Chapter Seven #3
Rachel had come with me to the after-party, invited specifically because I'd known, walking in, that I would need at least one person in the room whose loyalty required no performance from me at all, and I found her partway through the evening near the edge of the room, watching the same cluster of publicists' assistants I'd been avoiding all night.
"You don't have to stay," she said quietly, reading my face accurately even in the low light. "Nobody would blame you for leaving early after a night like this one."
"I know," I said. "I keep telling myself that and staying anyway."
"Why?"
I thought about the question longer than it probably deserved. "Because leaving early feels like admitting they won something," I said, finally. "And I'm not ready to hand them that yet, even if staying costs me more than it's worth."
Rachel didn't argue with the logic, though something in her expression told me she didn't fully agree with it either, and stood beside me another twenty minutes before I finally let myself admit that the cost had outpaced whatever small victory staying might have represented.
I left before the desserts came out, before the band even took its second break.
Told Grant I had a headache, which wasn't technically a lie, my temples pounding by then with the particular ache that comes from holding a smile too long, and took the car home alone while he stayed behind to work the room the way his job required of him, moving from table to table with the particular stamina I'd watched him build over two decades in this business, a stamina I no longer had the reserves to match tonight.
At home I sat on our bed in the dark and did the thing I'd told myself all week I wouldn't do.
I opened my phone and watched the compilation videos analyzing my face during Lila's speech, one after another, an endless scroll of strangers with opinions about my marriage, about my expression, about the exact quality of my silence.
Sienna's reaction says it all. Look at her jaw.
Someone had slowed the clip down to quarter speed and drawn a bright red circle around my mouth, freezing on the exact half second where I'd stopped smiling before remembering to start again, a half second I hadn't even been aware of until a stranger pointed it out to several hundred thousand other strangers.
One account had gone further, running a poll asking followers whether they thought I looked jealous or just tired, forty-two percent voting jealous, the rest split between tired and, disturbingly, both, as though my exhaustion and my supposed jealousy were somehow the same failing viewed from different angles.
I read every comment under that poll before I made myself stop, before I finally set the phone face down on the nightstand and pressed the heels of my hands against my closed eyes until the pressure behind them eased slightly.
Grant came home close to one in the morning, still riding the adrenaline high of the win, still smelling faintly of champagne and other people's congratulations, his tie already loosened and hanging crooked around his neck, the trophy tucked awkwardly under one arm like something he wasn't sure where to put down.
He found me sitting up in the dark, phone still in my hand, screen still glowing against my face.
"You left early," he said, sitting down carefully on the edge of the bed, as if the mattress itself might tip if he moved too fast, setting the trophy down on the floor by his feet rather than the nightstand, some instinct telling him it didn't belong closer to the bed tonight.
"I couldn't be in that room anymore."
He set the trophy down on the nightstand after all, gold catching the little bit of light from the hallway, and reached for my hand.
"I'm sorry the reporter asked you that. I should have stepped in faster, I saw her corner you near the bar and I got pulled into a conversation with the director and by the time I looked back you were already gone, and I didn't want to make a scene chasing after you across the room. "
"It's not one reporter, Grant." I turned to face him fully, and something in my chest had gone very still, the strange, quiet calm that comes right before you say a thing you can't take back once it's out of your mouth, a stillness I recognized even as I felt myself settle into it.
"How long have you known they're doing this deliberately?
All of it, the photos, the interviews, the cropping.
How long have you actually known, and don't tell me you just found out tonight, because I don't believe that anymore. "
He was quiet for a long moment, longer than I expected, long enough that the quiet itself became its own kind of answer before he ever said a word.
"Grant."
"Can we not do this tonight? I just won, Sienna. Can we just have tonight."
"No," I said, and something in my own voice surprised me, a firmness I hadn't planned on finding. "We can't. I've been asking you some version of this question for weeks and you keep finding reasons why tonight isn't the night. I need an answer."