It Had to Be You

by Georgia Clark

  Savannah smiled sadly. “I don’t know if my parents would agree with that.”

  “Exactly. You don’t know. After you tell them—if you choose to tell them—you’ll find out.” Liv put her tea aside to focus on Savannah. “But remember this: telling people things that they might not expect to hear, but that are true about you, is a way for them to deepen their relationship with you. To know you, and love you, even more. And speaking as a mom”—Liv’s throat thickened—“that’s honestly the best gift my son could ever give me. To let me in like that, and allow me to love him even more fully.”

  She found herself reaching out to hug Savannah. For a long moment, Liv held her as she cried softly.

  Liv could never have imagined that the overly made-up young woman handing her a copy of Eliot’s will outside the brownstone would end up here, in her arms, weeping about being a little, or a lot, gay. And for Liv to really, really care about that.

  PART FOUR IN LOVE IN NEW YORK CITY

  72

  The week before Halloween, the wizards at Google finally sent Liv Eliot’s email password. Benny123.

  For five long days, Liv avoided it all. The Pandora’s box it might open felt like someone had put her spine on ice. And so Liv made Savannah do it.

  “Just look through the last few months or so,” she instructed her. “See if there’s anything I should know about.”

  Savannah hesitated. “I’m not sure that’s something I’m comfortable doing, Liv.”

  A punch of dread tightened Liv’s throat. “Well, I can’t. So I need you…” She fluttered her fingers at the laptop.

  Savannah entered the password. She scrolled and tapped for a few minutes, moving methodically through pages of junk mail. Then she frowned.

  “What?” Liv was hovering, unable to stay away.

  It was their attorney, emailing Eliot the updated will. Two weeks prior to his death. It was the last line of his otherwise formal email that’d caught Savannah’s attention. I am sorry to hear of the reason for the requested change and truly wish you all the best.

  Liv read it, and read it again. “Did he mean, like, our marriage?”

  Savannah pressed her teeth into her lower lip, thinking. “What other reason might there be?”

  Something strange and frightening edged into Liv’s mind.

  She searched Eliot’s in-box for their doctor’s name.

  Three appointment confirmations. Three appointments she definitely did not remember Eliot attending: she had to bug him to get a checkup. Nothing more from the doctor’s office in his email. No further clues.

  Liv sat back in her chair. Her fingers were numb.

  She’d never gotten a copy of Eliot’s autopsy.

  It had to be requested from the medical examiner’s office, and at the time, it seemed pointless. It was a garden-variety heart attack—what else was there to know?

  I am sorry to hear of the reason for the requested change.

  Liv watched herself with calm detachment as she followed the steps to officially request Eliot’s postmortem exam. Days later, she was alone in the front office when she received an email with an attached PDF. It was a cloudy Friday afternoon. Savannah was doing some returns. Ben was at school. The house was very quiet.

  Too nervous to sit, she paced the front office, willing the courage to click the PDF open.

  The patient was a forty-nine-year-old Caucasian male…

  Liv inhaled a jagged breath and looked away. It took her a few minutes to ground herself and return to the report. She skimmed the cold prose, fast, too fast.

  heart showed asymmetric as well as concentric hypertrophy

  blood vessels were fixed in 10% formalin

  hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

  patient was high risk for sudden cardiac death

  Liv sank, legless, into the pale pink sofa.

  High risk. Sudden cardiac death.

  In the coming hours, Eliot’s past would catch up to the present. His strange behavior in the months prior to his death would all make a horrible new kind of sense. The furtiveness. The whiplash between overly doting and prickly distance. The doctor’s appointments. The affair.

  Eliot had been careening through life with a ticking time bomb for a heart. And he knew it.

  73

  The audience at Zinc Bar was shoulder to shoulder as Darlene began the trusty set closer. “ ‘They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, No, no, no.’ ” And while the students and the tourists and the locals sang along, swaying with their glasses of inexpensive wine, something was missing.

  Electricity.

  Chemistry.

  Zach.

  Zach was missing. No one was dancing on tables or making out or doing shots. The Dionysian energy he brought to this, to everything, was gone.

  Darlene finished the song. The capable if not particularly charismatic session musicians took a quick bow. The audience clapped. They didn’t cheer. Or holler. Or stamp their feet. Darlene couldn’t blame them. It was painful to admit, but it was true: Zach made her a better musician. He made her a better person, period. But he’d disappeared. Removed himself, entirely, from her life. He’d embedded himself with her for so long, she didn’t think absence was possible. Except, it was. He didn’t reply to her texts, didn’t return her calls.

  As she was packing up the equipment, the bartender waved her over, offering her a shot. She shook her head: it wasn’t fun getting drunk without Zach. The bartender shrugged and did it himself.

  “Hey, I heard about Zach,” he said. “Pity.”

  Adrenaline kicked her ribs. “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t he quit music or some crap?”

  Quit music? Quit music?

  When Darlene visited Zach’s apartment, the smiling concierge recognized her and called up. Then the smile faded.

  She tried to lose herself in her EP, which all this was supposed to be in service of. In lieu of Zach’s twenty-five grand, the check for which she definitely wasn’t cashing, she paid for the producer’s deposit with all her savings, telling herself that when she got a record deal, she could pay it all back.

