The Storm
I met Landon’s daddy only once, and it was by accident.
After that first night, I’d never planned on seeing Landon Fitzroy again, assuming he had a lot better shit to do than hang out in a dive bar in a no-name town, but the next evening, when I’d gone in for my shift at The Line, there’d been a letter waiting for me on the heaviest paper I’d ever felt in my life.
Seriously, I’ve had mattresses thinner than that piece of stationery.
It had his name at the top, or I guess I should say his letterhead because he was the kind of person who had letterhead.
It wasn’t a very long note, but what was in it made my heart pound, my head swim, my knees get wobbly, alllllll of that.
He just sounded so sweet was the thing.
Here he was, a big-deal lawyer, his daddy running the whole state of Alabama, his boat in the St. Medard’s Bay harbor bigger than my whole damn house.
Bigger than two of my whole damn house, seemed like.
And there I was, a waitress at a bar with a high school diploma and not much else, but you would’ve thought I was a goddess from the way he was practically begging me just to acknowledge him.
I’ve kept that letter for the past forty years, the paper so soft it almost feels like fabric from how many times I’ve folded it and refolded it.
I won’t quote it, and I’m damn sure not putting it in the book because some things have to stay private, but I will tell you that he told me I looked like I “swallowed starlight,” and oh my God, that was it for me.
Now, of course, the whole thing seems insane.
Writing something like that on his fancy paper with his full fuckin’ name on it, walking into The Line in broad daylight to hand that note to Roy the bartender himself, saying out loud that he was leaving it for the barely legal waitress who’d served him and his buddies the night before.
At the time, it was romantic as all get-out, how little he cared about what people might say, how bold he was, how he wanted me so much that he’d risk his whole reputation. All that, combined with how open his letter was, how vulnerable and uncertain he sounded?
Oh, honey.
Show me the teenage girl—shit, show me the grown-ass woman—who can resist that, and I’ll show you a liar.
Of course, once I was a grown-ass woman, all this looked a little less dreamy and a little more reckless, almost purposefully so.
I wonder now if he was trying to blow it all up, if he wanted to force his father’s hand.
If the only way Landon could think of to escape the destiny that was waiting for him was to obliterate it as thoroughly as possible.
We had that in common. Not the destiny part, but that need to push, push, push—to see how far we could take something, see how long it took before someone finally said no.
Anyway, he’d scrawled a number on the bottom of that letter, and I called it right then and there from The Line.
Do you know to this day I still don’t know exactly where the phone that number reached was?
It wasn’t Landon’s office, and it damn sure wasn’t his house.
This was before cell phones, but it could’ve been a car phone, I guess, although it never sounded like one.
He picked up just after the first ring, and baby, we were off to the races.
After Landon was gone, the tabloids made our romance out to be either this epic star-crossed thing or this really tawdry affair where we … I don’t know, fucked on piles of mink coats and I greeted him at the door wearing nothing but diamonds.
(Okay, actually, I did do that once. The diamonds, not the mink coats. It was just after he bought the little house on the beach in St. Medard’s in April of 1984. The papers called it our “hidden love nest,” but it was literally like half a mile from Ellen’s family’s inn, so how “hidden” is that?)
But the truth was, those early days were almost sickeningly normal.
We talked on the phone every night during the week, and every weekend, he’d be in St. Medard’s with me.
At first, our affair was under the radar.
People were used to seeing him around town and knew his family had a house nearby, and we were discreet.
For a little while, at least.
Mostly we spent time on his boat, sometimes just anchored at the marina, but we’d also take her out on occasion. Those were my favorite times, the two of us alone surrounded by sea and sky.
“Sometimes when we’re like this, I feel like we’re the only two people on the planet,” Landon said to me one evening as we watched the sun put on a brilliant orange, pink, and purple show as it sunk into the water.
I nodded, wrapped my arms tighter around him, and said, “Me, too,” even though I could never feel that way, not on that boat with his wife’s name curving along the side in gold paint.
The Miss Alison.
You’re gonna wonder if I felt bad about her. Alison. Being “the Other Woman.”
I do now. I never met her, never even saw her in person, but if I had, I would’ve apologized, and if she spat in my face, well, I’d say she fuckin’ earned that right.
But at the time, it was more like I just tried not to think about her.
And because Landon and I had our own little world down there in St. Medard’s, and she had her own big world of social events and shopping and who knows what else in Mobile, that was kind of easy to do, except for the times when my eyes would drift to the side of the boat, to that swooping “A.”
So yeah, at first, it was practically wholesome—other than the whole adultery part.
Then Landon’s daddy crashed the party.
Has the governor of your home state seen your tits? Because mine has, and I really do not recommend it.
We were on the boat, in the part of the cabin I always thought of as the living room but Landon told me was called the salon. It was February, and it was freezing outside, the day damp and gray, the marina practically deserted.
I still had my jeans on when the governor of the Great State of Alabama suddenly appeared on the teak steps that led down from the deck, but my sweater and my bra were long gone, and in the frantic scramble that followed, I ended up clutching a throw pillow that said AHOY! to my chest.
Funny, the things you remember.
Beau Fitzroy had his son’s black eyes, and if the way Landon first looked at me had made me feel precious and seen, then Beau’s dark gaze made me feel like I was shit he’d just scraped off his shoe.
