Chapter Eight
GRANT
Ishould have lied. Some ugly, self-protective part of me considered it, for exactly as long as it took to look at her face in the low light and understand that a lie right now would be its own kind of ending, faster and uglier than the truth would be, a betrayal stacked on top of whatever this already was.
"A few months," I said.
Something moved across her face, a flicker of the exact confirmation she'd apparently been bracing for without letting herself expect it, and I rushed to fill the silence with the only thing I had ready, the thing I'd apparently been rehearsing for weeks without ever admitting it to myself.
"Nothing happened with Lila. I want you to hear that first, before anything else.
I've never touched her outside of filming a scene.
I don't want her, Sienna. I've never wanted her, not for one second, not even accidentally. "
"I didn't ask you that," Sienna said.
"I know, but I need you to know."
"I didn't ask you that," she said again, louder this time, sharper, and I stopped talking, because I could hear now, finally, that I'd spent the entire conversation answering a question she hadn't put to me, filling the room with a defense against an accusation she hadn't actually made, because defending my fidelity was easier than answering for the thing I'd actually done, which had nothing to do with fidelity at all and everything to do with what I'd allowed to happen to her in plain sight.
"Did you know," she said, slow and careful, like she was building something out of words she'd rather not need to use, each one costing her something to say aloud, "that people were mocking me. Calling me the starter wife. Comparing my face to hers like it was a competition I signed up to enter."
"Yes."
"Did you know the studio was cutting me out of photographs I was standing directly in."
"I found out. Recently. I should have told you sooner, I know that now."
"Did you know," and here her voice finally cracked, just slightly, just once, the first real crack in her composure all night, a crack that seemed to cost her more than everything she'd said before it, "that your own publicity team had an actual slide, with a chart on it, calling me an obstacle to overcome, like I was a problem to be engineered around. "
I hadn't told her that part specifically.
I didn't know how she'd learned it until much later, until Lila mentioned overhearing something she shouldn't have from a member of the publicity team who'd had too much to drink at a wrap party and said more than she should have, but in that moment all that mattered was that Sienna knew, and that the knowing had confirmed something she'd apparently been trying very hard, for weeks, not to believe.
"I saw that slide," I said. "I told Vanessa to stop using that language immediately, that same day."
"You told her to tone it down," Sienna said.
"You didn't end the strategy. You didn't tell me what you'd seen, what they were actually saying about me behind closed doors.
You let it keep happening because ending it entirely would have cost you something real, some part of the campaign's momentum, some percentage point on a chart somewhere, and I was the only one actually paying the price for that momentum, every single day, in every comment section, in every cropped photograph. "
"That's not..." I started to argue and stopped myself, because it was true.
The point settled into place even as I tried to find an angle to argue against it, and there wasn't one that would survive contact with her face right then, with the specific quality of hurt in it that no amount of careful phrasing could talk its way around.
"You sold them a love story, Grant," she said, and her voice had gone very quiet now, quieter than shouting, in a way that scared me considerably more than shouting would have.
"You just didn't care that they needed me to be the villain in it.
That was the price of admission for the story you let them sell, and you let me pay it without even telling me the terms of the deal you'd made on my behalf. "
"I didn't think of it as a deal I was making."
"You didn't think of it at all," she said. "That's exactly the problem. You saw a number you liked and you stopped thinking about what was underneath it."
I wanted to argue with that too, wanted to find some version of events where I hadn't simply stopped thinking, but sitting there in the low light with the trophy gleaming faintly on the nightstand behind her, I couldn't locate one, couldn't find a single moment over the past several months where I'd genuinely stopped to consider the cost in the terms she was describing rather than the terms Vanessa had been feeding me.
I thought, sitting there, of the specific evening weeks earlier when she'd shown me the fan video at the kitchen counter, her voice shaking on the word humiliating, and of how quickly I'd moved to comfort rather than to action, offering my body and my reassurance instead of the one thing that would have actually mattered, which was ending the thing causing the pain.
I understood, turning that memory over in the low light of our bedroom, that I had mistaken comfort for accountability more times than I could now count, that I had let my own tenderness toward her stand in for the harder, less comfortable work of actually protecting her.
"What do you want me to do," I finally asked, quieter now, some of my own defensiveness finally giving way to something closer to actual listening. "Tell me what you need from me right now, tonight, and I'll do it."
"I don't think you can give me what I need tonight," she said.
"I think what I need is to know whether the version of you standing in front of me right now is the version that exists when nobody's watching, or whether it's a performance for my benefit the same way everything else has been a performance for somebody's benefit this whole year. "
I didn't have an answer for that question that felt honest enough to offer her, and the silence between us stretched long enough that it became its own kind of answer, one neither of us wanted to hear.
I thought, sitting there in the wreckage of that silence, about the beach day only weeks earlier, about her head against my shoulder, about how genuinely I'd meant every word I'd said to her that afternoon about noticing her instead of merely using her.
Both things had been true at once, I understood now, the man who cleared his schedule for a quiet day at the ocean and the man who'd let a spreadsheet call his wife an obstacle and done nothing decisive about it for weeks afterward.
I didn't know, in that moment, how to explain to her that both versions of me were real, that loving her completely hadn't been enough, on its own, to make me brave enough to risk something that mattered to my career in order to protect her.