“It’s icy, Miss Marshall. I was instructed to make sure you don’t slip down the stairs.”
I look to where he’s pointing. An outside stairwell that looks like it was recently shoveled, but the snow is thick and already piling up again.
My strappy sandals were not put on with this in mind. So I keep hold of the driver’s hand until we reach the bottom after a precarious descent.
He lets go of me in front of an old metal door, and then he pulls and it swings open.
I step inside and the door closes behind me.
The room seems vast and long, but it’s hard to tell because there is only one small spotlight shining down from the ceiling.
I am transfixed by the image it’s illuminating on the wall. I walk forward, past the darkness, and into the light. And I just stare at the picture of JD. His blue eyes. His blond hair and scruffy chin. His charming smile.
The unframed photograph is the size of a picture window. His face is so big. So happy. So familiar. And so real.
My fingers stretch until I can touch his lips. And then I walk forward, my arms spread out, and I press my cheek to his. My hands wrap around the edges of the canvas in a desperate attempt to pull him into the hug he deserves.
And I cry.
I cry all the tears I owe him.
They fall down my cheeks in rivers.
When I saw the announcement in the neighborhood paper that Zoey Marshall was going to do a reading in Brooklyn, I knew it was time. I knew she was coming for me.
Two years I’ve watched her from afar. Two years of endless internet searches, red-eye flights to try to catch a glimpse of her in a city before she left, stalking her blog, and her Facebook, and her Twitter. I wanted to keep that connection any way I could while she healed.
I watched her story play out on TV at first. Her father did the talking, of course. Zoey Marshall does not make public appearances. At least, not until today.
Tens of thousands of people preordered the book. While she never made a public statement on TV or did a print interview, she was always a click away on her blog where she wove a story about her fictitious sabbatical at a hippy commune tree house community in the Brazilian rainforest.
JD didn’t sell those films. He deleted them. No one ever came forward to say this is Zoey Marshall’s real story.
And even though I know she made some of the story in the novel up to make us more romantic, all the important things are true.
We were in love.
JD is dead.
People were saved.
Lives go on.
I’ve been back to see Ray a few times. Jax thinks I’m crazy, but the FBI went through his records for almost a year and never found a single i undotted or t uncrossed. Ray was as up and up as a porn mogul can get. Still is.
Public Fuck America never went live, obviously. But I did get back all the videos of JD. I had to fight for the ones of Blue. Jax made sure that evidence, including the videos and contract she had with Gabriel, disappeared.
I kept everything that was mine.
We destroyed the rest.
There were lots of trials. Not Gabriel’s. He bled to death on the concrete floor of my loft that night. And those trials had lots of deals. No one got off, not even the flock wives. The deals were made to keep Blue’s reputation intact. And now that she wrote the book, it’s sort of a cover in and of itself. A brilliant move, actually. She made our story fiction. No one will ever believe it’s true.
My transient gallery has grown through word of mouth generated so as to ensure people in her circles—her publisher, her agent, her publicist, her editor—all knew about it.
I have lived every moment of the past two years with her in mind.
So when the text comes through that she got into the car, my heart beats wildly with anticipation. She is not going to a transient show in some dingy abandoned building. She’s coming to my home. My personal gallery where I have labored over the past twenty-six months to create the perfect exhibit.
And not by coincidence, it’s called One, Two, Three.
One lost girl.
Two best friends.
Three eternal soulmates.
The idling motor of a car outside breaks my concentration and I stand up. I straighten my suit coat, and my tie, making sure it’s tight.
Her shoes tap on the concrete steps. I picture her hand being held by my driver, Matthew, and then the door opens with a creak.
She’s illuminated by the outside light for a brief moment, and then the door closes behind her and she stands in the shadows.
But it only takes her a moment to see JD. It’s hard not to, since I’ve placed a spotlight above his head. It’s my favorite picture of JD, taken when he was sitting outside on our terrace when we first moved into the loft.
It was a good day. One of the best. We were rich. He was happy. I was satisfied that we’d gotten through the hardest thing he’d ever have to go through. He was better. He was whole again. He was saved.
It turns out salvation is no more permanent than anything else in this life.
But if I could save him once, I could do it again.
Blue reaches out to touch his lips and then she spreads her arms and hugs the photo. It’s almost as wide as her arms, but not quite. There is just enough room for her to grab onto the edges and place her cheek on his.
“You came,” I say, stepping out of the shadows.
She turns to face me, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I owed you a story. So I wrote you a story.”
I walk forward and take her hand. “I love your story.”
She starts to cry again. “Why did you leave me? After it was all over I asked them to tell me where you were, but they refused.”
I take her in my arms and hold her tight. I smell her hair and close my eyes. “I left because I love you. And you were right.”