No one had ever looked at me like that before.
And I never let anyone look at me like that again.
But that cold February morning, I was half naked and shocked and embarrassed and honestly a little afraid.
I’d never cared all that much about politics, and up until that moment, I’d always just thought of Landon as …
Landon. Just a guy. A sweet, smart, sexy man who made me feel sweet, smart, and sexy.
But seeing his father there was a real bucket of cold water to the face.
Reality crashed into me so hard it took my breath away, and even though Landon and I had been together for six months by then, for the first time, just what it was I was doing—sleeping with a married man, a married man who is eleven years older than me, a married man whose father is the goddamned governor, what the actual fuck is wrong with me?
—broke through whatever haze I’d been in since I’d picked up that letter and seen Landon’s name in embossed letters across the top.
I don’t know how long Mr. Fitzroy stood there, silent as the statue they built for him a few years ago, the one that makes him look like a fuckin’ Star Wars villain. I do remember Landon getting up, fastening his belt while his hair hung over his forehead, his body radiating tension.
“Dad,” he started, and faster than a snake, faster than anything I think I’ve ever seen, Beau Fitzroy reached out and slapped Landon hard across the face.
It sounded like a pistol shot, and I think I might have gasped. Landon just stood there, his head turned to the side, a red mark already appearing on one cheek.
Then he chuckled, but it wasn’t a sound I’d ever heard from him before. Landon laughed all the time, and this wasn’t that. This was something mean, something dark, and there was another first for me that afternoon.
For the first time, I realized that I might not really know Landon all that well.
“You know, I’m actually old enough to hit back now,” he said to his father, but Mr. Fitzroy just glared at him.
Sighing, Landon turned and fished my sweater out from behind one of the sofa cushions, crossing the small space to hand it to me.
But taking it would’ve meant losing my pillow, and Mr. Fitzroy had gotten enough of a show as it was, so I just reached out with my fingertips and snagged the hem, letting the sweater lie limply on the sofa next to me.
“You are determined,” Mr. Fitzroy said, his voice deep and so Southern you could smell bourbon and magnolias in every word, “to throw it all away, aren’t you? Just plum determined to destroy yourself and anyone who loves you.”
“Well, you should be fine, then, Daddy,” Landon said, one corner of his mouth kicking up.
I loved Landon’s smile, but not this version of it. Like his laugh, there was something ugly in it, and I shrank back against the sofa, wanting to be anywhere but on that fucking boat, let me tell you what.
“Don’t you dare act like I don’t love you, boy,” Mr. Fitzroy thundered in reply. “If I didn’t, I’d let you blow up your entire goddamned life on … on boats and beaches and”—he gestured toward me but didn’t bother looking in my direction—“whatever this even is. Temporary insanity, one hopes.”
Forty years ago, and I remember every word that man said that day. You would, too, if a person you’d seen your whole life on TV, in newspapers, and in a photo on the wall of the DM-fuckin’-V was suddenly standing in front of you, more or less calling you trash.
“Well, you’re half right,” Landon said, looking a little more like his old self, hands braced on his hips, a faint smile still curving his lips. “I’m absolutely insane about Lo, but there is nothing temporary about her.”
Now, here is where I have to think.
Because I want to tell you that he then said, “Because I love her.”
But did he? I’ve replayed it over and over again, and I tell myself he must have because I remember sitting there feeling warm all over, feeling loved, so much so that it didn’t really register what his father said next—not then, at least.
“Like the last one,” Mr. Fitzroy said, and now he was smiling one of those ugly smiles. “And the one before her. And the one before her, I suppose. When are you going to grow up, huh? When am I going to stop getting phone calls asking if I know where my son is and with whom?”
Now, of course, I could answer that for him.
“August 1984, sir,” I’d say. “Just six months from now, and you’ll never get those kinds of phone calls again because Landon will be dead, and I’ll have turned out to be temporary after all. Are you happy, you son of a bitch?”
But on that day, none of us knew any of that, and Landon just said something about how maybe his dad could stop picking up those phone calls, and his dad blustered something else, and then he was stomping back up the stairs.
He didn’t look at me as he left. Other than that first heat-seeking missile of a scowl he’d turned my way when he first showed up, he hadn’t looked at me at all.
Maybe he was afraid he’d catch another glimpse of my nipples—or, more likely, who I was and what I looked like just didn’t fucking matter to him because I wasn’t a person, I was just this …
thing. An inconvenience in his life, a mere tool his son was using to break free from all those expectations, all that destiny.
So. You wonder why Beau Fitzroy was so steadfast in his belief that I killed his son?
I’ll tell you: it’s because he felt guilty.
Because he knew—that motherfucker knew—that if he’d just let Landon live his own life, if he’d just eased up on him for one damn minute, Landon might not have been so reckless, so, as he put it himself, plum determined to live life on his own terms.
And men like him, men who think they have capital-D Destinies, who think God Himself is personally invested in their success, like He has nothing better to worry about than some politician’s stock portfolio, they can’t ever lose.
It’s always gotta be someone else’s fault, and if it’s a woman they can blame?
Well, hallelujah and pass the biscuits, because that’s even better.
Pages of unfinished manuscript titled “Be a Good Girl: Lo Bailey, Landon Fitzroy, and the Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty.” Found among possessions of August Fletcher, 8/3/2025