CHAPTER 9
ROMY
Wildstone’s home stand at the Forum is three nights, sold out in minutes, and I’m working all three, because the doc crew wants backstage footage and Miranda wants me where the cameras can see me existing. Everyone’s happy. That’s the phrase we use now. Everyone’s happy.
Night one goes beautifully, for the record.
The band’s home crowd is a religion, and Knox walks onstage to a noise I’ve felt in my sternum a hundred times and never once gotten used to.
Dean plays the whole first encore with his eyes closed.
I watch from the wings with Tessa, who’s senior staff now, and who handles a pyro-timing scare without me saying a word, and I think, somebody remind me why I ever thought my life was hard.
Night two answers me.
Forty minutes to doors, I go to Knox’s dressing room to drop off the revised setlist. He’s in the shower off the green room, I can hear it through the wall. The dressing room door is propped open, which is normal given the whole floor is family at this point in a tour.
Samantha is standing at the mirror in Knox’s jacket.
The jacket. Black leather, worn soft at the elbows, the collar bleached pale at the fold.
Austin, Texas, a vintage shop off Sixth Street, the tour where the money started.
He paid the rent money he’d budgeted and lived on gas-station burritos for a week, and I know this because I was standing next to him in that shop, nineteen years old, the one who said buy it, you’ll regret it forever if you don’t.
She’s wearing it. My husband’s jacket. She’s posing in it, turning at the mirror, and the documentary’s pickup camera is in the corner, an operator I don’t know, filming this.
For a second I just stand in the doorway, setlist still in my hand.
Twenty years in this industry and nobody has ever put on that jacket.
Dean doesn’t touch it. Our goddaughter isn’t allowed near it.
It hangs where it hangs and it waits for Knox, and now it’s on her, and she’s looking at herself in it, and something in me goes past anger into a place so calm it scares me.
I set the setlist on the nearest flat surface, because even now, even here, the paperwork matters, and then I cross the room and start taking it off her.
I get one shoulder. My hands are on the collar and the sleeve and I’m removing my husband’s jacket from another woman’s body, and she grabs the other sleeve and spins, and her face is pure theater-surprise, big eyes, the camera right there.
“Excuse me?”
“No.”
“Romy, what are you—” She holds the sleeve. I hold the collar. “Wardrobe gave it to me. For the segment. Wardrobe—”
“Wardrobe does not own this jacket. Nobody owns this jacket except the man whose back it’s on, and you are not him.
” I pull. She pulls back. We are two grown women tugging a piece of leather between us, and some part of me watches from the ceiling going this is insane, and the rest of me keeps pulling, because the jacket is not the jacket and we both know it.
“Let go of me,” she says, loud, louder than the moment needs. Loud enough for the corner. Loud enough for the lens.
“Take it off.”
“You take your hands—”
“What the hell.” Knox, in the doorway, hair wet, towel around his neck, smelling of the venue’s terrible soap. He takes in the whole scene in half a second: her, me, the jacket between us, the camera in the corner. “Camera off.”
The operator lowers it. “Knox, we’re just—”
“Off.”
It goes off.
“Samantha.” His voice is flat and cold and I have heard it maybe five times in twenty-five years. “Take off my jacket.”
“Your wardrobe department said—”
“Take. It. Off.”
She takes it off. She does it slowly, sliding her arms out of my husband’s sleeves with her eyes on me the whole time, and she lets it drop onto the couch instead of handing it to either of us, and then she gathers her dignity and her team and storms out of the dressing room, and the slam of the door travels the whole floor.
Silence. The shower’s still running in the green room, abandoned mid-rinse. Knox picks the jacket up off the couch and looks at it, and at me, and at the door she left through.
“She said wardrobe gave it to her,” he says.
“I heard her.”
“I’ll talk to wardrobe. If somebody on that crew handed it to her, they’re done.”
“And if they didn’t?”
He doesn’t answer. We both know why.
Dean finds out between the incident and doors, because dressing-room floors have no secrets, and he appears at my tech table with two paper cups of the good whiskey and no jokes at all, which from Dean is a five-alarm fire.
“You okay?”
“I’m great. I’m married to the truth and my husband’s jacket is safe.”
“Romy.” He sets the cup down. “She put on the Austin jacket. In his room. Alone.” He shakes his head slowly, and I see it happen, the last of Dean’s celebrity-crush theory sliding off the table.
“I’ve watched that man guard that jacket for twenty years.
He made ME take it off in Tokyo in ’09 and I’m his brother and it was raining. ”
I laugh, which surprises both of us. “It’s just a jacket, Dean.”
“Kid,” he says, gentle, and doesn’t finish it, and we drink the whiskey, and the show goes on.
Wardrobe, interviewed the next morning by a very tired tour manager, produces sign-out sheets for everything on that rack. Every garment accounted for, every loan logged. Nobody gave Samantha Saint anything. She’d have had to walk in, take it off its hanger, and put it on.
