4th January
London
THE charity my father championed when he was alive sent out a notification whenever a donation was left in his name. The amount of the gift in the message I’d just read made my eyeballs bug out. I checked it again, counting the digits to make sure. All six of them.
The second shock was the message left from the donor in the comments section. Please let me make it right, Brynne.
Lance.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Lance had done this? He had made an obscenely large donation in my father’s name to the Meritus College Fund? Assisting disadvantaged, but motivated kids to get a university education?
Why would he do it?
I really couldn’t imagine why he would, but I knew I needed to find out. So I went to my purse and dug around in the side and end pockets until I found the card he’d given me. I flipped it to the back and read the message he’d handwritten with blue pen, just to make sure. Please let me make it right, Brynne.
I sent him a text with shaking hands and a pounding heart, afraid to hear what he wanted to say to me, but knew the time had come for me to know.
Ethan was at the offices, preparing for his trip to Switzerland the next day. I’d not told him about either of Lance’s attempts to meet with me, at his hospital bed, and after my pre-natal check-up. I’d found the more time that passed, I just didn’t want to dredge it up. What purpose would it serve? I needed to move on and deal with the here and now, instead of dwelling on the shit that had gone bad years ago.
I didn’t tell Ethan, even though I knew I probably should have given him a warning. He wouldn’t be comfortable with me seeing Lance alone, and he’d be over-the-top territorial to the point any meeting, including his presence, would be made useless. No, I needed to meet Lance on my own. This was my history. My past. And I was the one who needed to face up to it, and put it to rest.
So I left a short note for him on the kitchen counter instead. In case he made it home before I did, he would find my note saying I’d gone for a walk.
IN favor of some exercise, I did walk down to Hot Java, the coffee shop just around the corner from the flat.
Lance arrived before I did and was waiting window-side, at a table for two. He looked as he had the last time I’d seen him—completely and totally different from the boy I’d known a lifetime ago. In so many ways it was true. He was now a political celebrity, the tatted-up, war-hero son of the Vice President-Elect. He had an escort waiting for him too—Secret Service most likely, considering the terrorist risk. For someone like him, it must be enormous.
He looked miserable sitting across from me, and I wondered if he was still in any physical pain from his injury.
“I’ll be heading back to the States very soon. Command performance for the inauguration.” He tapped his leg with a tattooed finger. “But, I’ll miss London. It’s a good place to fade into.”
Yes, it is. “Why did you send that huge donation in my father’s name? Is it something you truly want to spend your money on, Lance?” I asked, pushing the raspberry tea bag in my mug into a mini vortex from over-stirring. No matter how much I’d thought about it, I could not for the life of me, see his motivation for the money. So, all I was left with was the unimaginable idea that he could really be sorry. Mind. Fuck.
Lance looked out of the café window, staring at the busy street traffic, and the equally busy foot traffic, managing the winter drizzle to go about their business. “Thank you for meeting me, Brynne. This is something I’ve wanted for a very long time…and also, very much dreaded.” He turned his eyes back to look at me when he finished speaking.
“You said…you said you wanted to tell me what really happened that night at the party.” I could feel my heart thumping erratically deep in my chest.
“Yeah.” He shifted in his seat and seemed to brace himself for what he wanted to say. “But first, I want you to have my deepest apology for how I treated you, the things I did to you, for how I hurt you so very badly. I have no justification for anything that I did, no excuses, only regrets.”
His eyes flickered over me, a hint of longing in his expression—for what, I wasn’t sure. Longing for me? About what might have been with us?
“So, before I tell you the rest, I wanted you to at least hear that part.”
I felt something strange glimmer inside of me, like a crack feathering out on a frozen lake. I couldn’t speak just yet, but I managed to acknowledge his apology by nodding my head.
“You saw the video, Brynne?”
I nodded my head again and kept my eyes on my mug of raspberry tea. “Once. That was all I could watch—” My mind went black at the remembered images that flashed in my head. The other guys, me being used, the laughter, the song lyrics, the torment of my body with objects, how they spoke to me like I was a whore who wanted what they were doing to me.
“I am so sorry…I didn’t mean for it to go that far,” he said.
“What in the hell did you intend by filming us then?” I spat back, lifting my head. “Do you even know what that video did to me? How it changed my life? That I tried to kill myself because of it? Are you aware of all of that, Lance?”
“Yes.” He closed his eyes and winced. “Brynne, if I could take it back—I just—I’m just so very sorry.”
I sat there and stared at him, nearly unbelieving at what I was experiencing. For so long I’d understood my dark place for what it was. An evil deed, done to me by evil people, devoid of remorse, or even humanity for their actions. But with Lance before me, apologizing so sincerely, he didn’t seem evil at all…and it was a very hard concept to accept.
