“Where the hell have you been?” he asks.
“What is this?” I shout at him. “You promised me.”
“I’ve been trying to call you for two days.”
I think of the flights, being in the sub, the island, all the emails from him.
“You promised me,” I say. “I’m working on the story of a lifetime, Henry, and you’ve just fucked it up.”
“It wasn’t me,” he insists.
“You run the paper!”
“I don’t own it. Jesus, Maya, have you been following this? Your piece has gone nuts. The board’s been all over me wondering why the second story hadn’t run yet. I’ve been trying to buy you time—”
“Why not run the one on his father, then? How did they even get this one? How did they know about it?”
I hear Henry take a deep breath. I get out of bed and walk through the closet, try the door to the bathroom. It’s locked. I can hear the shower running. I go back to the bedroom as Henry explains.
“We sent the files off to the printer last week, remember? The story was running when you went home that night, which was when I got a call from Wilde’s agent and then you-know-who. So the story was in our system. Someone in the office must’ve tipped someone on the board to let them know it was here, that we already had it. I swear to you, Maya, I did everything I could. This was going to run yesterday. I stalled as long as possible. They were going to fire me and run it themselves if I refused.”
I cradle the phone with my shoulder while he’s talking and pull my shorts on. I don’t want Ness to see me naked. Whatever I thought I was doing with him, whatever the last two days were, it’s obviously over. I’ll be another picture on the wall. I wonder, idly, if maybe some of those women hurt him instead of the other way around, if I didn’t have that completely backwards as well.
“Maya, you’re not going to like this—”
“Jesus, Henry, what?”
“They’re making me run his father’s piece tomorrow, and the piece on Ness for the Monday edition.”
My thoughts go immediately to Holly. Those stories will always be out there. Forever. And I can tell from Henry’s voice that there’s no stopping them. It’s a done deal.
“What if I quit?” I ask. “Can they legally run them if I’m no longer at the Times?”
“Yes,” Henry says. It’s the first time he hasn’t doubted that I’d do it. “I’m guessing this puts a dent in whatever you’re working on up there?”
“Yeah, that’s toast.” I put him on speaker and pull my shirt on. I look at the rumpled bed. Was I even the one who slept in it? Was that me in a goddamn submarine? On a private jet? On an island? Nothing makes sense. A voice from New York has dragged me back into the real, and out of wherever I’ve been. I pick up the phone and take it off speaker just as the shower door slams shut in the bathroom. “Listen, Henry, I’ve got to go. I’ve gotta see if I can make this right.”
“One last thing,” Henry tells me. Ness steps out of the bathroom and gets dressed in the closet, doesn’t glance at me. I’m torn on whether I should run to him, throw myself on my knees, explain what happened, tell him it wasn’t my fault—or if I should let him cool off.
“Whatever this did to your current story,” Henry says, “you should know that this series is a big deal right now. I’ve got a dozen requests from major media who want to interview you, and book publishers want the rights to this. We have a few Hollywood studios talking to our legal department right now. You’ve got the book rights, but we might move ahead with the film stuff, while the iron is hot.”
“Please, Henry. Don’t do anything until I get back to the office.”
Ness looks at me as I say this. He’s pulling his running shoes back on, is wearing blue jeans and a button-up.
“It’s out of my hands,” Henry says.
I hang up in disgust. Ness strides from the closet and through the bedroom, into the breezeway.
“Let me explain,” I tell him.
He whirls around, points a finger at me, and tries to form the words; I can see in his eyes, in the twitch of his cheeks, in his furrowed brow, that he has legions to say. But all that comes out is: “You promised me.”
He heads toward the front door. I follow him, explaining anyway. “I told my boss not to run it, that I would quit if he did. The board pressured him.” How to explain all the politics of a multimedia conglomerate owned by a company that started out selling dish soap? “They already had the story, Ness. They were going to fire my boss, the editor in chief of the goddamn Times, and run it anyway. There was no stopping this.”
“Then why make the promise?” Ness asks. He hesitates at the top of the stairs, and I think for a moment that we’ll be able to talk through this. Then I hear him say, “I thought you were real.”
He opens the front door, leaves, and slams it behind him. I run up the stairs, fumble with the latch, and hurry out onto the porch. Ness is already around the low wall toward the garage; I hear the rapid crunch crunch crunch of shells from him running. By the time I get around the corner, the garage door is opening, and a bright red convertible with a white stripe down the middle is growling out in reverse. He doesn’t look my way as he roars by.
This is where I let him go, where I lose him, where I slink home to New York and never see him again, where our tryst is a memory, and whatever story I could write from this wreck of a week is left unfinished, with no resolution, with no way of piecing together his scattered clues.
But I say, “Fuck that.” I say it out loud. I turn to my car. And then I remember my keys are down in the guest house.
I take the boardwalks at a dangerous pace. I’m still barefoot. No bra on. My thoughts whirl. Surely he’ll understand. Once the adrenaline wears off. Once the sting of betrayal cools. I’ll write a retraction. An even bigger piece. When word gets out about how the Times ran this story, there’ll be mud on their faces.
Get real, Maya, I think to myself. When was the last time a retraction ran anywhere but in a small inset on page twelve? The untruths go on the front page. Corrections are buried.
I’ll write the piece anyway. I’ll make it a book. I can fix this.
Fetching my keys, I run back up to the house, out the front door, and jump in my car. I speed across broken shells. I want to catch Ness, don’t want to sit at the house and wait for him to return. He might stay away until I have to leave, might have Monique or his guards throw me out. Approaching the first guard gate, I lay on my horn, and the gate comes up. A new guard comes out with his hand held up. I blow right by him, kicking up a cloud of dust.
I don’t see a trail from Ness’s car. Too far ahead of me. I get my car up to sixty on that gravel road, reach over my shoulder and grab my seat belt, click it in. Tall trees whiz past, trees that don’t belong here. I feel a kinship with them. These trees understand.
The second guard gate eventually comes into view. Ness has already passed through. A paved highway waits for me on the other side. This time, the gate doesn’t open. A guard steps out, hands raised, asking me to stop. The other guard probably called ahead. This one doesn’t look too happy. I roll down my window as I crunch to a stop.
“Hey, hey,” the guard says. “Take it easy. What the hell is going on?”
“Which way did he go?” I ask.
The guard scrunches up his face. “Who?”