Hilariously Ever After

by Penny Reid

  I want her to see it. I want her to see that beautiful things can be real. Or maybe that real things can be beautiful.

  Not everything I do that autumn is noble. I have enough anger to go around, and my sights also happen to be set on Vicky’s mother and the Woodruffs.

  The New York Nightly Reports I-team is excited about the idea that I brought them for a news-hour segment about what really happened with Vonda O’Neil. Getting the salacious truth of the story. The mindfuck that everyone was wrong about her, and the opportunity to shame the true villains on camera.

  That’s how I find myself flying up to Deerville the week before Thanksgiving with a stack of cash—a hundred thousand, to be exact.

  I got the idea for this whole thing after Brett told me that he thinks the mother still has evidence. He figured it out from something Denny said to him about the Woodruffs having to keep her quiet.

  This little nugget doesn’t put him back in my good graces, but it’s a start.

  Maybe.

  The news crew is made up of Marv Jenkins, the on-camera personality, two camera operators, and a tech guy. The address they got for Vicky’s mother, Esme O’Neil, is wrong, but we track her down to a trailer park and then follow the bread crumbs from there to a poorly lit local bar.

  I recognize her right away, down at the end.

  She’s the skinny woman drinking alone, hair dyed red, skin wrinkled beyond her fifty-something years. She looks bewildered and angry when the lights and cameras fire up—it’s an ambush and a half.

  Newscaster Marv buys her a drink and coaxes her into repeating the lies on camera. My blood boils as she tells the world how surprised she was that her own daughter lied. She’d believed the girl—how would she know her own daughter turned out to be a liar? It’s a well-worn speech, calibrated for maximum sympathy.

  Her voice wavers when she meets my eyes. Does she feel my rage? Does she sense it’s the end of the road for her story?

  The cameras go off when she’s done. I step up and slap the cash onto the scratched wooden bar. Bundles of fifties. The Woodruffs were paying her, but probably in the low five figures. My money adds up to more.

  “Now you’ll tell the truth,” I say. “And after that, you’ll deliver the evidence you’re holding back. We know you have it.”

  She protests, but her gaze doesn’t leave that money. When she looks up at me, there’s defeat in her eyes, I know she’ll bite. She’ll take that money. She’ll sell herself out.

  Maybe I should have some compassion.

  She lost the love of her life and couldn’t cope.

  I get it. I’ve been there.

  I live there.

  The footage they gather is insane. Esme O’Neil takes us to a safety deposit box where she has the shirt and a nanny cam—still inside a bear. There’s a cop along to keep the chain of evidence right. The footage inside the bear is Papa Woodruff and Denny bargaining with her for the shirt.

  We fire it up on a tablet. It’s captured perfectly. The money exchange is clear as day. “Helloooooo,” Marv says, sounding like a mustachioed, bathrobe-wearing porn star greeting his bedmate. “And with this, the story goes national.”

  They get Esme being sorry. They get actual lab shots of the shirt testing. It’s like one of those hidden treasure shows or something.

  The Woodruffs got a mayo-spattered shirt, as it turns out. You can never trust a drug addict.

  The news feature crew does a Denny ambush at a black-tie gala—they actually hold everything under wraps just to surprise him at the gala. They make him repeat the lie about how Vonda must have fixated on him, and how he doesn’t blame her for the lies.

  They run the footage on a phone for him. They get it on camera, him watching himself standing behind his dad in the sad O’Neil living room all those years ago, paying Vicky’s mother for the shirt.

  He calls it fake news and storms out of there, lawyering up soon after.

  There’s a simultaneous confrontation with the Woodruffs on their doorstep that night—the same doorstep they stood in when they announced they forgave Vonda and that they’d drop the charges.

  There’s nothing the public loves better than liars getting caught on camera.

  Marv and the I-team make it onto a sixty-minute news show, with the new material spliced up with old Vonda footage.