“So…what was your intent that night, Lance? If you feel you must make things right with me, then I guess I’ll have to try to hear it.”
“Thank you,” he whispered, tapping the table top with his hand softly, rhythmically, only his fingers lifting up and down. The tattoos that decorated him covered the whole surface of his right hand—a skeleton of the bones of the hand interspersed with spider webs in between the individual finger bones.
I wondered what Daddy-O thought of all the goth ink on his son.
After a moment, he started talking.
“I was a complete prick to you,” he began, “I know that, and I have no excuses, but when I went off to Stanford and found out you were with other guys when I was gone, I got insanely jealous that anyone else would have you. I wanted to punish you for it because that’s how my mind worked back then.” He started flicking his thumb onto the side of his coffee mug. “I got you drunk at the party with the intent of filming us having sex, so I could send it to you as a reminder that you were my girlfriend, and nobody else got into what was mine when I was away at college.” He cleared his throat and continued. “That was the extent of what I intended for the video, Brynne. I would never have posted it anywhere, or shown it to people. It was a reminder of me…for you.”
“But, those others…Justin Fielding and Eric Montrose—they were there.” I couldn’t look at him, so I just stared out the window at the rainy sidewalk and busy people instead.
I kept on listening, though.
“Yeah,” he said sadly. “I got you drunk, but I was even more wasted, and to the point that I passed out after I…finished. Those two had come home with me for the holiday weekend and they knew I was bent on teaching my girlfriend a lesson she wouldn’t forget. I told them what I was going to do with the sex video. Like an idiot. I was so arrogant I never imagined they would try to get in on it. You can clearly see on the video that after I fuck—after I’m done—I’m not there on screen again. There’s a cut in the filming, and then it’s just Fielding and Montrose…and you. Trust me, I watched it over and over, horrified by what they did.” I looked away from the window and studied his face. He met me head on without shielding himself. I saw regret and shame in him. “Brynne, I—I never meant—”
I knew Lance was telling me the truth.
“They watched us…and then when I passed out, they took over. I don’t even remember leaving you in that game room, Brynne. I woke up the next morning in the back of my car. The video had already been posted to a sharing site and it was too late. It got passed around all weekend.” He hung his head and shook it slowly. “And that music they put on there…”
I tried to remember the sequence of imagery, but I’d been so traumatized by my one-time viewing of the video, I couldn’t really pull up much memory of Lance’s involvement at all. I knew he’d been very angry with me for dating Karl. Being an immature seventeen-year-old slut hadn’t left me with good judgment skills in where I went, what I did, or whom I did it with. Sadly, I’d learned my lesson in a very hard way, but it was still remarkable to hear this new information from Lance.
“So, you didn’t do it because you hated me?” I asked him the question I’d always wanted answered. It was the thing that never made any sense to me. We’d had our problems, but I had never felt hatred from Lance before that night. The video had felt like hate to me for all of the intervening seven years, and had been hard to bear because it was so confusing.
“No, Brynne. I never hated you. I believed I would marry you some day.” His dark eyes blinked at me, regret and sadness clearly readable in them.
I gasped, unable to respond to what he’d just told me. I had no voice, so I sat there silent and stared at him, unable to do anything else.
He slid his hand forward as if were going to reach for mine, but caught himself in time, leaving his fingertips about an inch away on the table. It was so awkward I picked up my mug of tea and held it in both of my hands so I could make them useful.
“I tried to call you and see you, but your father, and mine, shut that down. My dad informed me that I would die before he allowed me to destroy his political career. He had me withdrawn from Stanford and enlisted in the Army within two days. I was shipped off to Fort Benning for Basic Training, and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t even talk to you to say I was sorry, or to find out how you were.” He held his palm up in question. “And now with my father’s political aspirations…I’m just caught up in all of it, carried along without a way out. And with him in the West Wing, I’m more trapped than ever…” he trailed off sadly.
Wow. Just wow. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined this reality. I didn’t know what to say to him, or how to respond, so we just sat there in silence together for a minute. He didn’t even know about the other sordid history connected to the whole mess—the reason behind the deaths of Montrose and Fielding, Karl’s blackmail attempt, my father’s murder—were all because of that video. Lance wouldn’t hear it from me, either. The events had played themselves out, and it was time to put them into the ground for good. Nothing would ever change my greatest loss, by bringing my dad back to me.
I cradled my stomach protectively, needing reassurance from something pure and innocent. So much ugliness in my twenty-five years—surely I could find beauty and peace moving forward. And just like a message from above, I was rewarded with a little nudge right under my ribs as if to say, “I’m still here and I know you’re my mom.” Yes, my butterfly angel, I am.