  But that was another avalanche of disappointment.

  She submitted ten songs to the producer. They listened to them all in his Harlem studio. Her initial excitement morphed into panic as song after song received only reserved acknowledgment, no real enthusiasm. “Dark Secret” was last. It took every ounce of her strength to keep it together as the lyrics played.

  He’s my dark secret; I think he’s a keeper.

  I like to run, but he makes me stand still.

  When it comes to keeping secrets

  I’m nothing but the best

  I’m a locked box, baby, I’m a treasure chest

  But boy you’re breaking down my defenses

  Making me mix up all my tenses

  You were the only one who made me feel like coming home.

  “That,” the producer said. “That has potential.”

  “Oh,” Darlene said in pained surprise. “I sort of cowrote that. With a… former friend.”

  The producer asked if her “former friend” had signed a cowriting agreement, for the song they legally owned half of.

  Of course the former friend had not. He, apparently, had “quit music.”

  Without it, the producer was not willing to work on “Dark Secret,” and without that, Darlene was of no interest to him.

  Darlene left the studio in a daze, stepping onto a street messy with car horns blaring, a woman arguing into a cell phone, music playing from a distant window, dogs barking. A rhythmless jumble of random noise.

  74

  Alone in his apartment, Zach stared at his ceiling in silence. His bed was covered in political books—his newfound medicine. He read, and listened to podcasts, and watched the distressing, dystopian news. He did not listen to, or play, or even think about, music. Because music was Darlene. And once you had the ear for it, every song was about love or women or getting your heart put
through a bloody Vitamix and honestly, he couldn’t handle it.

  Memories of things she said or did attacked him at all hours. Strangely, there was one moment that he kept coming back to, from a wedding upstate in May, the one where Zia met Clay. Something Darlene said that he couldn’t stop thinking about.

  I don’t want my success handed to me. I want to earn it.

  He joined a local activist group aimed at registering people to vote, and this felt good; this felt productive. When a very cute fellow activist asked him out for drinks, he declined politely. He dragged his useless, broken heart around with him like a pile of trash, hoping that time would do what the expression claimed, and heal his septic wound.

  It didn’t. He missed her. Christ, he missed her. He made it seem like he didn’t love her anymore, but that wasn’t true. He couldn’t turn off his feelings, even if he wanted to. He missed his bandmate. He missed his best friend. He missed his girlfriend. He just missed her. But every time she texted—Please. Please, just call me—he heard those words. I’d sooner marry a donkey than date Zach Livingstone. And his throat would get tight, and his stomach would boil, and he’d throw his stupid phone across the room. Darlene didn’t care for him: she’d only said that because she felt bad she’d been caught. Kissing was easy but love was not and there was still so much he didn’t understand about her, about her world and her struggles. And he’d never be able to. Because he was a stupid white guy with the brains of a witless beast.

  * * *

  “Can I get everyone’s attention, please?” Mark Livingstone tapped his wineglass with a dessert fork. The clean, high sound rang out across the crowded room. Zach’s twenty-seventh birthday party had originally been planned as a Sunday picnic, but the freezing rain lashing the East Coast moved it into the formal front room of the Livingstone estate. Relatives and family friends nibbled crustless sandwiches and petit fours, to the subdued strains of Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor. Zach’s music buddies, scruffy-looking folk from all walks of life, looked either bewildered or snide at the chichi surroundings. Zach had been too morose to push back on his mother’s planning, and so now he found himself the guest of honor at a ridiculous tea party. He didn’t even feel like getting sauced.

  But only a donkey would feel ungrateful surrounded by so much privilege and people who genuinely cared about him. Zach tried to feel thankful for his many blessings—and he did. But the one thing he wanted, the one girl he wanted, thought he was an idiot. So he probably was. His chest hurt. It hadn’t stopped hurting since his sister’s wedding. He slumped into a settee at the back of the room, only to have his shoulders tapped by his mother—Posture, darling—as she took a seat beside him.

  “Quiet down,” Mark boomed, and everyone shut up. There’d been three pretty average speeches so far: his great-aunt, one of his father’s business associates, and a family friend he didn’t even like. His dad, thankfully, was last. “It’s been a banner year for the Livingstone family,” began Mark. “Catherine has been doing wonderful work on the board of Save the Children”—his mother inclined her head at the light applause—“and many of you were present last month for the wedding of our daughter, Imogene, to her lovely wife, Mina.” The applause increased. Imogene pinched Mina’s bottom. Mina elbowed her, hiding a smile. “But we’re here today to honor my son, Zachary Bartholomew Livingstone, on his twenty-seventh birthday.” Zach managed a watery smile. Imogene caught his eye and made a sympathetic face. She and Mina were the only ones privy to the true despair felt by the man of the hour. “As many of you know,” Mark continued, “Zachary enjoyed something of a… Bacchanalian youth.”

  The room tittered—they knew.

  “But this year, we’ve started to see a real change in him. In fact, just this summer, Zachary became interested in politics. And I’m pleased to inform you he’s beginning a paid internship with our local congresswoman.”