  The statute of limitations has run out on Denny’s crime as well as the cover-up, but there’s no statute of limitations in the hearts of the public.

  The story rips like wildfire through social media. Denny’s friends and client base dry up overnight. The Woodruffs are ostracized by all but the hugest assholes.

  Who knows, maybe they’ll try to sue Esme O’Neil. But she’s in rehab. It’s more than she deserves.

  She turned on her own child. A beautiful, honest girl who deserved love. Still does.

  She has it—from me. My love for her bounces uselessly off the moon.

  Chapter 32

  Eleven months later ~ New York City

  Henry

  I’m having drinks with Smitty, an old college friend, and Theo Drummond, a chemist who might do some work with the Locke Charitable Foundation.

  We’re at one of the posh bars that cater to the Wall Street large-assets crowd.

  The place is filling up. People come up to us now and then to say a quick hello. Locke is stronger than ever. Everybody wants in.

  Small consolation.

  Smitty has his eye on three women across the way. “Should we ask those three to sit with us?”

  “Not me,” I say. My heart’s not in it. Hasn’t been for a while.

  “Theo?” Smitty tries.

  Theo shakes his head. “You’re on your own.”

  “I can’t fuck all three,” Smitty says. “Well, actually I could…”

  Theo groans.

  I point my finger into my empty glass, lit from the bottom from the glowing bar. The bartender comes over and pours the scotch.

  Smitty turns back to me. “Come on, Henry, when was the last time you had any?”

  “A minute ago, and it tasted utterly amazing,” I say.

  “You know what I mean,” Smitty says.

  How long? The answer is a year and twenty-one days. It’s been a year and twenty-one days since I had sex. A year and twenty-one days since Vicky disappeared. Literally disappeared along with her sister.

  I try not to think what she’d say about my sex hiatus, how she’d tease me about losing my most eligible bastard status.

  I don’t care. It’s only her. Her or nobody.

  My PI hasn’t turned up jack. It’s a lot easier to hack through somebody’s fake identity than to scour the planet for a person who knows how to disappear.

  Last I heard, Denny was up to his eyeballs in debt, drinking heavily and trying to borrow money from the people he once snubbed for being beneath him.

  A spate of Where is Vonda? articles came out, but nobody ever found her.

  One year and twenty-one days.

  “You sure?” Smitty tries.

  “I’m not over my last thing,” I explain. “Final answer.”

  He turns to Theo. “What’s your excuse? You’re not dating anybody. Look at them—smokin’ hot!”

  “I’m not dating anybody,” Theo says. “But there is somebody.”

  “What?” I ask. This is the first I’ve heard of Theo with anybody. “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know who she is,” he says. “That’s the problem.”

  “I don’t understand,” Smitty says.

  “This is going to sound a little crazy, but I’ve been having…conversations…with my wake-up call girl.”

  He’s got our attention now. “Conversations?” I ask.

  He gets this faraway expression. He sucks in a breath.

  “Are we talking phone sex here?” Smitty demands.

  “No. I mean, yeah, but it’s more than that,” Theo says. “We talk about everything,” he says.

  “But to be clear, phone se
x is involved,” Smitty presses.

  Theo says nothing. I take it as a yes. “Jesus,” I say.

  Smitty just laughs.

  “You’ve never seen her,” I clarify. “You literally have no idea what she looks like…”

  Theo shakes his head. “No information about her whatsoever. I’ll find her, though. I’m scouring this fucking city.”

  “You know she could be a total troglodyte,” Smitty points out with his usual sensitivity.

  “I don’t give a shit.” Theo gazes out the window at the people going by. “I have to find her.”

  He looks exhausted. Is he even sleeping?

  I nod. “Dude. Hard to find a woman who doesn’t want to be found.” I should know.

  He tells us the scant details he has on her. We brainstorm ways to us it to find her.

  I tell him about my attempts to find Vicky. How I sometimes scour the jewelry collections, but nothing I see ever comes close to what she’d make.

