When Liam returned from Playa Del Carmen, I didn’t even need to tell him about the restraining order because he’d seen it on a television behind the airport bar. I was curled up in the media room in a blanket with a cup of tea, my eyes swollen, looking like hell when he came in, a bag full of tacos from some new “authentic mom and pop” place he’d stopped at to bring me dinner. He pretended not to notice my state.
“I was still craving Mexican when I got back,” was all he said. He kissed my forehead and added, “Hungry?” I married a saint. That’s all there was to it. I nodded, and he got under the blanket with me and handed me a taco. He inclined his head to the cooking competition on TV.
“What’s the secret ingredient?”
“Horseradish,” I answered through my chewing. Liam paused the show and looked at me.
“I’m not going to ask why you contacted him. I understand why you felt like—”
“It was stupid,” I interrupted.
“Yes,” he agreed. “It was a mistake. It doesn’t make you look innocent, it makes you look... I don’t know, Faith, but we have to have a plan to handle this. You can’t go rogue on me.”
“I know.” I shoved the tacos away on the coffee table and pulled my knees up to my chest, hugging them. “We should cancel the book event, and I’ll just lay low until the news shifts to the next scandal. At least that’s what Paula said to do.”
“First off, Paula is an agent, not a publicist, and she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. If you hide, you look guilty,” he said firmly. I smiled at him for the first time in days. He believed me. He was on my side.
“But Kinsey said not to make a statement, and the show, they...” I tried to explain that I’d been terminated, but he’d heard it all already.
“The show would probably love to keep you on. Scandal is great for ratings, but I mean you know how it goes. It looks like they support what you did.”
“But I—” I started to protest, but he interrupted.
“I don’t mean that you did it. You know what I mean. Forget about the show. We’ll focus on your party, and we’ll discuss with Kinsey what you’ll say if...well, not if, when the media show up. We’ll have a plan.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “What if no one comes to the signing now, though?” I pushed my feet under his warm hip and rested my head on my knees.
“RSVPs have almost tripled,” he said matter-of-factly.
“What?” I sprung up, in total disbelief.
“This is a totally fucked up thing, like nightmarish, but like I said, people like a scandal. You may have lost your show, but the timing of your book coming out right now... I hate to say it, but people are sort of awful. You’ll sell.” He picked up a taco and ate it. I had never even considered this. It was the last thing I cared about right now, but if there could be a shining light from all of this, maybe I could say my bit at the event, a polished, lawyer-approved, brief statement of defense, and maybe I would sell like crazy. Maybe my book would even help more people. Maybe this would blow over.
One would expect Liam to act a little strangely with everything going on. When people start to recognize you from sleezy news coverage and you constantly have to defend to people that your wife is not a deranged child molester, it can get under one’s skin. At that time I wouldn’t have been looking for signs of him pulling away, or making excuses for staying late at the office because he had every right to be on edge and guarded. Our world was upside down, so how could I have noticed it odd that he was removed, anxious, falling apart even? Why wouldn’t he be? We both were.
He maintained that everything would be fine. He was keeping busy with his work, and with coordinating the menu items with the chef at Le Bouchon for the book signing event. But maybe there was more to his distance than the stress of it all. The smiles he gave me before leaving for work at times felt vacant. The distracted, polite kind where the eyes don’t match the expression. He told me to show my face and keep my head up, but he didn’t invite me to any of the new restaurants he was reviewing in those couple weeks before the event. I was sure he believed me, but now, I don’t know. Now, the thought of him being...ashamed of me was unbearable.
I saw my regular clients. Only one stopped seeing me—a younger guy, late teens, probably at the insistence of a parent. The others seemed to genuinely accept my explanation and the nature of being in a high-profile position, and at least for the time being stayed. Although I felt reservation from many of them—a self-editing that I knew wouldn’t allow us to make progress if it kept on. If they felt uncomfortable or self-conscious around me, it defeated the purpose of therapy. I would wait, though. Things would get back to normal.
Liam started to call from his office a few times too many, saying he was going to stay and finish an article or do some research before an event the next day. He rarely worked in his office. His job was flexible. He often worked from his laptop out of a Starbucks, and in the evenings he was always by my side. If there was a deadline to meet, he’d tap away at the keyboard while I cooked mediocre pasta or flipped channels on the couch, but he always wanted to be with me at night. The joys of a child-free life: good wine whenever we felt like it, sex, travel, and some expendable cash.
