. Hugo Kensington’s Wife Reacts to Ginny Davies Interview.
They’ll be waiting for her to leave. Waiting to shove microphones in her face and demand responses to accusations she didn’t see coming. Waiting to capture her at her worst so they can sell the footage to the highest bidder.
I park around the corner and walk toward the building, keeping my head down. A few of the photographers glance my way but don’t recognize me immediately. I’m dressed casually, no suit jacket, nothing that screams “celebrity husband.”
The side entrance is clear. I slip through and take the stairs two at a time.
Her studio door is closed, but I can see light through the frosted glass. She’s still here. Still working, probably, trying to ride the high of her showcase before the internet takes it from her.
I knock.
“Go away.” Her voice is flat. Exhausted. “I’m not giving any comments.”
“It’s me.”
A pause. Footsteps. The door opens.
Lucille looks wrecked. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her hair escaping from its careful arrangement, her showcase dress traded for the worn sweater she keeps here for late nights. She’s been crying, and recently.
“You saw it,” she says. Not a question.
“I saw it. And I saw the fifteen paparazzi camped at your front door waiting for you to react to it.”
Her head snaps up. “What?”
“They’re not going to stop, Lucille. Not tonight, not tomorrow. They want a shot of you looking guilty or furious or broken, and they’ll wait outside this building until they get it.” I keep my voice low, steady. “We need to get you out before they figure out there’s a side entrance.”
“And go where?” She wraps her arms around herself. “Alice’s? They’ll follow. A hotel? Someone always talks.”
“Just get out of here with me first. Then we’ll figure out the rest.” I hold out my hand, not close enough to crowd her. “Please. Trust me for the next ten minutes.”
She looks at my hand for a long moment. Then she grabs her bag, kills the studio light, and takes it.
We take the back stairs down and slip out the side entrance into the alley.
The paparazzi are still clustered at the front, their backs to us, their cameras trained on a door she’s not going to walk through.
I keep her close as we move, one hand at the small of her back without quite touching, guiding her away from the light and the noise.
But my car is parked around the front corner, past the crowd, and there’s no clean way to reach it without being seen.
“This way,” I murmur, and steer her deeper into the maze of side streets behind the building.
We move fast through the dark, past shuttered storefronts and loading docks and the backs of buildings that all look the same at this hour.
A car alarm goes off somewhere. A cat bolts across our path.
Lucille lets out a startled laugh that she claps a hand over, and for a second the fear cracks and something lighter shows through.
“Where are we going?” she whispers.
“Up.”
The parking structure on the next block is open all night, and I take her through the pedestrian entrance and up the stairwell, flight after flight, until we push through a heavy door onto the rooftop level.
It’s nearly empty this late, just a scatter of parked cars and the low hum of the city rising up from below.
Lucille walks to the edge and grips the concrete barrier, catching her breath.
And then she goes still.
Because the view up here is something else. The whole city spread out beneath us, a grid of light running all the way to the hills, and above it, for once, a clear sky. No smog, no glare washing it out. Just stars, faint but real, the kind you never get to see down in the noise.
“I forgot the sky did that,” she says quietly.
I come to stand beside her, close but not touching, and I let her have the moment. Her shoulders drop by a fraction. The frantic edge she carried out of the studio starts to loosen.
This is the thing I’ve been building toward for weeks. The offer I’ve been too afraid to make because I wasn’t sure she’d take it.
“My family has a vineyard,” I say. “Three hours north. It’s private.
Gated, no public access, completely off the radar.
The press doesn’t even know it exists, because we’ve never hosted anything there.
” I keep my eyes on the city, giving her room.
“Come away with me. No cameras. No press. No Ginny. Just somewhere you can breathe until this feeding frenzy burns itself out.”
She turns to look at me. “You want me to run away with you to a vineyard.”
“I want to take you somewhere they can’t reach you.
” I finally meet her eyes. “I know things are complicated. The divorce papers are still on my desk, still unsigned, and I’m not asking you to decide anything about them.
I’m not asking for anything except the chance to be there for you when it counts. Which is something I never did before.”
Her eyes are bright with unshed tears, the city glittering behind her.
“What if I’m terrible company? What if I spend the whole time crying and angry and impossible?”
“Then I’ll hand you tissues and make you tea and sit with you while you feel every bit of it.”
“What if I don’t want to talk?”
“Then we won’t talk.”
A watery laugh escapes her, and she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
“You’ve really thought about this.”
“I’ve thought about nothing else for weeks.”
The silence continues between us, the city breathing below, and I let her see there’s no lie in it. No performance. Just me, asking.
Then she says it.
“Yes. Take me away from here.” She lets out a shaky breath. “But I’m warning you, if this vineyard turns out to be some rustic nightmare with no hot water, I’m stealing your car and driving straight back to civilization.”
The relief hits me so hard it’s almost dizzying.
“There’s hot water,” I promise. “And a kitchen I have no idea how to use.”
“Good thing one of us can cook.”
We take the stairs back down together, and this time she doesn’t need my hand to guide her. She keeps pace beside me, her chin up, the fear replaced by something that looks almost like resolve. We come out a side exit half a block from my car, well clear of the crowd still watching the wrong door.
“Get in,” I say, opening the passenger side. “Keep your head down until we’re clear.”
She slides into the seat, and I drape my jacket over her, a shield between her and any lens that might swing our way.
I get behind the wheel, start the engine, and pull out as calmly as I can manage.
In the rearview mirror, one photographer turns toward the sound of my car, but we’re already moving, already turning onto the main road, already gone into the traffic.
“We made it,” Lucille says, peeking out from under my jacket. “I can’t believe we actually made it.”
“The night is young. There’s still plenty of time for disaster.”
“That’s very reassuring, thank you.”
“I try.”
She laughs, and the sound does something in my chest, loosening a knot I didn’t know was there. Then her smile fades a little.