“Fucking asshole,” I said, gasping for air.
He stared at me, his cheeks flaming red, then cooling. Then, after what felt like an eternity, he shrugged. “You know what, babe? I feel bad for you. I was just trying to help you out.”
I straightened my dress and wiped his spit away from my mouth. “Your loss,” he called as I slammed the door shut.
He graduated two months later. It took more than two years before he finally acknowledged what had happened that night. And by then—as awful as that night had been—the scar tissue had hardened so much that I couldn’t even feel the original wound underneath. I saw Adam again, and I didn’t remember what had come before. I didn’t want to remember. From the moment Adam came back into my life, I grew restless and unhappy and yearned for something new. I thought he was the answer. I never stopped to think that Adam was the source of my unhappiness. I thought my life was the illness and Adam was the cure. But the more time we spent together, the deeper my dissatisfaction grew. His presence was the only thing that could distract me from it. And so I kept returning to the well, drinking deeper and deeper.
Maybe that’s why, even though I’ve spent so much time thinking about last year, I don’t think about Adam that much. In the end, what we had went no deeper than the quick hit of a drug. All those dinners, those bottles of wine, those nights in his bed—they add up to nothing. The lie I told myself collapsed in one shattering moment, and now I can only start from scratch.
*
In the past month, I’ve carved out a new, careful routine for myself. I wake up early. I’ve started running again in the mornings, before the heat sets in. I take Pepper on long walks through the woods, throwing sticks for him until my arm is sore. I come home and eat lunch, leftovers or sandwiches, cleaning up after myself like a guest. My father is always at work, and my mother is always at her meetings and committees. Most days it’s just me and Jasmine, the housekeeper. We move on our separate tracks, nodding when we pass each other.
I have a stack of books from the local library. I’m filling the holes in my education, all those English classes I never took because I thought I hated the subject. Austen, Dickens, Bront?. Ovid and Homer, Woolf and Joyce. I have a vague plan to work my way up to the present. Some of the books make me laugh, some make me cry, some bore me to death, some I suspect I am utterly missing the point of. It doesn’t really matter. It’s the act of concentration that I need to relearn. I am trying to be present. Some afternoons I go to the Boston MFA, where I spend hours sitting in the galleries, losing myself in the artwork, grasping at the feeling I had in Paris.
In the mornings, I scan the news for a mention of Spire. The coverage has lessened as the months have gone by. In the beginning, the story was everywhere: the investigations, the plummeting of WestCorp’s shares, the promises of full cooperation with the authorities. Michael Casey ducking and covering his head whenever the cameras chased him. In those early weeks, every ringing phone or approaching car put me on edge. I was certain it had caught up to me. An officer at the door, ready to serve me with a subpoena, ready to haul me off and take my statement.
But that’s not what anyone cared about. The leak paled in comparison to the laws that had been broken, and Spire and the feds had bigger fish to fry. What mattered was the crime, not the telling. And I bet no one suspected Evan of being connected to it. Evan was chosen precisely because he would never run his mouth. I studied every picture in the paper and every clip on TV for a glimpse of his face, for evidence of what had happened to him. But there was nothing. The cameras were focused solely on Michael Casey, the one whose head the public demanded. Once or twice I saw Adam on TV, commenting on the latest update in the Spire story, grinning broadly under the hot studio lights. He’s finally as famous as I always thought he would be.
*
My mother, meanwhile, has been watching from a wary distance.
Most days she’s out the door before I’ve even left for my run, on her way to one of her appointments or Pilates classes, but the other morning she lingered at the kitchen table. I looked up from the paper and found she had a rare gaze of contentment.
“Julia.” She reached for my hand. “Sweetie, I’m proud of you. I’m so glad you’re feeling better. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
She stood up. Sentiment over. While she fussed for her purse and car keys, she kept talking.
“You know who I ran into at the coffee shop yesterday? Rob’s mother. She didn’t know you were back.”