We were never one of those couples who passed each other on our way out to separate lives. We shared everything. It sounds trite to say it out loud, but we truly were best friends. Now, he wanted space, and it crushed me.
“I made zucchini bread, and Survivor’s on. Can’t you just finish it up at home?” I asked, and when he didn’t respond right away, I imagined him taking the phone away from his ear, closing his eyes and sighing, trying to find a delicate way to tell me he needed time away from me—from my pajamas, and my unwashed hair, and my obsessive retelling of the internet’s latest gossip about me.
From my grief.
“Never mind.” I recovered quickly because I didn’t want to hear a made-up excuse. “I’ll see you later then.” I hung up before he could say anything.
I tried to think about how I would handle this if the tables were reversed. If a woman from Liam’s paper said he’d abused his power to make her have sex with him and then he’d covered it up, would I doubt him? All the headlines that we thought would be buried in more interesting scandals in the press hadn’t gone anywhere, not since the voice mails were played on an Inside Edition episode. Liam had just been flipping past the station, looking for something to watch. His hand stopped halfway to his mouth when he saw it. A slice of pizza, limp in his hand, his mouth agape. A terrible photo of me filled the screen, and my voice mail was broadcast to the world, but it was edited. I know what I’d said, but they took out a few sentences and strung the rest together to make it sound like I was luring him in.
“Carter. Um...this is Dr. Finley. I, ah...hope you’re doing okay. I really think we need to talk.” Liam looked up at me as if in slow motion. I came in from the kitchen, wiping my hands on a tea towel, and stood frozen behind the couch, watching. He looked, just as slowly, back to the TV. The sound bites continued, out of order. “I care about you.” No mention of his mom and dad caring about him too. That was omitted. They cut the rest of what I’d said about telling the truth and no one being upset with him if he did. But they made sure to play “Please call me.” I switched the TV off in a rage. Liam still stared at it, unsure of what to say. He just pointed at it mutely, as if to ask, “What the hell?”
“I did not say ‘Carter. Um...this is Dr. Finley. I care about you. Please call me.’ I don’t know if Carter sent this to them edited this way, or if his mother got a fat paycheck for handing the voice mail over and they had a field day themselves.”
“What did you say? Wait, forget that. Why in the HELL would you call him at all? Jesus Christ. I just—” He got up to charge out of the room, but turned back around momentarily as I shouted back.
“That’s not how it was! I needed to understand why—Liam, my words were twisted. That’s not what I said.”
“Okay,” he said dismissively. He wanted to get away from me in that moment. I whimpered, pleading.
“Do you believe me?”
“Sure.” Then he turned on his heel and went into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. The clip played over and over on different news outlets, and Liam stopped coming home when he usually did.
I didn’t press him. I didn’t relentlessly ask, “Are you okay?” I tried that a few times, but his hollow responses made us both feel worse. Up until now, he had tried to be there for me, standing up for me when strangers at the grocery store pointed and whispered. Last week he’d literally just stared back and pointed at them, and then whispered something to me. I couldn’t help but burst out laughing at how ridiculous it was as they scurried away.
Once, he saw a woman in a restaurant parking lot who was stuffed into a pantsuit and teetering on heels; when she tried to covertly snap a shot of us with her phone, Liam just lifted his arms in a “gotcha” pose and said “Boo!”, and she tripped on her heels and scurried off, humiliated. Maybe he simply had nothing left to give after days of constant self-defense. We were both exhausted.
The day of the book launch event, Ellie came over to the condo, and I drove in from Sugar Grove and met her so she could help me organize the stacks of books and rehearse what I was going to say to any press. Since I’d had to talk her down when she called, bawling after seeing the news story when she got home from vacation, she had tried to respect that I didn’t want to discuss it. I wanted to talk about the record cold weekend ahead, her Valentine’s day plans with Joe at the Signature Room, Ned’s cold, anything else. So, while Hannah sat, delighted, watching Doc McStuffins on my iPad, Ellie told me all about her recent failings with Weight Watchers, and how she and Joe had a cheat night when they brought the kids to Chucky Cheese and had never got back on the wagon. Liam and Joe were close. I forget how much Joe is hurting too sometimes. Ellie opened a Dove chocolate I keep in a bowl on the table and ate it.
