The thought almost makes you feel worse.
You find yourself on the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s good, you think. It’s good to cross the bridge by foot once in a while. You have to step back from the streets and look at the city. It’s all about perspective.
You try to remind yourself that you did the right thing. You think of Katie. You were just keeping Katie safe. Maybe Kyra, too. And whatever Quinn had planned for Alice—whatever his reason for wanting to find her—you’re glad you stopped it.
The bridge is quiet at this time of night. You stop right at the peak. You look out over the city. You think of calling Lindsey. You want to let her know that you will always, always keep Katie safe.
And then you feel a surge of hope. You’ll call Lindsey!
Not now. You’ll wait until the morning, of course. You’ll wait until you’re sober. But for the first time in your life you understand what it means to atone for what you’ve done. You can’t just expect Lindsey to forgive you. You’re going to apologize to her. You’re going to earn her trust. You’re going to become the kind of guy who deserves to see his daughter once a week. You will always keep Katie safe.
And not just Katie. Quinn was dangerous, full stop.
With Quinn gone, how many more women will be able to get back to their lives?
EPILOGUE
BARCELONA
2015
Oh, Haley. I’m so sorry for the way I left New York. We had such a good week together, and then I left without saying goodbye. When you came to Barcelona six months later, I stood you up. Now a year has passed, and you still haven’t given up on me. You’re still sending me emails every so often, checking in. Few people get a friend as dedicated as you.
I’m grateful to have you, old friend. Even now that I know about the guilt braided into your loyalty, and the long-running apology you’ve never been able to say.
* * *
• • •
WHEN I ARRIVED IN NEW YORK, I felt sure I was doing the right thing. I walked into your apartment—the familiar poster of Grey Gardens on the wall, the familiar smell of cinnamon in coffee—and relief washed over me. I sat at your kitchen table and told you what had happened, how Richard hired me. When I finished, I stood up to stretch and my back cracked, so loud it made us both laugh. I knew I’d been right to come to you for help.
Of course you agreed to make a film with me. You were thrilled.
We started right away, taking long brainstorming walks, sketching out a plan for production. We planned to use found footage from the movies we’d made in eighth grade, old VHS tapes labeled with masking tape and Magic Marker (you’d bought a VHS player just so we could watch them). The movies were mostly unintelligible; our thirteen-year-old voices were too quiet to hear on the crappy camcorder microphone, and because we’d done all the edits in camera, our characters jumped around on the screen, defying time and space.
But they were a joy to watch. I saw, in those movies, the girl I used to be. A girl who thought she could act. Who thought she could be a witch, a police detective, or whatever she wanted. Who wasn’t afraid of anything.
I fell asleep on your couch dreaming that, by making this movie with you, I could become that girl again.
We agreed that I would start by writing a narrative outline, a script-like document to guide the collage of a film we had planned. Meanwhile, you were going to fundraise.
You kept up your side of our plan. You shifted the schedules of your other projects and made time to write an excellent grant proposal almost instantly. You lost no time in sending the proposals to funders and started setting up coffee dates and pitch meetings. You were confident, competent, as always; you were sure of the story we were going to tell.
But I couldn’t keep up my end of the bargain. It was too hard to write about Richard.
All week I sat at your kitchen table, unable to write. I plucked dead leaves off of your houseplants, and went for long runs, and bought myself nice pens and new notebooks, but nothing worked. I stared at a blank Word document, so overwhelmed with revulsion I thought I might throw up. I wanted revenge, I wanted justice, but I didn’t want to write about what had happened.
Or maybe it was just that I couldn’t figure out how.
* * *
• • •
EVERY NIGHT, OVER DINNER, I lied to you. I told you that writing was going well. I just needed more time, I said. If I told you the truth, I worried you would want to interview me, to get the juices flowing. I worried you’d offer to write a rough outline for me, to get rid of that first blank page. I worried you’d push me into one of the hundreds of ways you’d tried to get me to tell my story over the years. I worried I’d end up telling your version of the truth, not mine.
“Yeah, it’s going great,” I’d say. “I just need a little more time.”
* * *
• • •
ONE DAY, WHILE NOT WRITING, I opened the document where I’d transcribed Richard’s interviews. The text was so familiar it was almost comforting. How many hours had I spent among those words? I almost started typing them again. I slammed the laptop closed.
What if I never got Richard’s voice out of my head?
* * *
• • •
MAYBE I COULD have done it with more time. Maybe I could have written the movie we imagined. Maybe I would have eventually broken through.
Instead, on Thursday afternoon, Richard sent me an email. The email was breezy, all lowercase.
just checking on you!
i hope you’re not working too hard on this last chapter.
no matter what you do it will be great!
It had been ten days since our last interview. I’d assumed Richard had been silent because he was ashamed of what he’d done. I’d assumed he was avoiding me.
