She walked home from Marianna’s with her phone in her hand, still buzzing. She should have turned off her Derek alerts months ago, but they had been a useful way to keep track of him, to have him be part of her life, however tangentially. She’d received a message from her mother: What is happening? Are you okay? A sinking feeling as she read it, because of how much her mother didn’t know, the dark places her imagination might take her.
Which was why she called Nicole, who picked up right away, saying, “This is insane.”
“Hello to you too,” said Brooke.
“Did you know this was coming?” Nicole asked.
“I don’t know anything anymore,” said Brooke. “I was babysitting.”
“You saw the press conference?”
“I saw it.”
“He cried.”
“Well, people do.” Brooke was not going to defend him, even though Nicole was waiting for her to. It was truly a reflex she really had to fight—for five years it had literally been Brooke’s job to put the many sides of Derek together into a comprehensible and sympathetic story. But now she wasn’t going to do it, give Nicole the satisfaction.
Nicole was waiting. “It didn’t look good.”
“Not at all,” said Brooke. “Listen, I need you to call Mom. Just let her know that I’m all right. That I know as much about all of this as the rest of you do.”
“You’re really okay?” asked Nicole. She knew Brooke too well, which had made her hard to be around these last few months, or even to talk to, Brooke preferring the company of a near-stranger like Marianna. Or even no one. Because the last thing Brooke wanted to do was stare her truth in the face, to have to listen to her sister spell out the reality of her situation—that she was truly broken and still hung up on a guy who’d left her stranded. But for tonight, at least, Nicole would be able to help Brooke avoid a conversation with her mother—Brooke was up for that even less.
“Listen, I’m nearly home,” Brooke said in lieu of an answer to the matter of her well-being. Home now was a basement apartment in a triplex whose weedy lawn she was traversing. The faint cellphone signal underground was always a good excuse to escape these conversational traps. “If you could call her, I’d owe you big time.”
“Of course you would,” said Nicole. “But any thoughts of paying me back soon? I want to see you.”
“Sure, sure,” said Brooke. “Maybe sometime in the next few weeks.”
“Which is what you’ve said any time I’ve talked to you in the last few weeks.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Busy avoiding me.”
“I’m not,” said Brooke. “There’s just a lot right now. And then tonight—”
“I’ll call Mom,” said Nicole. “But you have to let me take you out for dinner.”
“In the next few—”
“—weeks. Yep, I know,” said Nicole. “Listen, you take care of yourself, okay? And if you need anything, you always, always can call me.”
Brooke told her sister, “I know.”
* * *
—
For the last few months, since her sudden return to Lanark, Brooke had mainly been successful at keeping the feelings at bay, as well as the people who’d force her to feel them. Although, she had always been a bit like this, and it had become her defining trait, her levelheadedness. The way she did not give in to emotions, to their powerful draw, but instead stuck to facts and worked her way through them. She could be a hero in a crisis, adept at strategy. The sensible one. She could rise above the morass and look down below, figuring a way to get through it, instead of succumbing to the panic. No, she would not panic, it was not her style—but surely now she’d reached the point where she could finally declare enough. Thinking of everything that had been heaped upon her these last few months, and now this: the allegations and the press conference. Her headache compounded by the force of it, her heart like a drum. She didn’t need it spelled out, really, how alone she was here, and she’d done that to herself. Except he’d done it to her first, leaving her in this desperate place, and there was no one she could tell the story to, because they’d only hate him. They’d misunderstand, or they would understand too well—and which one was it? But now it seemed like everybody hated him anyway. This cause she’d been fighting for all these months was a lost one, and even thinking about it felt like drowning. She had to get up now, or else she’d never be able to get up at all.
Now fully awake and all too steeped in the facts of the night before, Brooke hauled herself out of her bed, which was just a mattress on the floor, and rolled into the kitchen, where Lauren was sitting at the table eating toast, scrolling through her phone. This was one thing about Lauren that Brooke hadn’t appreciated properly until this moment: she thought celebrity gossip constituted “the news,” which would serve Brooke well today. Plus, she made great coffee, and now gestured for Brooke to help herself. But all the mugs in the cupboard were ugly, Brooke despaired, and none of them were hers.
“Are you okay?” Lauren asked, Brooke presuming she looked as terrible as she felt, and she asked Lauren if she had painkillers. Her head ached even more now that she was upright. Lauren had a bottle of ibuprofen in the cupboard, alongside all those jars of her boyfriend’s supplements and vitamins, and Brooke gulped two down with coffee in a mug with a gas station logo. And then she went back to her room to get dressed, ignoring her phone, or trying to. Determined not to check it, because once she started scrolling, there’d be no end to that, and in the meantime she’d have to head into work like this day was ordinary. This crisis was not one in which she was immediately affected, as difficult as that was for Brooke to get her head around.
Because before, of course, this crisis would have touched everything. As one of the longest-serving members of Derek’s staff, she would have been alerted right away, been part of an emergency task force to help get ahead of the story before it was all over the news. It was the rush she loved, even in the most impossible challenges, the kind of work that got the blood going, enough adrenaline that everybody could forget that they hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Ordering pizza and guzzling energy drinks, or else something stronger. Whatever it took to stay above water, drafting statements and trying out various defenses.
This whole thing was obviously a setup. The allegations in this case were both more than a decade old, which certainly did help his side. There’d be no evidence of anything anyway, so why had those women waited so long to come forward? It was political opportunism, part of a conspiracy, and Derek’s name had been besmirched. Damage done. Besmirched. Such a funny, old-fashioned word. What even was smirching? There was a musty kind of morality to all of this, Brooke knew, and it could be spun.