I had always felt for Ellie and her struggles with weight. She was very open about it and would promptly tell anyone who said “she has such a pretty face if she’d just lose a few pounds...” to fuck off. She called me once, crying after Ned was born, feeling impossibly fat and tired. She laughed at herself crying over the phone through bites of a Baby Ruth. She said something that surprised me though. She admitted that she never got to unpack all of the shit from our childhood the way I did, so she probably just eats instead. It seemed self-aware of her to know that there was an underlying reason for her binging, but it also felt a little blamey, like I was lucky I got to work through it somehow.
I just listened though, the way I did, as she neatly packed my book into boxes and bounced Ned on her knee at the same time, telling me all about her new, foolproof keto diet plan, and I was grateful for the mundane topic and the distraction.
The night of the book launch party, Liam was dressed in his tweed herringbone suit that I love, with its slim, hipster-looking fit. I erred on the conservative side, wearing a lace dress, high-necked and long-sleeved, hoping I could keep my coat on most of the night, considering the freezing temperatures. I didn’t want anyone even looking at me. It was silly maybe, but it felt like a violation at the moment, the judgmental gazes masked behind smiles, kiss-kisses on the cheek, and clinked glasses. I didn’t even want to do this at all. What was once going to be a fun night with French food, good wine, and friends, was now something to be tolerated for a few hours.
The restaurant was beautifully decorated, with elegantly strung lights illuminating the dimly lit lounge area, where a table was set up for me to sign. Canapés, bacon-wrapped brussels sprouts, onion tartlets, and foie gras crostinis all lined the white linen appetizer table in tidy rows like little hors d’oeuvres soldiers. Wineglasses sparkled in the light from hanging paper lamps; it was exquisite.
But the night was honestly sort of a blur. Like your own wedding—never enough time to talk to or even greet everyone. There were a few folks from the press. Liam had instructed Marcel, the owner of the restaurant, to let them get a few shots of the event, but after I offered them a statement, they’d have to go. I gave a rehearsed paragraph saying that the allegations were false, that Mr. Daley was not pressing charges because he knew this to be true, and there was no evidence to the contrary, which was why the DA didn’t have a case—that I had no plans to stop practicing, and we’d be happy when this whole thing was behind us.
A scattering of guests, who were near the cameras at the time, clapped. Liam gave me a wink to praise me for sticking to the script with poise. All of that was true, so we did feel like (despite the voice mail messages I left, which the DA did hear the whole of eventually) this was bound to fizzle out fairly soon. My show would be a casualty in all of it, but my marriage, and maybe even my book, would not be. I could live with that.
I smiled and greeted people as I scrawled my signature inside the front cover of my book, one after another. I told myself that I’d have only one glass of wine, which I was feeling in desperate need of halfway through the signing. So I was grateful when a waiter handed me one, saying that the guy at the bar had sent it over. Liam was next to me, so it wasn’t him. I looked around, straining to see who’d sent it. Always show gratitude and kindness to all of your fans, Paula would say. I didn’t see anyone, and the line was too long for me to leave, so I told the waiter to thank him and kept on.
For a split second, I imagined Carter at the bar, having snuck in, sending me an anonymous drink, a few minutes away from creating a huge scene. The ripple of numbness swept my cheeks, and I shook off the ridiculous thought. Was I becoming paranoid, anxiety setting in so easily as the result of one irrational thought?
Then I saw someone walk through the front doors who made me stop cold. I excused myself from the table and went to the restroom before he could see me. It was Will Holloway. What the hell was he doing here?
Will was a childhood friend who I reunited with again in college, after losing touch for a few years. We’d dated for a couple years before I met Liam. I’d broken it off because it was just too much on my shoulders at the time. He was fresh out of law school, and I needed to put all my focus in starting my practice. I couldn’t handle a relationship—didn’t want to, I suppose. He was always really sensitive, and the more late nights and rescheduled dinners I had, the more suspicious and moody he became. We stayed close friends though, and when I met Liam, they hit it off too. I was honest with Liam about the fact that we’d dated, although I never mentioned the seriousness or length of the relationship to him. I wasn’t hiding it, but once Liam and I were engaged, Will, seemingly out of nowhere, couldn’t handle it. He told me that he wasn’t over me and couldn’t watch me get married and that he was sorry.
He took a job in Boston not long after, and so it was easy to explain to Liam why we didn’t hang out with Will anymore. I don’t feel like I lied to Liam, exactly, but we were planning a wedding, and I didn’t want to hash through it all and taint the special time. No one had done anything wrong; I just chose not to explain it. I was utterly surprised at Will, after two years of post-breakup friendship, to find out he wasn’t over me romantically. If anyone should have felt lied to, it was me. At least that’s what I told myself. Any other time, I would have been thrilled to see him. But now, the thought that I’d kept a secret from Liam—and that it could surface—made me feel physically sick.
