Amara was quiet for a moment, watching me, and I had to wonder what she was seeing: a woman on the verge of losing her mind.
“What are you thinking?” she said after a minute.
“I spent ten days with him on tour in South America, just following him around. We go from city to city. From the hotel to the stadium and back to the hotel. There are walls of screaming girls everywhere and we are constantly surrounded by security. They pace our floor. We can’t go anywhere by ourselves. We can’t sightsee. We can’t have a casual dinner at a restaurant. We can’t go for a walk. We can’t do anything without an entourage and bodyguards, and this is his life for months out of the year. Months. I can’t do that.”
She nodded. “Do you love him?”
Crap. I was going to cry. Here. In Balthazar. Under the gold lights and the oversized French mirrors. My avocado and poached eggs on toast were getting cold. “I love him.”
“Okay, then.”
“But I don’t know that that’s enough. I think Isabelle is miserable. She’s not herself. His fans are stalking me. They defaced our gallery; they send death threats, dildos to my house. Not to mention the harassment on social media. I don’t know that I can do this…”
“What are you most afraid of?”
“Everything.” I smiled, but it felt forced. “Isabelle having a nervous breakdown. And it being my fault. Getting older. Getting old. My boobs, my upper arms, my ass. All of it. Eventually he’s going to take a good look at me and be like, ‘Bollocks! You’re forty!’”
Amara laughed. “That’s a good accent you do.”
“Thank you.” My thoughts got drowned out in the hum of the restaurant. Laughter, the clinking of silverware, the scraping of bistro chairs on tile. “But even if everything were perfect … even if the harassment stopped, and Isabelle grew to accept it … how would it happen? What, we move in together, we cohabitate, we have a kid, we get married? He goes on tour, I run a gallery? How crazy is that?”
Amara shrugged. “I don’t think there are any real answers. I think you just do it.”
I sighed, pushing away my plate. I’d had all of seven bites and my appetite was gone. “You know what I’m most afraid of? I look at Daniel and Eva having a baby, and I think, I can’t give him that. I’m already old. By the time he’s ready to have kids I will be too old. What am I saying? He’s twenty-one. He’s in a boy band. I can’t have a child with a guy in a boy band. How insane would that be?”
“It’s not just ‘a guy in a boy band,’” Amara said. “It’s Hayes. It’s Hayes. And you love him.”
My heart caught in my throat. I could feel the tears welling.
“And he adores you…”
“I know … But that’s bound to end, right? One day he’s going to wake up and realize I’m twice his age. And he’s going to freak the fuck out and leave me.”
Amara reached out to squeeze my hand on the table. She was quiet for a long time, and then: “He might not.”
“He might not,” I conceded. “But he might.”
*
I arrived in Los Angeles that evening. Only hours after Hayes had departed for Australia. And yet it was probably for the best, because I wanted nothing more than to curl up with my daughter and hear about her life. She was not her usual excitable self, but she filled me in on school and fencing and the musical she’d been cast in and her crush on Avi, the soccer-playing senior. (“Do you think he’ll notice me now since I don’t have my braces anymore?” “How could he not?”) She seemed to be functioning, normal. Eighth grade.
And so I tried not to let the other things bother me. The pile of mail I’d received without return addresses or addresses I did not recognize—letters and cards and packages—I placed unopened in a box, on the instruction of the detective who was assigned my case after the vandalizing of the gallery. They were monitoring my mail to see whether a pattern of threats had been sufficiently established to be legally considered stalking. Apparently one dildo was not enough.
*
On the following Tuesday after I’d gotten back, we received the news from Paris: Cecilia Chen had decided to go with someone else. She claimed that Cherry and Martin, another reputable midsized gallery, was a better match. “They’re slightly less flashy,” she said, “and that appeals to me.”
Marchand Raphel was many things, but flashy was not one of them. And I knew then that she’d gone and Googled me, and my boyfriend, and based her decision on that.
*
“Solène.” Lulit cornered me as I was leaving the office that evening.
“I know what you’re going to say,” I said, “and I’m sorry—”
“No, you don’t,” she cut me off. “What I was going to say is: I like Cecilia, a lot. I think she would have been great for us. I think we would have been great for her. But I like you more. And I want you to be happy.”
Her tone, her voice, her expression were all so sincere, in that moment I remembered everything I loved about my best friend, and I began to cry. “It’s tearing me apart. I love him so much. And it’s tearing me apart.”
“I know it is,” she said, wrapping her arms around me. “I know it is. It’s okay. We’ll figure it out. We’ll make it work.”
But again, I could not imagine what that would look like.
*
I was still hurting when I arrived at Isabelle’s school to pick her up after her rehearsal that evening. But I did not want her to see it, so I covered, as I usually did, and pulled up to the carpool area with a smile.
She was standing far off to the side when I approached. There was a cluster of older girls to one side of the entrance, laughing and texting. And I was happy she was not with them.
Isabelle climbed into the car and slammed the door before I’d even shifted into park. “Drive.”
“Hey, peanut. How was your day?”
“Drive, Mom. Just drive.”
“Oh-kay … No ‘Hello’? What happened?” I looked back over toward the older students as we peeled out. “Do you know those girls?”
“I do now.”
“What happened, Izz?”
“Nothing, Mom. Just a bunch of girls from the Upper School who wanted me to ask you if you could get a picture of Hayes Campbell’s penis for them. You know, typical teenage stuff.”
My stomach lurched. “They said that?”
“No, actually, they said ‘dick,’ but I thought I would edit it for you to be polite.”
I pulled the car over then, frazzled. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”
“But as long as you’re happy…” She began to cry.
“Oh, Izz…”
“Please keep driving. Please don’t stop here. Please don’t stop until we get home.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Okay.”
It wasn’t until we got on the 10 that she added: “And remember that guy Avi, the one I think is really cute? Well, he finally spoke to me today…”
I nodded, my mind elsewhere.
“He came up to me in the hall just as I was going into Life Skills, and said, ‘Tell your mom I turn eighteen next month.’ So yeah, that’s how my day was.”
“Izz…” I could barely find my voice. “I’m so sorry…”
She was shaking, the tears streaming down her face. Everything she had held back for so long, released.