“So, your life changed after that night…just like mine,” I said after a moment.
“Yes. The choices I made that night changed everything.”
WE said our goodbyes on the busy street with more of the media circus I’d experienced before, with security, and drivers, and photographers. I really needed to get back to the flat to start dinner for Ethan as this was our last night together for a week. He had to leave for Switzerland very early in the morning.
The whole meeting with Lance had been on the bizarre side of things, but I felt so much lighter with my guilt after hearing his revelation. Still ashamed of my behavior that brought me to be on that pool table seven years ago, but a great deal of the self-loathing was freed for me. I felt tremendous relief, and for the first time, felt like the feeling might actually remain with me.
“Thank you, Lance.”
He looked at me curiously. “Why, Brynne?”
“For telling me your story. For some reason, it helps me to let go…of it.” I rested a hand on the top of my belly, unable to explain such a private thought with any kind of clear understanding, but it made perfect sense to me. “I’ll be a mother soon, and I want my baby to have a mom who can hold her head up, and know she didn’t do anything wrong, that she’s a good person, who did a stupid thing in a long line of stupid things.”
“You are a good person, Brynne…and we all do stupid things, unfortunately. And sometimes bad things happen to us without any intervention from the stupid things we do.” He looked down at his prosthetic.
“What will you do now, Lance?”
“Go back home and figure out what I can do now that I’m done with the Army. Learn to live with one leg. Maybe go back to school and finally get my law degree.”
“You should do it then, if that’s what you want.” I smiled. “I bet the stuffy law professors at Stanford will just love all your ink.”
He laughed. “Yeah, about as much as the people in D.C., but it’s good to shake things up once in a while.” His driver opened the car door, signaling that it was time to go.
“I think you’re being summoned,” I said, gesturing toward the car.
“Yeah.” He looked like he had more to say as his eyes studied me. “Brynne?”
“Yes, Lance?”
“Telling you helped me, too. More than you can ever know. You deserved to hear it from me a long time ago. So thank you again, for seeing me.” He sucked in a deep breath as if he was gathering strength. “You’re more beautiful now than when you were seventeen, and I’m so glad I got to see you pregnant. You’re going to be a wonderful mother. And I want you to remember that you’re beautiful in spite of how we sometimes see ourselves. I’m going to remember you just like you are right now.” He finished with a smile, but I could see how all the confessing was starting to get to him. This meeting had been emotional for him, for me—and now it was time for us to say goodbye to each other.
I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to his many compliments, but again, they were heartening to hear from him. “I wish you well, Lance.” I put out my hand. “I hope you get the chance to pursue your own dreams now.”
He took my offered hand and leaned into me for a half-hug, and even a press of his cheek to mine. Then he got into the back of the limousine, the window tint so dark he was made invisible to me the instant the door closed behind him.
And just like that, Lance Oakley was gone.
THE drizzle was strangely comforting on my walk home. It reminded me of the dreary days I’d learned to get used to when the climate was still new to me. In the beginning, when I first moved to London, I missed the California sunshine. But as I blossomed in my new environment, immersing myself with school and the heavy cultural influences around me, I grew to love the London rain. So, as the drizzly drops scattered over my purple hat and scarf, I wasn’t bothered a bit. The rain had always felt cleansing to me.
I walked faster, hurrying to make it home before Ethan discovered my absence, and the questions he would have about where I’d been. I knew I absolutely wasn’t ready to discuss Lance with him yet. I owned the truth about what had happened to me seven years ago at that party, and re-hashing it again in conversation was not something I was quite ready to share, even with Ethan. He would have to understand that I needed to do this my way, and trust in me to make the best decision for myself. And, in many ways, for us. Ethan should understand the process now as he was finally into therapy himself. Being forced to re-live traumatic events did not always help the victim. Sometimes it hurt badly.
I pushed through the heavy glass doors of our building and waved to Claude as I headed for the elevator. I pressed the button and waited, feeling a little sweaty now that I was out of the rain. I dragged off my hat and figured I now sported mega hat-hair, and hoped I wouldn’t have to ride up with anyone, to spare him or her the sight of me.
The doors opened and out came a tall blonde I’d seen before. Sarah Hastings was dabbing at the corner of her eye with a floral handkerchief, as if she were drying tears.
She stopped abruptly, realizing I’d spotted her, and it was too late to pretend I hadn’t. “Oh, Brynne, hello, it’s me, Sarah. Do you remember me from Neil’s wedding?”