Knox reads the sign-out sheet in front of me. He reads it once, which is all it takes, and sets it down, and for the first time since this started I see him not have a box to put something in.
“She took it,” he says.
“Yes.”
“She took my jacket out of my dressing room and put it on in front of a camera.”
“Yes.”
He stares at the sheet a while longer. “Why the camera, Romy? If she just wanted to wear it, why make sure there was a camera?”
And there it is, the question I’ve been carrying around like a stone in my pocket for months, finally coming out of his mouth instead of mine.
He looks up at me, and I can watch the edges of the big story starting to show through the little ones, and I don’t say I told you so, because there’s no version of this where winning feels like winning.
“Now you know what I’ve been looking at,” I say.
He nods, slow. “The doc footage. I want it. All of it, raw, before Aaron’s editors touch it.”
“Knox.”
“I’m not doing anything stupid,” he says. “I’m checking what else the cameras caught.”
We don’t mention it again that night. He does the show, two hours of him at full power, and if the jacket thing costs him anything onstage I can’t find it, and I know this instrument better than anyone alive.
At the encore break he comes to the wing for water and holds my eyes for a second and I nod, go, finish it, and he goes.
The clip hits the internet in four days.
Not the jacket. Not the setup. Not the mirror or the camera in the corner.
Just forty seconds of the documentary’s interview footage, Samantha in a chair, soft light, her voice trembling with restraint: “I put on a jacket from wardrobe, and she came in and physically pulled it off me. In front of people. I’ve never been treated like that.
I keep asking myself what I did to make her feel so threatened by me. ”
Cut, clipped, captioned: Romy Wildstone ripped the clothes off Samantha Saint.
It does numbers. The comments are a sewer with my name in it.
Jealous wife. Controlling wife. The fandom that brought a glitter sign to a rope line has a narrative now, and the narrative has my face on it, and it’s the version where I’m the crazy one.
My sister-in-law texts from Portland: Tell me there’s context. I write back: There’s context. She writes back a string of words about Samantha that would make Dean blush, and I love her so much I have to put the phone down.
A gossip account posts a thread: every time Romy Wildstone has “caused a scene,” helpfully compiled.
The theater blocking. The repost. The jacket.
Months of my marriage’s quiet defense, reedited into a highlight reel of a jealous woman.
The thread is very careful. Nothing in it is a lie.
Every frame of it is false, and there’s no comment long enough to hold the truth, so I don’t write one.
I put my phone in a drawer and produce Marisol’s single instead, and for six hours my world is only as big as a vocal booth.
The label wants a statement. Miranda brings it to us in the kitchen, the actual ask printed out, which means the ask is bad: they want Knox to say something conciliatory, something about how tensions run high on tour and everyone regrets the misunderstanding and he loves them both as artists.
“No,” Knox says. He doesn’t even sit down to say it. “I’m not criticizing my wife. Not a word. Not ever. Tell them the next draft of that statement is where we start suing people.”
Miranda nods slowly, and doesn’t argue, and I remember all over again why she’s lasted nineteen years. “I’ll kill it,” she says. “But Romy. The story has legs. It’s going to be a thing.”
“Let it be a thing,” Knox says.
After she leaves, he stands at the counter a minute, and then he says it, careful, wading in, knowing it’s thin ice and stepping anyway.
“I’m on your side. Completely. I just—” He exhales. “You could have called wardrobe. One call, and they handle it, and there’s no footage, no clip, no sewer. That’s all I’m saying.”
I look at him for a long moment.
“Why,” I say, “should I have to call wardrobe to get another woman out of my husband’s personal jacket?”
He opens his mouth. Closes it. I watch him hear his own sentence the way I heard it, and I watch it not survive.
“Why was I the one who needed a procedure, Knox? She put on the jacket we bought together in Austin, that I picked out, that I told you to buy, in your dressing room, in front of a camera she knew was rolling. And the question in this kitchen is why didn’t his wife make a phone call about it.”
“Romy—”
“You keep doing this.” I’m not yelling. That’s the thing he’ll tell Dean about later, that I never once yelled.
“You keep waiting until after she does something to decide where the boundary was. The boundary was always there. I shouldn’t have to draw it in chalk around my own marriage every time she walks through it. ”
He stands there, wet hair, gym shirt, this enormous famous man, and he’s crying a little, not performing it, just wet eyes and a clenched jaw and a man out of answers.
“You’re right,” he says. “About the jacket. About the call. All of it. I’m sorry I said it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again, and he means it, and I know he means it, and somewhere in the house the internet is calling me crazy in four languages.
I go to bed before him. At some point I half-wake and he’s sitting at the piano, not playing, just sitting, and the jacket is hanging on the back of the piano bench where he can see it.
He doesn’t play a note. He sits there a long time, this man who processes everything through his hands, with his hands in his lap.
In the morning it’s back in the closet, and he doesn’t wear it to night three.
He hasn’t worn it since.