  Nothing feels like her.

  Or maybe I'm just getting further away.

  “Speaking of makers and their studios, you put a bid in for that London thing?” Smitty asks me.

  “What London thing?”

  “The huge warehouse share studio—Redmond or something?”

  “I haven’t ever heard of it,” I say.

  “That’s weird. You have a UK presence. I would think Locke would be the first firm they’d invite to bid. It’s the kind of shit you guys have been getting off on lately. It’s some big cooperative makers space. Freaking huge. Reclaimed urban ruin, neighborhood integration…”

  I sit up, interest piqued.

  He goes on to outline more features…familiar features. “We bid it, and it’s not even our thing.”

  “Are there places to eat, sleep?” I describe the ideas I had for the Southfield Place Studio.

  He nods his head. “So you do know about it.”

  “The owner’s not named?”

  He gives me a funny look. “No.”

  “You have access to the RFP?” Request for proposal. I nod at his phone.

  “What? And let you bid against us if you weren’t even invited?”

  I nudge his phone toward him. “Forward me the RFP.”

  Chapter 33

  London

  Vicky

  It’s a rare sunny day in London. I step out from the funky share space where I have an office onto the street with Smuckers trailing behind.

  We skirt around puddles like pale mirrors on the pavement, reflecting gray skies and the gray buildings all around, and the colorful lights of signs. There’s a scent of diesel in the air, mixed with the sweetness of hops from a nearby microbrewery.

  We head up the street toward a bright-red phone box. A woman named Hanna converted it into a coffee booth—I was relieved there isn’t just tea here.

  “Hi, Veronica!” Hanna says.

  I tell her hi. I buy a muffin and coffee and hang around and talk to her, like I do every day. She always has a nice treat for Smuckers.

  I love the colorful, international bustle of London. I love my fun, fashionable neighbors at the office shared space, but I miss New York.

  The Vonda story broke after Christmas. My mom, of all things, found it in herself to confess and produce evidence that shows what the Woodruffs did to me. There’s speculation she was paid.

  It was a big TV news-hour-style story that got picked up all over—it even made the front page of the Washington Post.

  I cried when I watched it. And then I watched it again and again and again. And I just felt so clear. Like something painful inside me got washed clean in tears and rain.

  But, strangely, I didn’t want to go back.

  That thing that got washed and cleared is perfectly preserved, fragile in a nice ribbon. Going in front of the cameras as vindicated Vonda doesn’t appeal to me much more than going as hated Vonda.

  Maybe I’m tired.

  Carly is attending a great school, and she’s got a part in a musical on the West End that will be amazing on her résumé when she goes back to New York. I don’t want her to go, but she’ll be eighteen and done with school soon. I want her to be free to chase her dreams.

  I’m using the money I got from Locke as seed money to build my dream co-op studio in the ruins of an old warehouse. I’ve got a few investors lined up, and I’m in the process of quietly soliciting bids, blending elements of the Southfield studio with Henry’s vision and some ideas of my own.

  I try not to think of him too hard these days or about the way things ended with us. And how I loved to be with him.

  How he helped me remember who I was. I sometimes wonder if he had a hand in my mother’s one-eighty.

  I still don’t think he meant it when he said he wasn’t pretending. Or, at least, most of me doesn’t think he meant it. A tiny sliver of me thinks he did.

  But I still won’t reach out to him. Does that sound screwed up?

  It’s just that the memory of him saying he wasn’t faking his feelings for me is like a lottery ticket where you never go and check if you won. So you can never be disappointed that you lost. And when you look at it, you can think maybe it’s something good.

  The balsawood griffin sits up on my dresser like that, faithful and loyal and full of possibilities, as if there is still some magic in the world. Like a lottery ticket I never followed up on.

  I look at it when I wash dishes. When I make food. When I feel happy. When I feel unhappy.

