CHAPTER THREE
MERRITT
The first call came at nine in the morning from a number I didn't recognize, and I almost didn't answer it. I'm glad I did, in a way, because it told me exactly what I was in for before I'd finished my coffee.
"Mrs. Bellamy, this is Danielle Okafor with the Post. I'm working on a piece about Fenner Bellamy's business dealings, and I wondered if you'd be willing to comment on your husband's response to the allegations."
"I'm not able to comment on company matters. You'll want to reach Bellamy Aeronautics' communications team."
"Of course. I did have one other question, if you don't mind. Your father is Mercer Vale, is that correct? Of Brackenridge, Pennsylvania?"
I stood very still in my kitchen, phone against my ear, coffee going cold on the counter. "I don't see how that's relevant to a story about my husband's company."
"We're just trying to build a full picture of the Bellamy family's background," she said, in the tone of someone who already knew the answer and was only asking to hear how I'd handle it. "Thank you for your time, Mrs. Bellamy."
By noon, the picture had built itself without my help.
A blog with more traffic than credibility ran a piece with the headline FROM PRISON TOWN TO PENTHOUSE, alongside a photograph of the house I'd grown up in on Fenwick Street, paint peeling from the porch railing exactly the way it had when I was twelve.
Someone had found the old newspaper photograph of my father from his sentencing, thirty-one years old and gaunt in a courtroom hallway, and run it beside a recent photo of me at a Bellamy Aeronautics fundraiser in a dress that cost more than what he'd earned in a year at the mill before everything fell apart.
I read the comments once, which was one time too many. Strangers had opinions about how a woman like me had ended up married to a man like Whitaker, opinions that ranged from admiring to vicious and somehow managed to be equally exhausting.
I called my mother first.
"I already saw it," Della said. "Your sister called me the second it went up, cursing a blue streak."
"I'm sorry, Mom."
"Sorry for what? You didn't do anything.
Your father did something, thirty years ago, and he paid for it the way the law asked him to.
That's not the same as you owing anybody an apology for existing.
" A pause, the sound of her moving something in the kitchen, a life that continued regardless of what strangers on the internet had decided about it. "How's Whit handling it?"
"Furious. Mostly at Fenner."
"Good. Somebody should be."
I called Blythe next, and she was exactly as loud about it as I expected.
"They ran your childhood photo like it's a mugshot," she said. "Our house, Merritt. They didn't even ask permission, they just pulled it off some real estate listing from years ago and slapped a headline on it."
"I know. I saw."
"Does anybody up there know what it's actually like to grow up somewhere people write headlines like that about? Does one single person at that gala know what it costs to keep the lights on in February?"
"Blythe."
"I'm not attacking you. I'm attacking them. There's a difference." She sighed, and I could hear her settle, the anger burning down into something closer to worry. "You okay?"
"I'm embarrassed," I admitted. "Not of Dad. I'm never going to be embarrassed of Dad again, I decided that a long time ago. I'm embarrassed that strangers get to look at our family and decide what we are based on twenty seconds of research and a bad photograph."
"That's their limitation, not yours."
"I know that too. Doesn't make it feel any better today."
Whitaker came home at nine that night, tie already loosened, jacket slung over one arm, and found me at the kitchen table with my laptop open to eleven browser tabs I should have closed hours ago. He read my face before I said a word and crossed the room to pull the laptop shut.
"I saw the coverage," he said. "It's disgusting, using an old real estate photo like that."
"They found the sentencing photo too. The one of him in the courthouse hallway."
"I saw that one too." He sat across from me, took both my hands in his, and for a moment he looked less like a CEO managing a crisis and more like the man who'd once driven six hours with me to visit my father before either of us had any money or any Bellamy name attached to us at all.
"Merritt. Look at me. None of this is your fault, and none of it should touch you.
Your father did something thirty years ago and served his time for it.
You didn't do anything but grow up loving him anyway, which is the opposite of a crime. "
"I know."
"I need you to actually know it. Not just say it back to me." He squeezed my hands. "You have nothing to hide. Nothing about where you came from is something to be ashamed of, and if anyone in this family or outside it ever suggests otherwise, they'll answer to me before they finish the sentence."
It was exactly what I needed to hear, delivered with the specific conviction that had made me trust him from the very beginning, before there was money, before there was a company that employed four thousand people, back when he was a nervous engineering graduate who'd shown up to my father's release hearing because I'd asked him to and he hadn't hesitated for a second.
I still remembered exactly what that day had looked like.
A cinderblock waiting room outside the facility in Somerset County, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, my mother wringing a tissue to shreds in her lap while I sat rigid beside her, twenty-two years old and terrified that Whitaker, three months into dating me and still learning which fork went where at his own family's table, would take one look at the chain-link fence and the guard tower and decide I came with more complication than he'd signed up for.
He hadn't flinched. He'd sat in that waiting room in a borrowed tie because he hadn't owned a proper suit yet, made small talk with my mother about her garden until she stopped shredding the tissue, and when my father finally walked through the door in the clothes the facility had given him to leave in, Whitaker had stood up and shaken his hand like he was meeting the father of the woman he intended to marry, because that was exactly what he was doing.
"Mr. Vale," he'd said. "I've heard a lot about you."
"All of it bad, I'd imagine," my father had said, testing him.
"Some of it. Most of it was about how you taught Merritt to change a tire in the church parking lot when she was fourteen because you didn't want her stranded anywhere without knowing how to help herself. That part I liked."
I had fallen in love with him a second time in that exact moment, watching him refuse to let my father's record be the only fact in the room.
"Whitaker," I said now, at our kitchen table twelve years later, "do you remember what you said to my dad, the day he got out?"
"I remember all of it," he said. "I remember thinking that if I got this wrong, I didn't deserve you at all."
"You didn't get it wrong."
"I'm not going to get this wrong either." He brought my hands to his mouth and kissed my knuckles, an old habit from those first years neither of us ever fully retired. "You have nothing to hide."
I believed him completely. I wrapped that sentence around myself like a coat and wore it through the rest of that week, through the follow-up articles and the online cruelty and Sabine's careful non-comments at a board dinner I nearly skipped, and it held.
It held right up until the moment, months later, when I finally understood that Whitaker believing something was true and Whitaker acting like it was true were two entirely separate promises, and he had only ever kept one of them.
That night, though, I only knew that my husband had looked me in the eye and told me I had nothing to hide, and I built the next several weeks of my life on the foundation of that sentence.
It seemed, at the time, like solid ground.