Chapter 30 #2
“The day before he dropped the suit. I got in touch with his lawyer and negotiated a number. He agreed. So I did it.”
“Without telling me.”
“Because I knew you’d say no.”
“I would have said no because I know what he was going to do. He’ll take the money and then in a few months, he’ll be back for more.
Then you’ll pay him again. And again… It would never end.
I did not need you to solve it. I needed you to listen to me.
You sat in that meeting with Reiss,” Rose said.
“You sat there while he outlined the whole strategy and I said I wanted to fight it properly and you nodded and the whole time you had already planned to pay him off.”
“I was going to tell you. But then…” she stopped. “No, that’s not true. I wasn’t going to tell you ever. Because I wanted to avoid this.”
“If you lied about the payment,” Rose said, “I have to ask what else you’ve handled without telling me.”
“Rose—”
“She wasn’t wrong in how she described you. Bending things the way you want. So it benefits your show. Your career. It’s how we got married after all.”
The room went quiet. Lizanne stood on her side of it and Rose on hers and the distance between them felt impossible.
“I’m not a project,” Rose said. “I’m not a problem you solve and a debt you pay off and a situation you manage. I am a person and this is supposed to be a marriage and I can’t tell any more where the show ends and the real thing begins. And if I can’t tell then something has gone very wrong.”
“That’s not—”
“It is.” Rose reached into her coat pocket.
The ring was there — she had taken it off in the car, a decision she hadn’t fully made until her hand was already moving.
She set it on the mantelpiece. The small sound it made against the stone was very clear in the quiet room.
“I don’t know whether Trina is right. I don’t know whether what we have is real or whether I’ve been inside a very good story with a brilliant actress.
But I know I can’t figure that out in this house.
I need to think without someone deciding what I need to know. ”
Lizanne looked at the ring on the mantelpiece. She looked at Rose. She did not move toward either.
“I’m going to the pool house,” Rose said. “Don’t worry. I won’t blow your show up.”
She walked out through the entrance hall. She did not slam the door. She closed it behind her with the same care she always did and walked across the grounds in the cold February air and did not look back.
***
Quinn and Kayla were in the pool house kitchen when she came in. Quinn was at the stove, and Kayla at the counter with her laptop; they both looked up, clocked her face.
“What happened?” Quinn asked first.
“She met with Trina,” Rose said. Her voice felt like it was coming from a long way off.
“Alone. Didn’t tell me. Trina has a photograph of them in a car.
Kissing.” She paused, her throat tight. “She also paid Jeremy off. While we were sitting in that meeting with Reiss, she had already done it. It was a transaction, not a legal victory.”
Nobody spoke. The only sound was the low hum of the refrigerator.
“I’m going to need more info,” Kayla demanded and snapped the laptop shut.
With a sigh, Rose explained everything, the whole sordid thing.
When she was done, her best friend and her brother both looked at her in a way she couldn’t quite decipher.
It wasn’t the resounding support she’d expected. It was…skepticism.
Quinn cleared his throat. “I think she did the right thing, paying him off. You knew all he wanted was money.”
Rose looked at him, her eyes flashing. “The right thing?”
“Not the lying,” he said. “That was a massive screw-up. But paying him? Getting him out before he could drag you into a deposition and turn it into a tabloid circus? I would have done the same thing. If I had the money and the power to make that man vanish from your life forever, I wouldn’t have checked the ethics. I would have just signed the check.”
“It wasn’t her decision to make,” Rose said. “It was mine. My life, my daughter.”
“I know,” Quinn said. “But I understand why she did it. She doesn’t know how to watch people she loves suffer when she has the means to stop it.”
Kayla had been quiet, which was unusual. She was looking at Rose with the expression of someone who had already decided to say the hard thing.
“I’m more concerned with Trina Holmes,” Kayla said, “she has been publicly humiliated. She left Lizanne for a man who dumped her. And then the show aired, and you became—” Kayla gestured to Rose. “You became the person everyone is talking about. The person Lizanne is with.”
Rose stared at her. “She has a photograph, Kayla. They were kissing.”
“She has a photograph of a single moment that she was prepared to capture,” Kayla said.
“A moment Lizanne says wasn’t how it looked.
Think about the logistics, Rose. She set up a fake consultation to get you to a restaurant.
She had a photo ready to go. This wasn’t a confession of an affair; it was a tactical strike.
Trina walked into that room to do maximum damage, and she used the truth of Lizanne’s nature, her desire to see things handled, as the delivery system.
Besides, how did she know about Jeremy?”
Rose stood up and walked to the window. Across the grounds, the main house was lit—the warm yellow square of the bedroom window standing out against the dark.
“I don’t know…What I do know is that Lizanne lied to me,” Rose said. “Because she decided she knew better. And after lecturing me for not telling her about Jeremy sending cards to Daisy.”
“Alright. It’s hypocritical, but she loves you,” he said. It wasn’t an argument. It was just a fact he was leaving on the table.
“The thing is, I don’t know that that’s true anymore.”
Rose went to the room that was officially hers still, even though Kayla’s stuff was everywhere.
She lay on top of the covers in the dark, her shoes on the floor, her coat draped over a chair.
The pool house was quiet. Through the window, the light in the main bedroom finally went out.
She was only grateful that Daisy was with her mom for a couple of days.
The last thing she needed was Daisy picking up on the bad atmosphere in the house.
She looked at her finger. All that was left was the ruby ring from her father. She glanced out of the window. Lizanne’s bedroom light was on. Their bedroom light. She saw her pacing, phone in hand. Probably talking to Pat about damage control.
That was her thing. Fix things. Fiancée left you for a man?
No problem. Blackmail the wedding planner into marrying you.
Feeling lonely in your multimillion-dollar house?
Move the wedding planner’s family in and pretend you’re one big happy family instead.
Need publicity? Sell a perfect love story to the world.
She wanted to believe Lizanne loved her, that this hadn’t all been fake. But she’d always believed Lizanne would not go behind her back and pay off Jeremy…