“Hey,” he says again, once he’s alone, and his voice sounds different. Lower. Somber, like he has bad news to deliver. “I need to ask you something.”
My blood crashes in my ears, deafening me a moment. Next to me, Henry sits up straighter, at attention. “Okay,” I say.
“Is it true you took a meeting with Caroline Hasser?”
In my peripheral vision, the trees blur like I’m drunk. I look to Henry, open-mouthed. He shakes his head, mouths,No. No. It wasn’t me. I cover my face with my hands a moment, try to think. I don’t know how my husband found out, but denying it will only make things worse.
“I did,” I admit.
“Faye,” my husband says, hurt. “Why the hell would you do something like that?”
“Why do you think?” I say back indignantly.
There is a long silence. “We’re making a movie together,” he reminds me. “My brother set meetings for when you get back and talked you up to these guys.”
“I don’t think we need to pursue independent financing for this one.”
“No studio is going to give you what you’re asking for, even with A-list talent attached. And anyway, how do you propose all this works if we have split representation?”
“People do it all the time.”
“Not married people.”
“Well,” I say, and let him sit with that a moment.
“I see,” my husband says in a stranger’s voice that makes me feel like gravity doesn’t exist for me anymore.
“How did you hear about this?” I ask, feeling scolded and small.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t?”
“I guess I knew there was a chance,” I say. Part of me wondered if I took the meeting hoping he would find out, so that I would be forced to make a decision, one way or another. I swallow nervously. It’s a gulp, Faye. Just say it’s a gulp. “Does anyone else know?”
“Not that I know of, no, and I’ll do my best to keep it that way, but I can’t make any promises.” In the background, someone opens a door and asks my husband something. He tells them he will be there in a minute, waits a moment, then speaks close to the receiver. “All I ever asked, Faye,” my husband says, lowly, sounding every bit as far away as he is, “is that you don’t pull the rug out from beneath me.”
I’m so angry I see stars. “I asked you to take care of this last year, and the year before that, and the—”
“I got the name of someone from my brother. I have an appointment for next month.”
Why bother now?That’s what I’m thinking. I’m angrier, actually,that he waited until I was pushed to the brink. Now I’m the one who will be the bad guy. “Wow,” I say, in a tone that is up for interpretation.
“What we have is too important for me to throw away.”
But he has. He won’t agree with me, but he has. It’s been too many years of trying. What we had is in a junkyard, buried under several hundred tons of scrap metal and hazardous waste. I’ll poison myself trying to find it.
“Just give me a chance to do what you asked, Faye.”
I stare out the window at the many mossy mountains that separate us. “Okay,” I say eventually. Look up Groundhog Day in the dictionary, and there will be an image of me, Faye Heron, giving her husband one last chance.
My husband exhales, relieved, and I find I can be angrier still. This is always what happens. He ends up reassured, and nothing changes for me. “How’s the writing going?” he asks.
“I’ve hit a wall.”
“We told her we’d send it Monday.”
“I may need a few more days.”
“Do your best.”