Chapter Four #2
"It's just the internet," Rachel said, gently, once I'd read her a sample of the comments over the phone, her voice careful in the way it got when she was trying to help without making things worse.
"You know that, right? None of those people know you.
It's not real information about your marriage, it's just strangers performing outrage for likes. "
"I know that intellectually."
"But it doesn't feel that way when it's four hundred thousand strangers."
"No," I said. "It doesn't."
"Do you want me to come over?"
"I have to leave in an hour anyway," I said. "Grant has a table read. I said I'd be there."
"You don't have to go to every single one of these things, you know. You're allowed to just stay home sometimes."
"I know," I said, though some part of me wondered, even as I said it, whether staying home would feel like giving something up, ceding ground I didn't yet understand I might need to hold onto.
Grant found me still at the counter an hour later, dressed for the table read, keys already in his hand, moving with the particular efficiency of a man running slightly behind schedule.
"Don't read the comments," he said, which was the wrong thing to say. It was true, but it assumed the problem was my reading habits rather than the material being manufactured for me to read in the first place, manufactured and amplified by people his own team employed.
"Your own team is supplying the material, Grant.
" I turned my phone to show him the fan video, the comment count still climbing, the studio's official repost of a carpet photo that had cut me entirely out of a frame I was standing directly in the middle of.
"This isn't strangers making things up from nothing.
This is being fed to them, deliberately, by people you pay a considerable amount of money to manage exactly this kind of thing. "
He looked at the screen for a long moment, his jaw working, and something in his face went careful, the way it did when he was deciding how much to say and how much to hold back, a look I'd learned to read over the years the way other people read weather. "I'll talk to Vanessa."
"You said that last week."
"I'll actually talk to her this time. I promise you."
"Your career is benefiting from people humiliating me," I said, and I heard my own voice shake on the word humiliating, hated that it shook, wanted so badly to sound calm and reasonable instead of like exactly what I was, which was hurt, and tired, and increasingly unsure whether the reassurance he kept offering was an actual plan or just a way of ending the conversation before it went somewhere uncomfortable for him.
"Do you understand that? Every million views is good for the movie and bad for me, and it's the exact same million views.
It's not two separate things happening at once. It's one thing, wearing two faces."
"I understand," he said, and he reached for me, and I let him, because I did still want to be held even when I was angry at him, because seventeen years of loving someone doesn't switch off just because you're furious at them in a given moment, and because some part of me was still telling myself, every single day, that this was temporary weather passing through and not a permanent change in the climate of our marriage, a distinction I badly needed to keep believing in.
"I'll fix it," he said into my hair, his hand warm against the back of my neck, his keys still dangling from his other hand, a reminder that he needed to leave in a matter of minutes.
"When, Grant?"
"Soon. I promise you, soon."
I wanted so badly to believe him. I let myself believe him, mostly, standing there in our kitchen with the fan video still open on the counter between us, because the alternative, that he either couldn't fix it or wouldn't, was a thought I wasn't ready yet to hold for more than a few seconds at a time before setting it back down.
He kissed my forehead, checked his watch, and left for the table read twelve minutes later than he'd planned, and I stood alone in the kitchen for a long time after the door closed, listening to his car pull out of the driveway, the sound fading down the street until the house was silent again.
I called my own mother that afternoon, something I did rarely enough that she picked up sounding faintly alarmed, asking immediately whether something was wrong.
I told her it wasn't anything serious, just a hard week, and found myself, halfway through the call, unable to actually describe what was happening in any way that wouldn't have required explaining the entire campaign from the beginning, a task that felt exhausting even to consider.
I let the conversation drift instead toward ordinary things, her garden, a cousin's upcoming wedding, and hung up afterward feeling both comforted and more alone than before I'd called, having said everything except the one thing that actually mattered.
That was, I understood later, one of the quieter costs of the entire ordeal, the specific isolation of a private wound that had somehow become public property, discussed by millions of strangers online while remaining nearly impossible to discuss honestly with the people who actually loved me, because explaining it meant reliving it, and reliving it, that week, felt like more than I had the strength to spend.