“I’m pregnant,” Ryan said, stepping forward, trying to stop the small fire of Maynard’s animosity before it spread through the room and they had a dozen journalists demanding more and more answers. “We were going to wait to announce it after the election, but now is as good a time as any. Harrison and I are having a baby. I’m due in April.”
“My math isn’t great, but that would mean you were pregnant before you got married,” Maynard said.
“This press conference is over,” Harrison said, lifting his hand against the explosion of flashbulbs and reporters’ questions. And with his arm over her shoulder, he escorted her away from the podium and back into his office while Wallace and the rest of the staff wrapped up the press conference.
The silence between them in the office throbbed. It pounded. They stared at each other, white-faced and shocked.
“Why did you tell them that?” he asked.
“Because we’re being honest.”
“Do you have any idea what they are going to do to you now?”
She did, a little. The ocean had been chummed and the sharks were circling and because Harrison was already in the water, she’d thrown herself in with him.
“We’re in this together,” she said, with more hope than anything else, because she could feel him putting distance between them where last night there had been none.
“You should leave. Right now,” he said.
In answer, she sat down on the couch, staking her fragile claim in his life.
It was proven to her over and over again in the following weeks that there was nothing the world liked better than pulling a person down off a pedestal. Harrison and his family were destroyed in the press.
And then they went after her.
And not being a man she couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like there was something viciously gleeful about the way the world went after women. She went from respected wife to dirty whore in three news cycles.
And then the Lip Girl footage surfaced.
After weeks of it being a nonissue, it was everywhere.
And the media ate it up, as if that seventeen-year-old version of her kissing a man and then turning around and saying “try it, he’ll like it” in impossibly tight jeans was all the proof everyone needed that she was no good and never had been.
There were people outside their condo holding signs that said “slut.” She was accosted outside her doctor’s office by a man urging her to repent her sins all while he did his best to grab her ass. Harrison shoved the man away, much to the delight of the photographers who had started following her.
Someone threw an egg at her at a daycare ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Even going to the grocery store was an event. It got to the point she had to seriously consider if the errand was worth leaving the condo for.
But Harrison campaigned. Nineteen hour days, head up, eyes forward, ignoring the viciousness people tried to throw at him. Unless it was about her, at which point he defended her to the ground.
But he was losing. They all knew it.
The night after the footage was released everywhere, she woke up alone in Harrison’s bed, which wasn’t unusual these days. She stared at the ceiling listening for the clack of his laptop keys, but she didn’t hear it. Didn’t hear him downstairs pacing from the windows to the door.
The other few nights she’d gone to find him, he’d shrugged off her concern. Her touch. Putting distance between them with platitudes and chilly kisses. She gave him some room, because she understood that this sucked for him on a seriously personal level, and there wasn’t much she could do but be there and wait for him to work through it.
She shuffled downstairs, prepared to find him in front of the TV watching the smear campaigns, but the television was dark, as was the rest of the condo.
“Harrison?”
“Ryan?” His voice came from the back bedroom. “You all right?”
He came out of the bedroom just as she walked up to the door. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m going to bed,” he said.
“Down here?”
“I don’t want to disturb you.”
“Disturb … Harrison?” she couldn’t believe he was saying this with a straight face. “What is happening here?”
“You need sleep, and I’m working late …”
“Stop, please. Stop talking like this is reasonable. Is this about the Lip Girl thing?”
“Of course it is!” he snapped.
She gasped. “Do I have to defend my seventeen-year-old self to you?” she asked, stunned and pissed.
“Do I have to explain to you how much it kills me that you’re being dragged through the mud, just for being in my life?”
He was ravaged in the shadows, torn apart, and she felt like a triage nurse unsure of what to address first. His guilt, his self-exile?
“Do I have to explain to you that lying in bed next to you and our baby makes me wish I could go back in time and never go to New York and demand you marry me?”
“Don’t say that,” she said. “I don’t wish it. I don’t wish that at all!”
She reached for him but he stepped away. He lifted his hand, which wouldn’t have stopped her, but the anguished guilt all over him—that stopped her in her tracks.
“It’s better this way,” he said.
And then he turned around and closed the door behind him, leaving her alone in the hallway. The furnace kicked on and warm air blew down on her from the vent in the ceiling.
He’d turned on the heat. For her.
Wait it out, she told herself as she climbed the stairs back to his bedroom. Until after the election. When this is all over, he’ll come back around.
But it was more hope than belief.
Chapter 25
The morning of the election, Harrison slipped the scrambled egg he’d made for Ryan onto a plate while she was in the shower and he set out her red teacup full of water. The prenatal vitamin and the Compazine.
At some point he’d started doing this for her every morning. And kept doing it even though he couldn’t look her in the eye, didn’t sleep beside her at night.
He put his head in his hands.
I’ve failed her so much.
There was a knock at the door and expecting Wallace, the only person who showed up at his condo in the early morning hours as if it were normal, he yelled, “Come on in.”