Actually, he just thought I was a fool.
That night you found me under a blanket on the couch. “It’s a migraine,” I said. “I need to just lie here and not move and not talk.”
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING we left the apartment together. You were on your way to coffee with a funder. I told you I was going to a doctor you had recommended, who specialized in migraines. Afterward, you and I were going to meet up for lunch.
Instead I left New York. I haven’t seen you since.
Because the truth is that when I left your apartment, I went to meet Richard.
He’d suggested a Mexican restaurant near the Meatpacking District, a tourist trap in an old building swathed in wrought iron.
He had chosen a quiet spot; it was ten o’clock on a Friday, and the place, just opened, was still empty. Two servers in black polo shirts leaned against their station in the back, joking with each other in Spanish. They gestured to indicate we should choose our own table. I walked to one near the door and sat with my back to the wall, my baggage resting at my feet.
“Thank you for coming,” Richard said. “When I got your email yesterday, I can’t tell you how I felt. I’m glad we have this chance to talk.”
I looked around the restaurant—cheap swag from beer companies, neon signs and multicolored flags and a cardboard cutout of a pirate with a palm tree. “It’s so empty,” I said.
“That’s why I picked it,” he said.
“Afraid I’ll make a scene?”
“I thought you’d want privacy,” he said.
A waiter came by and dropped a basket of tortilla chips and a bowl of salsa between us. Richard looked up and said, “Thanks,” but the waiter ignored him, walking away without saying a word.
I watched Richard. He was not the Richard you’ve been reading about in this book. Shorter, for one thing; shorter than his voice suggested. He wore a suit with no tie, the collar of his light-blue shirt open below his Adam’s apple. He had broad shoulders and a baby face; he looked polished, like he had s
pent a lot of money on his health. But his hair was not slicked back, his teeth were not pointed. He did not know we’d been working on the movie, had not sent any journalists to stop it by blackmailing us. He was not the monster I’d been imagining all these years.
“I’ve thought about this for a long time,” he told me. “I’m so impressed, again, that you’re willing to talk, to give me this chance.” He talked fast, and too much, just as he had during our interviews, filling up all of the space. “It hasn’t been easy for me, either. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.”
“Do what?” I asked.
“Well, apologize.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He gave a pleading laugh. “I guess I was too scared,” he said.
“Fear safety,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I know it was hypocritical.”
He leaned forward and picked up a tortilla chip, unconsciously. Then realized what he was doing and put it back. He smiled, gestured vaguely at the chip. “Stupid,” he said.
“So, are you going to apologize now?”
He started talking. It had happened in his late twenties. Over dinner, a dear friend confided in him that she had been assaulted in college. Richard was plunged into a torturous guilt over what had happened to him in high school. It was awful, he said. He still believed he was a good person, despite the mistakes that were made. But it was awful. He had wanted to find me, and somehow make amends, but he didn’t see how it was possible, until he got the idea to hire me. “I didn’t want to bother you, dredge up old feelings, you know? But I wanted to see if you were doing okay. And I had the money, I thought maybe I could help you out, career-wise. I thought it would be like a secret gift,” he said. “Like a guardian angel, you know?”
He almost smiled as he talked, as if forgetting himself, then, seeming to remember, he would look at me with an exaggerated frown, pleading for my approval. But even when he looked at me, I got the feeling that I was not really there. He was talking for himself. I could have asked anyone from the street to come take my place and it would have made no difference to him. I could have been a mannequin sitting in the chair.
“Can you excuse me a second?” I said. He stood up at the same time I did, like a gentleman. From the back of the restaurant I saw him checking his phone, distracted and frowning. Our meeting was one thing among many for him. I hadn’t eaten anything all day, but still I vomited in the bathroom.
When I came back to the table he put his phone away and stood up politely. But I didn’t sit down.
He looked down at his chair, wanting to sit again. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
“What can I do?” he asked.
“I can’t stay,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.” I wished I hadn’t said sorry.
“What can I do,” he said again.
I almost left. Instead I closed my eyes. I thought about you, Haley. You’re always asking me, When will you tell the truth?
When I know the truth.
I opened my eyes.
“I want you to tell me the story,” I said. “Just the facts of what happened. From the beginning. And then I’m leaving.”
“Okay. Okay. But let’s sit,” he said.
I sat on the edge of my chair.
Richard cleared his throat, reached for a chip. I watched him dip it in the salsa and put the whole thing in his mouth, frowning and chewing. “I don’t know what to say,” he said when he had swallowed.
“Why was I in your car that night?” I asked.
“I was giving you a ride home.” He shifted backward in his seat.
“I didn’t know you,” I said.
“You were with a friend of mine,” he said. “You were dancing with him. At the party.”
