CHAPTER TWELVE
The Woman They Refused
POV: Sharon ? The present, days later
The story turned because Earl couldn't keep his mouth shut, which was the first time in recorded history that Earl's mouth had done anyone any good.
It started as the story Dolores had warned her about, the woman-shaped hole.
Secret wife. Hidden six years. And the internet, which needed a reason, filled the hole with the ugliest guess available, because the ugliest guess is always the most clickable, so for about three days Sharon was a schemer, a gold-digger, a woman with something to hide, the sort of woman a sensible family would naturally keep out of sight.
Then a local news crew, working the angle of the town that kept the secret, made the mistake of pointing a camera at Earl outside the feed store.
"Gold-digger," Earl said, with the flat contempt of a man who had known Sharon for twenty years and considered the reporter personally stupid.
"Son, that woman worked doubles at that diner while she was married to a millionaire.
You know why? Because she liked it. She liked knowing everybody's coffee.
She paid for half this town's breakfasts out of her own tips and lied about it so nobody'd feel bad.
Gold-digger. I've heard some things. She drives a nine-year-old Honda.
Go look at it. It's right there. Gold-digger. "
And that was the crack in the dam, because once Earl started, the town could not be stopped.
Dolores wouldn't talk to reporters, on principle, but she didn't have to, because everyone else did.
The seniors from the bus. Mr. Petrie, telling a camera that Sharon knew he took decaf and never once let him near the regular, said it like it was the highest praise a human could receive, which in his world it was.
A young mother Sharon barely remembered, who said Sharon had covered her check one hard winter and told her it was a coupon, there'd been no coupon.
Mrs. Ellery, ninety now and sharp as a tack, who looked into the camera and said, "They want to know why a rich man hid her.
I'll tell you what I know. When my Walter died, that girl invented a lie so I could eat dinner with my dignity.
You don't hide a woman like that because you're ashamed of her.
You hide her because you're ashamed of yourself. Print that."
Sharon watched it happen from her mother's kitchen and did not know how to feel, because the thing everyone was praising her for was the thing she'd spent her life doing quietly precisely so no one would praise her for it, and having it read aloud on television felt less like being seen and more like being caught.
"They've got it wrong," she told Dolores on the phone.
"They're making me a saint now. I'm not a saint.
I paid for breakfasts because I could and it felt good, that's not sainthood, that's just having a little and remembering when you didn't. They're doing the same thing the mean version did.
They're making me into a story. It's a nicer story. It's still not me."
"I know, honey."
"I don't want to be beloved. I wanted to be married.
" Sharon heard herself say it and pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes.
"That's the whole thing nobody gets. I didn't want a nation of strangers thinking I'm wonderful.
I wanted one man to say my name at a party.
And now I've got the strangers and not the man, and everybody thinks the strangers are the happy ending, and I'm supposed to be grateful, and I'm not, Dolores, I'm not grateful, I'm just tired in a new outfit. "
POV: Sharon
The worst part of being beloved was that it worked on the family, and the family deserved to squirm, and watching them squirm didn't feel the way she'd once imagined it would.
Because the narrative flipping meant the Scotts were losing, publicly, in real time.
The company that hid the wife. The heir who called her a family friend.
Sharon watched a business channel run a segment on whether the "reputational exposure" would affect the stock, watched analysts in suits discuss her marriage like weather, and understood that she had become, overnight, a problem on a balance sheet, which was exactly what Richard had always feared she'd be and exactly the reason he'd tried to erase her, and now his erasing was the thing costing him.
There was a justice in it so precise it should have felt good.
It didn't feel good. That surprised her.
She'd spent six years imagining, in her worst private moments, the day the Scotts would be sorry, and now it was here, playing out on cable news, and all she felt watching Richard Scott's empire take a hit over her was a strange hollow flatness, because none of it gave her the one thing.
None of it made her chosen. It just made her a weapon that had been used against the people who refused her, and being a weapon was not the same as being a wife, and she was done, she realized, confusing the two.
Her phone rang. A number she didn't know, city area code, and she almost didn't answer, because half the calls now were reporters, but something made her answer, and the voice on the other end was a woman's, poised and cultured and unmistakable even though they'd met exactly once, six years ago, in a front room the size of the whole diner.
"Sharon," Eleanor Scott said. "Please don't hang up.
I know I have no right to ask you for a single thing.
I'm calling anyway, because I've spent six years being a coward in a quieter way than my son, and I'm too old to keep doing it.
Will you let me say something? You can hang up after. But will you let me say it?"
Sharon sat down slowly at her mother's kitchen table.
"Say it," she said.
POV: Sharon
Eleanor Scott did not apologize the way Sharon expected, which was to say she didn't perform it, didn't reach for the graceful words a woman like that would have at her fingertips. She was clumsy, and the clumsiness was the most honest thing about it.
"I knew," Eleanor said. "That's the part I need to say out loud to you, because I've been saying a gentler version to myself for years and I'm finished with the gentle version.
I knew about you within the first year. A mother knows.
I knew there was someone, and then I knew there was a child, I worked it out from things Jackson didn't say, and I never once asked him, because asking would have meant knowing, and knowing would have meant choosing, and I did not want to choose.
So I let my son hide you, and I told myself I was staying out of it, and staying out of it is a thing you can only afford to call neutral if you're not the one being hidden. "
Sharon didn't say anything. She'd learned that from the Circle. You let the true thing sit at its weight.
"When he brought you to the house that day," Eleanor went on, and her voice caught, "I was cold to you.
I've thought about it more than you'd believe.
You were pregnant and frightened and wearing a green dress you'd clearly chosen with great care, and I could see how much care, and I was cold to you anyway, because Richard was cold and it was easier to be on Richard's side, it's always easier to be on Richard's side, that's the entire secret of my marriage.
And you overheard the word procedure through a door.
I know you did. I was in the next room and I did nothing, and I have had to live in this family knowing that I had a grandson I chose not to meet because meeting him would have cost me a fight with my husband I didn't want to have. "
"Why are you telling me this now," Sharon said. It wasn't hostile. She wanted to know. "The story's out. You look bad now. How do I know this isn't just you managing the story like the rest of them?"
There was a silence, and Sharon braced for the smooth deflection, the reason, the pool.
"You don't," Eleanor said. "That's fair.
You don't know, and I can't prove it, and if I were you I wouldn't trust me either.
All I can tell you is that I'm not calling to ask you to say anything nice about us.
I'd think less of you if you did. I'm calling because I have a grandson I've never met, and I am sixty-three years old, and I've decided I would rather be humiliated and know him than be dignified and never have.
That's the whole reason. It's a selfish reason.
I'm not pretending it isn't. I want to meet Ethan before I've wasted the only chance I get, and I'm willing to be told no, and I'm willing to earn it slowly, and I'm willing to do it in whatever way protects him, but I couldn't not ask, because not-asking is the thing I've done my whole life and it's cost me everyone. "
Sharon looked out the window at the county road, at the vehicles that were fewer now, at the long lens that had finally gone home.
"He likes trains," she heard herself say, and did not know why she said it, except that it was true, and except that it was the same thing Jackson had apparently said to his father, and something about all these frightened Scotts finally learning the true small facts of a five-year-old undid something in her she'd meant to keep guarded.