The door opened and to his shock, it was his parents standing there. Or versions of them, anyway.
The polished strangers he’d grown up with were nearly broken. Stripped of the reputation they’d fought tooth and nail for, they looked painfully human. Frail. Old, even. Dad especially.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Harrison asked.
Dad glanced at Mom, who was the talker, the answerer of questions, the person first in the doorway, but she rested her hand against the door frame as if her engine had just stopped.
Dad swallowed, his chest lifting and falling with heavy breaths as he looked at his wife, and Harrison could not imagine what emotions swam between them. But it was obvious that they were big and they were killing them.
“I resigned this morning. It will be on the news, shortly, I’m sure,” Ted said, and then cleared his throat. “We’re going to visit your mother’s sister in Arizona.”
Harrison blinked. Mother’s sister, or “that intolerable hippie” as she’d been called in their house, was about as last resort as it got.
“We just … wanted to let you know,” Ted said. The two of them still lingered in the doorway.
Mother lifted dry, ravaged eyes to his and he flinched from all that was revealed.
“Don’t,” he said, before she opened her mouth. He could not take her apology now, years too late when she had nothing left to lose.
“Son,” Mother whispered, “we’re so sorry you got dragged into this—”
“Don’t pretend to be pained on my behalf,” he snapped, the freeze giving way under fire. Under a
terrible burning anger. Being angry with his parents was safe. It was familiar. It was totally okay, and he latched onto that with a vicious kind of glee. “I’ve been a prop my entire life. You’ve manufactured your sympathy in whatever passes for your heart because that is the emotion some polling group told you to feel when your son loses everything he has spent his life working for.”
Mother’s ravaged guilt turned to surprise, and if he hadn’t spent thirty-two years in her company, he might have believed her. “Is that what you think? That I am pretending to feel bad for you?”
“Yes, Mother,” he said. “That is what I think. That is what I have been taught to expect from you. Don’t break character now.”
“Stop! Both of you, just stop!” Ted cut in, using a hard voice Harrison had not heard from his father in a very long time. Both Patty and Harrison turned to him as if astonished that he could speak. “This is my fault. All of this is my fault. And I’ve turned all of you into liars in order to keep my secrets. And I’m sorry. I’m more sorry than I can say. But I didn’t want this life. I never wanted it. Not for a single minute.”
“What are you talking about?” Harrison asked.
“Politics, the family fucking business. I knew what it did to people. How it tore families to pieces. But your mother …” Ted shook his head.
“Don’t you dare throw that in my face. Not now,” she breathed.
“I’m not throwing anything in your face,” Ted said, holding out a hand to his wife that she all but slapped away with her eyes. “I’m just trying to explain to Harrison how we got here. How our family got so broken.”
“And that’s my fault?” she asked, and Harrison could only watch as his parents detonated right in front of him. “Because I wanted you to realize a tenth of your potential. Do not pretend for one minute if you’d become a teacher or a football coach or some other piece of nonsense you would have been a better man.”
Mother’s words sliced through Ted, leaving him smaller than Harrison had ever seen him. Tiny. Beaten.
“I’ll be in the car,” Mother said, her head held high as she turned and walked out of the condo.
“She’s probably right,” Ted whispered, staring at where she had stood. “But it’s a nice dream, being a better man. A better husband. Father.” Ted turned swimming eyes toward Harrison. “Listen, son, I know you have no reason to take my advice, but God, let Ryan go. Let Ryan out of this life. Give her the chance to be human far away from politics. Far away from us. If you care for her at all, it’s the best thing you can do for her.”
“Are you honestly trying to tell me you care about her?”
Ted pursed his lips. “I … I just don’t want to see any more people hurt. And if she stays she’ll be hurt. You know that, son. We’ll be in touch,” he said, and then he, too, turned and left, shutting the door behind him.
Harrison sagged against the kitchen island, the granite countertop cold beneath his fingers.
Dad’s words, they only made solid the feeling he had every day watching Ryan slog through the filth that he’d brought into her life.
She’d be better off away from him. From this life of his. From what this life would do to her, what it would ask of her. From this agreement he never should have drawn up.
In the bathroom, the shower was shut off and he imagined his wife drying off her body. Wrapping her hair in a towel. She used lotion in a blue bottle that smelled somehow like nothing else. He knew because when he was in the bathroom, he put it on his hands and felt closer to her for it.
My wife, my wife, my wife, he thought. Harrison was very good at not being selfish; for years and years he’d sublimated his minor and petty wants for what was good for the family. His father’s campaigns. And then his own political aspirations.
She was the only thing he’d really been selfish about and it had blown up in his face.
In her face.
She deserves better, he thought.
He was going to have to concede tonight. And then he was going to have to let her go.
“I just can’t believe people are buying this,” Ashley kept saying later that night as they watched the election returns in a suite at the Hilton downtown. His sister, his staff, Ryan—they were all gathered around the television as if their watching the ship go down would change its outcome.