“No,” I said, so sharply that Richard glanced over to see if the waiters were listening. I raised my voice even louder. “I want you to tell me the whole story from the start.”
“I don’t really remember much,” he said.
“More than me.”
He spread his hands and smiled, desperate. “It’s so hard to talk about,” he said.
“You could start with why you went to the party,” I said. “Say, I went to the party because I wanted to find a girl to have sex with.”
He frowned, not understanding.
“I went to the party because I wanted to get drunk.”
Richard sighed heavily. “I wasn’t that kind of kid.”
“I went to the party because . . .”
“Kids go to parties,” he said. “There’s no reason.”
“Tell me the story,” I said.
He ate another chip.
I said, “I went to the party because all my friends were going. I went to the party because I had nothing else to do. I went to the party because I was . . .”
“Because when you were on the team, that’s what you did,” he said.
INT. MEXICAN RESTAURANT — PRESENT DAY
RICHARD eats a chip, composing himself.
He puts his hand over his eyes, shakes his head. Then he sighs, gathering his nerve, and starts.
RICHARD
They called it “the party where we all get laid, even Richard.” They gave me so much shit for not hooking up with enough girls.
INT. THE PARTY — 1999
A bunch of teenagers hanging around a living room. “Juicy” blaring on a stereo, kids laughing and taking shots.
TEENAGE RICHARD is standing against a wall, sipping from a red Solo cup. He is skinny, sensitive. Alone. He’s wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and his VARSITY LACROSSE JACKET.
RICHARD’S POV: A huddle of giggling girls are looking over at him, gossiping with their hands over their mouths.
They see him looking and then turn away, bursting into laughter.
Richard looks down, then at the ceiling, awkward.
RICHARD (V.O.)
Actually, I wasn’t hooking up with any girls. But I would never tell the team that.
INT. THE PARTY — A LITTLE LATER
Richard pours the rest of his beer down the sink. Just as he turns, a DRUNK KID pushes Richard out of the way to VOMIT into the sink.
Richard grimaces and walks out of the kitchen.
He’s leaving.
RICHARD (V.O.)
I was an awkward kid. It never seemed fair. Why girls should be the ones with the power to decide.
EXT. THE PARTY HOUSE, FRONT YARD — CONTINUOUS
Richard slams the front door behind him and heads down the sidewalk.
RICHARD (V.O.)
Guys have to keep trying; only girls get to say yes or no.
Richard stops as the volume of the party behind him gets suddenly louder — someone opening the front door. The door slams and the party music gets muffled again, and there’s the sound of a guy laughing, drunk.
Richard stops walking, rolls his eyes, and gives a heavy sigh. He already knows who’s behind him:
MAX
Tricky Dick!
Richard turns. MAX is a big guy with small eyes. He’s got his arm around a GIRL, half-carrying her. They’re totally smashed.
RICHARD
(annoyed)
I’m going home, Max.
MAX
Give us a ride, man!
RICHARD’s POV: Max stumbles off the front porch and falls into the grass, pulling the girl down with him.
Richard watches her face as she tries to get back on her feet. She pushes her long brown hair behind her ears.
RICHARD (V.O.)
I just kept thinking . . .
INT. MEXICAN RESTAURANT — PRESENT DAY
Adult Richard is explaining the story to ADULT ALICE.
RICHARD (CONT)
. . . she’s way too pretty for Max. I thought, He doesn’t deserve a girl so pretty.
Alice STARES at him, shock and anger on her face.
RICHARD
If you can believe it, I was thinking of asking you out.
Close-up on Alice’s face. She stares.
INT. RICHARD’S CAR
Richard holds the door open as the girl climbs into the back seat.
RICHARD’S POV: The girl searches around for the seat belt, then manages to buckle herself in.
Richard gives her a thumbs-up. She laughs, drunkenly, and gives him a big, sarcastic thumbs-up back.
Too late, he realizes: Max is also climbing into the back seat.
RICHARD
Max, come on.
Max groans, rolls his head back on the back seat, and PASSES OUT.
RICHARD
Asshole, sit up front. I’m not going to chauffeur you around.
Max lets out a snore.
The girl laughs. Richard sighs, then has an idea.
He leans across the girl, grabs Max’s seat belt, and buckles Max in.
RICHARD
Sleep well, sweetie.
He pats Max’s forehead.
Max is truly passed out. He grunts and shuffles.
MAX
(mumbling)
Lemme ’lone.
The girl laughs again. Richard smiles at her, gives her another thumbs-up. She gives him a sleepy thumbs-up back, leaning her head against the window.
Richard gets into the driver’s seat, starts the car.
He drives; from time to time, glances into the back seat.
RICHARD
(trying to be casual)
So, where do you live?
True Story Page 25