  The studio keeps me busy. There will be subsidized spaces for artisans from all over the world. It’s exciting.

  I say goodbye to Hanna and head back to the share office with its hip interior of brick walls and green corrugated metal partitions between desk after desk. I make my way down to my area, saying hi here and there.

  I’m surprised to find a large box has been set in the middle of my desk where I have my inspiration photos scattered. It’s addressed to me. No indication of the sender.

  I ask the woman who sits next to me if she saw who brought it.

  “Courier,” she says, shrugging.

  Large as it is, it’s light as a feather. I grab a knife and slit the tape, opening the top.

  My eyes don’t know what I’m seeing at first. My mind interprets everything as packing materials, like a company that doesn’t have its shit together decided to go into the packing peanuts business.

  But my heart sees. It starts racing, dangerously racing. Fear. Happiness. Wonder.

  The box is filled with hundreds of tiny balsawood griffins, intricately carved—I recognize Henry’s hand in every claw, every tiny wing.

  I dig my fingers through them and I draw up a handful.

  “Four hundred twenty-five.”

  I spin around. My eyes meet his. My breath hitches. Shivers skim over me.

  He’s leaning on a partition behind me in a deep brown suit, dark hair tousled and just a little bit too long.

  Smuckers jumps at his legs, tail wagging.

  “Henry.”

  “I carved one every day you were gone,” he says.

  My voice shakes. “You can’t be here.”

  He pushes off the partition and comes to me, defiance sparkling in his eyes.

  I grip the table edge behind me like that might stop the room from spinning.

  He stops in front of me. He stands there, watching my eyes.

  He’s all posh polish in a thousand-dollar suit, but his pulse drums in his throat. When he speaks, there’s the faintest crack in his voice. “I want us back. What do I have to do?”

  My heart aches—it actually aches. “I don’t know if there was an us.” Even as I say it, some little voice in me screams that it’s a lie.

  “There was an us for me,” he says. “There always will be an us for me.”

  Henry’s here. In front of me. “You carved more than four hundred of those?”

  His gaze sears my heart. How many he carved isn’t the question, and he knows it.

  I can
barely think. This is everything I didn’t dare want.

  “It feels like too much to believe,” I say finally.

  “I know. I get it. You’ve been burned.” He takes my hand like my hand belongs to him. He knits his fingers between mine, warm and soft. “I burned you when I didn’t tell you everything,” he says. “I should’ve, and I didn’t. I could stand here and give you excuses, but I won’t. I just need you. Give us a chance.”

  “I can’t.”

  His hand tightens, just a bit, like if he doesn’t hold me tightly, I might get away. “Let me love you enough for both of us.”

  “What?”

  “I love you.” His words are calm and sure. “That’s real. Everything was wrong, but that part’s real. It always will be.”

  Instinctively I’m looking for the trick, the lie. But all I see is love, the vulnerability of Henry’s love. Of his coming here. Of his griffins.

  Henry’s gaze is deep-blue honesty and miles-wide loyalty. He’s been burned, too, but he’s showing up.

  Like some things can come true.

  “And of course…” He lifts our joined hands, brushes a kiss on my middle knuckle. “You have to let me design and build your studio share project. I mean, please. You think anybody else can do it halfway as well as I could?”

  I smile. “There’s the Locke Kool-Aid that I know and love.”

  He pauses and everything seems to still. Like, do I mean I love him?

  “It’s just about the Kool-Aid?” he asks.

  I smile so wide, I think I can never stop. “If I tell you I love you, if I tell you how much I love you and how scared I am for it not to be real that you love me, will it stop you from carving more tiny griffins like a psycho?”

  “No,” he says. “I’ll keep carving them for you. As long as I can carve.”

  Chapter 34

  One year later ~ New York City

  Vicky

  Thick red curtains crash to the stage, and Henry and I leap to our feet, clapping. Latrisha springs up on my other side. She sticks her fingers in her mouth and gives an earsplitting whistle.