“Yes, of course, I remember you. How are you?” What I really wanted to ask her was a bit different: Why are you coming out of my building, and were you just up with Ethan?
I had my reasons to be wary of Sarah, though. The texts from Ethan on her phone were one annoying thing, but when she called him later that evening, my wifely intuition perked up. And now she was here at our home meeting with him? I got the feeling she was using him, or possibly something more, and I did not like it one little bit. I also knew how hard it was for Ethan to interact with her. Ethan’s worst trauma had been the loss of Mike while they were prisoners. He’d been forced to watch the murder and was tortured emotionally throughout. It was horrible for him to have to re-live the events through Sarah each time she called, or wanted to reminisce, or whatever the hell she was trying to do with my husband.
She swept her eyes over me, took in my swelling pregnant self, and much to my irritation, the messy hair and damp skin. I knew I looked ghastly. “Oh, I’m just leaving now, but I’m fine, thank you.” She blinked and looked down at the ground. Her eyes were red and it was apparent to me she’d been crying.
“Are you sure? You look upset.”
“Actually, I’ve just left your husband—there was—something I needed…to give him.”
“May I ask what that was?” I asked, boldly.
“Um…I think you have to ask Ethan, Brynne, I’m not at liberty to say.” She shook her head and looked pained to be standing and talking to me. Sarah Hastings resented me, and if I had to peg her further, I’d say she felt guilty about it, too. Maybe she begrudged the life Ethan and I were living together…while she had only memories of Mike.
Exactly what I was afraid of. The feelings coursing through me were unwelcome and unpleasant. I felt jealous and useless at the same time. I didn’t know what to say to her so I just nodded and stepped into the elevator. Sarah had already turned away when the doors closed.
When I let myself into the flat I anticipated Ethan to be right there tapping his foot, but he wasn’t. Things were quiet. It wasn’t Annabelle’s day so I wasn’t expecting her to be around, but Ethan knew I planned on cooking tonight so we could have a quiet evening together before he left for his trip.
I checked our bedroom, thinking he might be in there packing, but he wasn’t. I headed back through the great room toward the other side of the flat, when I smelled the cloves. The door to his office was closed, but I peeked in without knocking. The room was dark except for two forms of illumination: the aquarium and the burning tip of his Djarum Black.
“You’re in here.” My eyes adjusted to the dim lighting and caught a glimpse of his face through the shadows. He looked grim as he sat there smoking in his study. Not happy to see me. No real acknowledgment. “Is everything all right?” I asked, stepping forward.
“You’re back,” he said idly. He just sat there staring at me, the bright lights of the tank framing him from behind, Simba and Dory swimming peacefully among the pieces of bright coral, as he ignored my question.
“Why are you sitting in the dark?” I wondered if he would tell me about Sarah’s visit. It was pretty clear that he was upset over it. He tended to go on a smoking fit after a bad dream or a flashback. Meeting or talking to Sarah seemed to bring about the same sorts of coping behaviors in him, but he smoked outside now exclusively, so doing it inside his office was my first clue that something wasn’t right. I wanted him to tell me about their conversations, but so far he hadn’t shared. I didn’t push him, as I’d promised, but it hurt me that Ethan could apparently speak to Sarah about things that he couldn’t with me. She could help him but I couldn’t? I wasn’t happy with how his reaching out to Sarah made me feel, but felt I couldn’t complain or bother him with it because it would just make things harder for him. I never wanted to be the one responsible for bringing Ethan more hurt and stress than he already had to deal with.
“How was your walk?” he asked, stubbing out his cigarette and standing. “I don’t want you in here breathing this shit.”
“Then why are you smoking in the house?” His manner was so cold, I felt a shiver of nervousness catch me.
“My bad.” He stalked toward me and steered me out with a firm hand to my back. There would be no resisting and no arguing, I could see that plain as day in the rigidity of his stance as he moved beside me.
We came into the kitchen where he left me to sit at the bar. He often sat there while I cooked dinner, either working on a laptop or asking about my day. But he didn’t look like he wanted to chat when he set his phone on the granite countertop with a clap. He looked up at me and folded his hands. His eyes told me he was fuming, swirling dark blue and searing.
I swallowed and tried again. “Ethan, did something happen to upset you?”
He raised an eyebrow at me, but didn’t answer the question. I realized he hadn’t answered a single question I’d asked him since I’d come home.
“Where did you go for your walk, baby?” He’s answering everything with questions of his own.
“I walked to Hot Java,” I said slowly, but getting the feeling he already knew. “Do you have something to say to me, Ethan?”
“No, my darling, I don’t, but I very much think you do.” He picked up his phone and held the screen up for me to see.
Lance Oakley embracing me on the street.
