The admissions office made an exception for George’s midsummer application, after everything that Ariel had gone through, the negative impact it was having on the boy, the excess of attention, the physical danger.
For the past year she’d been confronting the question of what her life will be like when George is gone. The boy’s increasingly distant behavior was a constant reminder that this stage of her life was drawing to a close, that soon her kid would be off at college, never home for more than a few days at a time. There was nothing for him in their little town; the nothing was why she’d come. But he probably felt their small town closing in around him, the small class in a small school, small teams, small world.
Maybe this place has served its purpose for Ariel too. When George leaves, she’ll be a fifty-year-old woman living alone on a small farm with some small animals, and a struggling small business, and a small group of friends. A small life.
Ariel peers out the window at the European sunrise breaking over the horizon. She’d been expecting to confront that new reality a few years down the line. But here’s that future, right now.
*
Her driver is holding a small whiteboard with her name. The trip takes an hour. She checks into the seaside hotel, changes into a bathing suit, goes for a bracing swim in the Adriatic, mountains looming in the background, shoreline decorated with the stone walls and red roofs of the ancient village, the fortified island, the beach chairs and umbrellas.
She wraps herself in a plush towel, reclines on the squishy chaise, and looks around at all this apparent perfection. It takes a lot of work to keep all these chairs aligned, the lines of tables so straight, the sand so clean, the cleaning crew so polite, her drink refreshed, fresh towels piled high. Ariel suspects there’s a lot of misery on the other side of all this perfection.
The resort is nearly empty, the season long over. This makes it easy to recognize all the other guests, just a handful, none even remotely suspicious. Nevertheless, out of an abundance of caution, Ariel requests a room change. “Anything with a terrace that faces the sea?”
“Of course madam. We will move your bags immediately.”
*
The knock startles Ariel, although it’s no surprise at all. This knock is why she’s here.
She checks herself in the mirror. Smooths her dress. Another self-assessment in another bathroom mirror. Then she opens the door, and there he is, that dazzling smile, that glint in his eyes. But she can also see that there’s less of an edge to him. There’s less of an edge to her too.
They succeeded, after all. Everything went off exactly as planned.
Everything except the aftermath: She hadn’t expected her fame to arrive so swiftly and so oppressively; she hadn’t expected the cruelty of the backlash, the persistence of the harassment; she hadn’t expected to ship her kid off to boarding school, to accelerate the beginning of the end of that stage of her life. None of those aftershocks were part of the plan, not specifically. But she and John had both known that there would be collateral damage of some sort.
He opens his arms, and Ariel allows herself to be folded in, a tight embrace, a friendly squeeze of the shoulders. But no passionate kiss. They don’t really have that type of relationship.
Or at least they didn’t, not until that night in Lisbon. But they haven’t seen each other since, haven’t even spoken, and Ariel doesn’t know what type of relationship they have now. It’s possible that they have none. It’s possible that they have everything.
“My God,” she says, “look at you.” He’s sporting a dark tan, a short beard, long hair. He looks like he belongs here. But what does she know about where he belongs? She barely knows this man.
*
The only truth to their story was that they did actually meet at the bookstore.
“Just five minutes,” he’d said at the counter. “Just let me buy you a coffee.”
He’d already called twice, this John Wright. After Ariel hung up on him the second time, she assumed that he’d give up. But a week later there he was, in person, buying her coffee at the café up the street. It seemed like bad manners to allow him to buy her a coffee in her own shop.
“Thanks for your time,” he said. “I’ll get straight to it. When my sister Lucy was sixteen years old, she was raped by Charlie Wolfe.”
Ariel gasped.
“She’d run away from our home, was working in a bar. She was extremely vulnerable. When that predator’s parents offered money for her to drop the charges and keep her mouth shut, she didn’t really have a choice. She signed the NDA, cashed the ten-thousand-dollar check. Some of which she needed to use for the abortion.”
“Oh my God.”
“She has never stopped being angry, and from afar she watched him get richer and richer, then more and more famous, and more and more powerful, and then he’s named Secretary of the Treasury, and suddenly people are talking about grooming the son of a bitch to be the next president of the United States.”
It was true: One day Charlie Wolfe was a minor item in the business pages, and the next he was front-page everywhere, he seemed to be invincible, inevitable.
“This monster”—John could barely contain himself—“must be stopped.”
Ariel recognized John’s fury. She felt exactly the same way. She thought of Charlie in the same exact terms: a monster.
“There’s nothing Lucy can do, she lives in Morocco, where I suspect she does something dubious for a living. I don’t know what exactly, and frankly I don’t want to. She’s my sister, and I love her, but there are some things we don’t discuss. And I can see clearly that Lucy is not a sufficiently credible accuser, nor a compelling witness. Certainly not in politics, not up against a guy like this, with the type of resources he could throw at her. It’s not out of the question that he might even have her killed.”
No, Ariel thought, it certainly wasn’t.
“A scumbag like this, someone who displayed such callous disregard for a young girl, I think we know that he did not stop his sexual-assault career with just the one. He didn’t face any consequences! Why would he stop?”
Ariel felt herself beginning to boil over, even as she knew that she was being swayed by this man’s own rage.
“So I started looking around, asking around. I hired a PI, and he came up with a few potential names. Then I hired a second PI to pursue from a different angle, like a science experiment, to see if the conclusions would be the same. I wanted to be extra-sure before I intruded into anyone’s life. These two different PIs came up with two slightly different lists of potential victims. But one name was on both lists. In fact one name was at the top of both lists.”
Ariel knew exactly where this was going.
Over the years, Ariel’s furor had waxed and waned, then had built to a crescendo alongside the arc of Charlie Wolfe’s outsize triumphs in every sphere. She was freshly enraged on a daily basis. How could such lavish rewards be bestowed upon this vile man, of all the vile men in the world?
“He raped you. And you too signed an NDA, under duress.”
Ariel wouldn’t say anything, of course. She couldn’t.