“I’m going to concede,” Harrison said. “Put us all out of our misery.”
“But what if …” Ashley asked, ever the optimist. His sister who didn’t see obstacles. “What if things change?”
“They won’t,” Wallace said. He grabbed the bottle of champagne that he’d ordered from catering about five months ago, when things had looked brighter for them, and took a swig right from the bottle before handing it over to Noelle, who did the same.
“Come on,” Ashley said, her wild brown curls blown so smooth. Even his sister had been forced to change in order to fit into this world he’d created. His wild, passionate, compassionate sister who grew gardens in the desert; she’d been groomed to fit into this tiny glass box that was his world, and it was the most unnatural thing he’d ever seen. “Let’s give him the time he needs.”
His sister pressed a kiss to his cheek and he closed his eyes at the contact. Uncomplicated and warm. Honest. Why did that have to be so rare in his life and given to him by the only two women who never really fit in it?
“I’m going to call Glendale and concede. And then we’ll go down and address the staff,” he told Wallace, who nodded, silent and grim-faced. All his manic energy had drained right out of him; even his red tie seemed subdued. Defeated. Harrison thought maybe they should hug it out or something, but then Wallace and his champagne bottle were gone and the moment was over.
The big suite was empty except for his wife in that wing chair across the room.
He grabbed his jacket and pushed his arms through the sleeves, finally making eye contact with Ryan, who was watching him with hot, dry eyes. In so many ways she was the smartest person he knew, savvy and wise about people, about what motivated them. She was a natural psychologist, but he wondered if she knew what he was about to do.
“You want me to come down there while you make the speech?” she asked.
“Of course.”
She was gorgeous wearing a blue suit, edged with subtle elegant sequins, her hair pulled back into a sleek knot. She was wearing pearls. Pearls. That woman from the bar—she wouldn’t have been caught dead in pearls. But it was a lie. Everything was a lie except for the cornered-rabbit, brittle look in her eye that he’d put there.
“And then you can go,” he said.
Who did he think he was kidding? she wondered. Himself, maybe.
But not her. Definitely not her.
Brody had been right; she’d had a taste of happy and now nothing else would do.
“Go?” she asked, arching an eyebrow at him. “Where?”
“Home, I imagine.” Harrison fixed his tie the same way she’d seen him do it a thousand times before.
She knew what he meant; she found herself braced for it because the last few weeks he’d been maneuvering them to this place.
But she needed it confirmed. Spelled out in black and white.
Because if he meant to dismiss her, she would not make it easy.
“The condo?”
“You still have your apartment in New York.”
“No.”
“We’ll put you up in a hotel for the time being.”
“Hotel,” she breathed.
She felt sick about the way this election was turning out. For Harrison and for herself. It was an awful experience hearing people talk terrible shit about you day in and day out. Things she didn’t deserve but somehow had to take because she was a public figure. And not responding, ignoring every asshole that called her a slut and gold digger, was making her crazy. Turning her inside out with anger and a strange paranoia.
She didn’t deserve this.
But it was happening, and they had to figure out a way to
survive it.
But it seemed Harrison, who had clutched at her, naked and raw and human, and was now unable to look at her, was going to throw in the towel.
Ryan stood, glad for her heels because it got her close to getting up in Harrison’s face. “I never pegged you for a coward,” she said.
“Are you telling me you actually want to stay here and continue to get dragged through the mud?”
“Yes.” Unequivocally yes. “I won’t say it doesn’t suck; it does. But if this is where you are, it’s where I will be.”
He shook his head, tugging the cuffs of his shirt past the edge of his jacket.
“The clause in the contract. I’m agreeing to let you go.”
“Well, I’m not offering to leave.”
His eyes flew to hers and she saw there the fierceness with which he wanted her. The desire he had for her, which was nice, but a cold comfort as he was pushing her away with both hands.
“You wanted to stay here, remember?” he asked. “You said I could go to Washington and you’d stay here. It was what you wanted.”
Oh, how obvious he was being, so cutting and solicitous at the same time, as if being polite would make it better.
“Yeah, that was what I wanted before you fucked me like your life depended on it.”
“Look, it didn’t work. In the end the act didn’t work.”
“Then let’s stop acting!”
He stared hard at her, right through her. Right through that threadbare old prom dress of Mom’s, the blue sequins she wore now, the boots from that night at the hotel. His eyes blazed through every version and every persona and she had no idea what he saw.
But for the first time in maybe ever, she knew exactly who she was, and she was ready to fight to be seen.
“That’s what I’m doing,” he said, and her jaw snapped shut so hard she bit her tongue. “I’m stopping the act. Look at what is happening to you, Ryan. Can you look at me, at this situation, this marriage, and say it’s any better than what you had with Paul?”
She gasped, stunned that he’d bring up Paul.
“First of all, you are nothing like Paul. And this marriage is nothing like what I had with him—”
Indecent Proposal (Boys of Bishop) Page 26