the Why
Amelia
Expectations and reality so rarely aligned.
I’d expected Tommy to come home the next day. For us to come together, to apologize and beg forgiveness, to forgive and move on.
I did not expect to find a picture of Tommy’s naked ass on Vivienne’s Instagram.
She’d thoughtfully tagged me in the image—Vivienne looking freshly tossed and utterly gorgeous in the early morning light, and in the background was my husband, naked and asleep in a hotel bed on his stomach, the sheets tangled around his legs. His face was buried in the pillow in his arms, his dark hair curling and cascading over his shoulder.
I would know his body anywhere. But the damning, irrefutable evidence was the perfect globe of his ass, marked with the words Made in the Bronx.
The location tagged in the photo was the hotel in Chicago where I knew Tommy was staying.
I knew because I should have been there with him.
My phone rested facedown on the bed for a long, long time before I found the composure and courage to pick it up again.
The article she’d linked the image to set another wave of helpless tears on me, the power and depth of which I hadn’t experienced before.
The USA Times had published a spread written by Vivienne Thorne, titled “The Truth About Tommy.” In great and explicit detail, Vivienne proceeded to tear down the construct of Tommy’s image, built with years of care by a man who’d only wanted to be left alone. Every relationship, every public appearance, everything was a lie.
Including me.
She knew things she shouldn’t, details she couldn’t. She spoke words that were familiar, ringing of a voice not her own.
Because they were mine.
So many of her points were retellings of my notes, embellished and added to, inflated to the point of pomp and bombast. Janessa. It was the only explanation. Vivienne had gotten her job back, and Janessa had enough in my notes to damn him. She had taken the lead and ran with it, painting him as a charlatan, a fraud.
In his way, he was. But she’d left out all the important details.
She’d left out the why simply to destroy the who.
The end of the article had left me gutted, read between long stretches of holding my phone to my chest, unable to breathe, unable to see past my tears. Vivienne had made it her spectacular finale to recount her sexual encounter with Tommy, just last night in his hotel in Chicago after a fight with his fake wife.
It was a cool account of their interaction in the hotel bar, one that had inevitably led them back to his room, where they hooked up, where Tommy admitted all the things in the article were true. Confirmed from the source.
I wished then that he’d just broken up with me. Maybe then wouldn’t have hurt so badly to know that he’d slept with Vivienne to spite me.
His characters had always been an archetype of him, and with that knowledge, I shouldn’t have been surprised. He was so angry, so hurt. And as I looked at the proof of his betrayal, I found I couldn’t reconcile the man I thought I knew with the man who would do this to me. To us.
But I reminded myself of an important fact.
It was all a dream. A fantasy. None of it was real.
It never had been.
My phone buzzed and dinged and lit up over and over again while I packed my things until I couldn’t take any more. I shut it off, unsure that I’d ever turn it back on. I wrote a letter as tears rolled down my face, collecting at my chin. I stowed Claudius in his crate. I knelt at Gus’s feet and held him around the neck and cried, telling him what a good boy he was, telling him how much I’d miss him.
And I left my keys in the dish when I walked out the door.
True Sins
Tommy
Nothing about me was calm.
Not the thundering of rushing blood in my ears, not my pulse fluttering in the thick vein on my hand. Not my racing thoughts or the tight muscles of my body, legs bent, too long for even the first-class seat.
I waved the flight attendant off when he tried to offer me another scotch.
One more, and I might hulk the fucking hatch off the plane and take a dive.
My phone pinged and vibrated with messages, one after another after another. Messages from everyone—my agent, my editor, my brother and mom, a dozen reporters, all of