  The crowded clapped, surprised.

  “It’s only a day a week,” Zach muttered, embarrassed.

  His mother shushed him, whispering over the applause. “I know things didn’t work out with Darlene, but we’ve been very impressed with you this year.” She shifted closer to him across the stiff settee. “We’re going to give you your trust.”

  The offer irritated him. If there’d never been a trust, maybe he and Darlene would’ve gotten together like a normal couple, and she’d be here beside him, holding his hand and exchanging secret smirks. “Thanks, Mum, but you can keep it. I’ll figure all that out on my own.”

  His father started saying something about the value of hard work.

  Catherine’s forehead tried to crease. “Zach, I’m saying we’ll give you the money.”

  “And I’m saying I don’t want it,” Zach said. “I’ll earn it myself: I’m actually pretty capable. Donate it all to the ACLU or something.”

  His mother looked absolutely aghast.

  “This year, we’ve gotten a glimpse of the man he’s going to become,” Mark was saying. “Responsible. Mature. Sober-minded. And I for one could not be prouder.” Mark raised his glass. “To my son. Happy birthday, Zachary.”

  “Happy birthday, Zachary,” echoed the guests.

  “Thanks.” Zach raised a limp hand in acknowledgment. “Thanks so much.”

  “All right, everyone.” His mother was on her feet. “Into the kitchen for cake.”

  The noise level rose again. Zach willed himself to get through this last little bit. The sooner it was over, the sooner he could go back to Manhattan, pull his duvet over his head, and stay there for—

  “I’d like to say something.”

  Zach froze. He knew that voice. That clear, musical, beautiful voice.

  The guests shifted, parting, allowing Darlene Mitchell to step forward.

  75

  Time didn’t make losing Clay any easier. But the one thing it did do was move the nation’s obsession off the infamous naked selfie. The news cycle was moving with the pace and responsibility of a drunk driver. Clay Russo’s naked body was a brief distraction from frightening new pollution statistics and arguments about health care. But Zia didn’t stop thinking about it. Or him.

  Was he still mad about it all?

  Did he think about her?

  Listen to the voice mails she’d left him?

  Zia had no idea. And so, she tried to forget about Clay.

  At first, taking a shift at an In Love in New York wedding at Brooklyn Winery seemed like a good idea. Close to home, good money, and working with people who were more like friends than coworkers. But as toast after toast celebrated the blissed-up couple, Zia’s defenses weakened. The couple began their first dance and grief landed on her chest, full force. She found herself in the side alley, feeling stunned and breathless, talking herself out of crying. Someone said her name. Liv.

  Zia startled. “I’m sorry, I was just—” Staying up late watching old movies. “Having a moment but I—” Making love in the shower. “Just, um—” Talking about everything and nothing, curled up in bed together, the city a twinkling distant dream.

  It was too much. Her face fell into her hands, and she started to cry.

  Liv put her arms around her, soothing. “Shhh. It’s okay.”

  “I just—miss him—so much,” Zia said between sobs.

  “I know, honey. Oh, I know.” And she did know. Liv was a widow. “You don’t really have any family in the city, do you?”

  “Not really.” Zia still took her niece and nephew to the park once or twice a week. But every time she looked at her sister, all she could see was cold, cruel venality.

  Liv gave her a tissue, tucking her hair out of her face. “Why don’t you come over for dinner tomorrow night? Sam will cook. And we can talk about it or not talk about it. Whatever you want.”

  “Thank you, Liv,” Zia said. “I’d really like that.”

  “Good. Take a minute, then get back in there. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Liv ducked back inside. Zia collected he
rself. She would move on. She knew she had to. But at least once a day, she couldn’t help picturing him. Alone in his trailer, jaw tense, gold eyes turned inward. Regretting what happened. Missing her.

  76

  As the intensity of the Jungle of Us shoot finally came to an end, Clay found himself resurfacing into a bitter, lonely reality.

  It was hard for him to recognize the man who overreacted to the viral photograph. It seemed like the actions of Illusion Clay, the invented one. The very thing he was afraid of happening—Illusion Clay taking over his life—had happened.

  He’d been a controlling dick. He’d blown it.

  But it’d been weeks. Even though he missed Zia, the best thing he could do for her was leave her alone. When the flirty makeup artist put her hand on his thigh at the wrap party, he leaned in, feigning interest. But then he remembered Zia pretending to be a makeup artist when she returned his wallet. How easy it had been between them, how thrilling. And the spark he’d been hoping to breathe into a cleansing fire with the actual makeup artist promptly went out.

  Now, back in New York, the penthouse felt huge and empty. An assistant, some eager undergrad sent to pick him up at the airport, helped Clay with his luggage, chattering about the week’s schedule of meetings and phone calls and appearances and invites. Clay only half listened, inspecting the fridge. Nothing but condiments. The prospect of ordering groceries and cooking for one felt depressing. Outside the city was washed gray. It used to feel cozy when it rained, full of candles and lamp light and the smell of her essential oils…

  “Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Russo?” The assistant stood by the elevator, blinking behind Coke-bottle glasses.

  “No. Thanks.”