I ran the fancy waterfall faucet in the bathroom and looked in the mirror a moment. I smoothed my hair with my hands, keeping the long, blond strands inside the bun on top of my head, and then I took a deep breath and went back to the signing table.
Liam and Will were near the table doing their vigorous handshake, man-back-pat thing, and clinking their pints of beer together by the time I came back. Liam had put a Fifteen Minute Break sign on the book signing table in my unannounced absence, telling the folks in line to come back in a little while. His mood seemed lighter now.
“Look. It’s Will!” Liam said, and I could tell he was more buzzed than I’d noticed before.
“It sure is. Will Holloway, I’ll be damned,” I said, hugging him.
“Faith, you look great.” He pointed to my photo on the many books stacked up behind me. “That’s you all over the place, that’s crazy. Good for you. Congrats.”
“Thanks. What brings you here?” I ask.
“He’s back,” Liam interjects.
“Oh? Cool,” was all I could come up with.
“I partnered at a new law office in town, so I moved back from Boston a few months ago, actually.”
“Really?” I said. I guess he thought I was offended he didn’t contact us earlier because he started to make excuses.
“I’ve been too busy with the move and new job to really reconnect with all the old Chicago gang, but I saw that you had this event, and I, wow, I knew you were doing well, but look at you. I wanted to stop in and get my copy before you sell out.”
“Well, that’s very nice of you to say, considering all the...” I didn’t even know how I was going to finish that sentence; I just make a twisty gesture with my finger to signify “craziness.”
“I heard. I’m sorry. I’m sure nobody besides bored, daytime TV watchers really believe any of that. It will blow over,” he said, smiling.
“That’s what I keep telling her!” Liam said, as if he were astonished to hear an ally agree with his profound point of view. “Hey, what part of town are you in?” Liam asked. It was weird to see Liam like this. He never got drunk-drunk. A little loose off dinner wine, but not like this. Not that I blame him.
“Just over in Wrigleyville,” Will said, chugging his beer.
“No way. We got a Tuesday night ice hockey thing over there. You gotta come out.”
“Hell yeah, I’ll come out.” Will matched Liam’s tipsy enthusiasm.
“Another beer?” Liam asked, and they headed to the cash bar, Liam’s arm draped around Will’s neck. I blinked in disbelief a few times, then shook it off and sat back down at the signing table, pushing off processing what just happened until later.
After another hour of smiles and scribbling my name on book copies, the event was pretty much over. People were still drinking and mingling, but my bit was done and I wanted to go home. I was about to look for Liam and Will when Liam came toward me, both our coats in hand, an angry expression on his face.
“Can we go please?” he asked, his face flushed and lips pursed.
“What’s wrong? You okay?” I stood, concerned.
“I’m fine. I just want to go...if you’re done, I mean, I’m not trying to...” He stopped himself, probably remembering that it was my event and he shouldn’t push me out the door, or maybe he just didn’t want other people to know we were arguing.
“Yeah. Of course.” I put on my coat, and we headed to the door. Will was standing near the bar and I caught a glimpse of him, looking apologetic. I didn’t say goodbye, I just helped Liam to the car.
“I’m driving, I take it?” I joked bitterly, annoyed at his recklessness and chumminess with Will, although I had no right to really be angry about either.
“Looks like,” he said, his response annoying me even more.
“Why don’t we just go to the condo tonight, take the train.”
“The train?” he complained, slurring his words.
“An Uber then,” I said.
“I really want to go home. You didn’t drink, right?” He opened the car door and slunk in.
“A little wine. Not much,” I said. He shut the door and buckled up as if it were settled, and I drove into the icy night. We didn’t say anything for a while. Once we were out of the city on the long stretch of black, unlit road that led to Sugar Grove, I broke the silence.
“Did you and Will get in an argument or something?” I asked tentatively.
“What? No. Why would you think that?” he asked.
“Well, then, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m...drunk.” He sort of laughed at this admission. I let it go. I tried to lighten the mood by making a joke about the fourteen-dollar domestic beers, and he gave a weak chuckle and rested his head on the passenger window.
A second later he screamed my name, pointing to the road ahead. Truck headlights appeared only feet in front of us—too late. The crash was deafening.