She hangs up before I get a chance to say another word. I stare at the phone as I wave hello to Larry, the security guard in Alex’s building, and then wait for the elevator.
After all these years, I'm pretty used to getting railroaded when it comes to parties and other family gatherings by my mom and by my sisters.
2
Emma
The inside of the elevator is all glass and looks out onto the skyscrapers of LA. The city is sprawling and big, but most of the buildings are about two or three stories. The tall, massive ones are concentrated in the downtown area.
I ride all the way to the 18th floor in this silent elevator while my thoughts return to the impossible interview. Corrin wants me to interview D. B. Carter, who is as reclusive a writer as there is one.
For one thing, no one even knows what he looks like. For another, I'm not even entirely sure if he is even a man.
Since I don't know the sex, I'll refer to him as him for now. So much for smashing the patriarchy, right?
D. B. Carter is an international best-selling author of a very popular fantasy series.
He is prolific, with over a hundred books and perhaps even more titles if you count all the novellas, short stories, and standalone novels he has written in his life.
The other thing that's particularly interesting about him is that he's independently published.
He doesn’t have a publisher so he has been self-publishing all of his work. He has a strong social media presence, but nothing personal is ever posted.
Of course, there are no pictures.
There is also no personal information of any kind. Many authors will state the city and state or country where they live. They might mention a spouse, children, or pets. None of these details exist about D. B. Carter.
I know this because I have looked.
Unfortunately, it was my idea to write about D. B. Carter in the first place. A friend of mine mentioned that he was her favorite author. When I looked him up, I saw how well he was selling on Amazon and other platforms.
I tried to find out more about him, but I couldn't. When I downloaded his book onto my Kindle, I realized what all the fuss was about.
I couldn't stop turning the pages.
I was addicted.
I stayed up half the night reading and the funny thing is that I don't even really like fantasy. There was something about the characters, the setting, and his use of language that lured me in and kept me there until I was done.
I'm a journalist and we like to think that we are objective. Of course, there is no such thing. We all come with our innate and implicit biases that guide the stories that we choose to tell and how we tell those stories.
When I was at that pitch meeting, sitting behind that Formica table with my colleagues listening to Corrin rant about taking the magazine to the next level, I didn’t have any other ideas. But I had just stayed up the whole night reading his book and couldn't wait to start the next one. What made him particularly interesting was that he was a bigger mystery than I had even envisioned.
The box of Thai food feels warm against my stomach and it calms my nerves somewhat. I can't wait to talk to Alex about this impossible assignment.
I have no idea where to start.
In this day and age, every search begins online, but outside of his books, he barely exists.
It reminds me of that old saying, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it fall, did it actually happen?
If a person doesn't exist on the Internet, does he actually exist at all?
Alex's office is at the far end of the hallway from the elevators. He is an associate at his father's boutique investment bank.
It's not a particularly big enterprise in that it doesn't have that many employees, but it's very profitable. Mr. Wetterling is very careful about keeping costs down and staying below the number of employees that he needs to remain a small business even though the firm made almost five hundred million in profit last year.
There are only a couple of office assistants; one who works for his father and another who answers the calls that come in for all of the associates.
I wave to the younger one and ask about her daughter who has recently been diagnosed with a kidney infection. Afterward I walk down the brightly lit modern hallway and nod to every associate with their door open.
When I finally get to Alex's office, I knock and wait.
No one answers, so I knock a little louder.
When I try the handle, the door swings open and I see Alex with his pants down, his shirt untucked, and a woman bent over his desk.
“Emma!” Alex yells, looking back at me, and trips pulling up his pants.
I straighten my back as the blood coursing through my body turns to ice.
When he moves out of my field of vision, I see her.
She just sits up on the desk, crosses her legs, and buttons up her tailored, dry clean-only, silk blouse.
“What's happening here?” I ask. With my palms drenched in sweat, the Thai food slips out of my hands and drops to the floor.
3
Emma
When I look back up at them, everything moves in slow motion. Alex walks up to me and says something, but I don't hear him.
My ears buzz.
The woman my fiancé was just having sex with is his boss, Jennifer Lester.
I look past her and then stare at the giant floor-to-ceiling window behind her.
The view of the city is magnificent. Breathtaking.
Is it just this scene that is taking my breath away and tightening my chest?
I try to inhale but my throat closes up.
I turn to walk away, but Alex stops me. He puts his hand on the door and pushes it back, shutting it.
“You can't leave,” he says. “We need to talk about this.”
I flip my body around. The adrenaline starts pumping through my veins and I feel myself coming back to life.
“What do you want to talk about?” I ask.
“You weren't supposed to be here,” Alex says.
I shake my head.
“No,” he backtracks. It's only just occurred to him that that's the wrong thing to say. “That's not what I meant. I'm sorry.”
“How could you do this to me?” I ask. “Today's our engagement party.”
“I know,” he whispers, “I'm sorry.”
“Fuck you,” I say and spit on the floor.
I haven't spat like that since I played softball, but it feels visceral and good. I push past him and walk out of the office.
I'm tempted to trot, but I stop myself.
I have done nothing wrong.
I have no reason to run away.
I almost get to the elevator when Alex catches up with me and pulls me into the empty office across from the front desk.
He closes the door behind us. The room smells like it has recently been painted. It's completely empty with nothing but a chair near the far wall.
“Where are you going?” Alex asks.
“Away.”
“Listen, I'm sorry. I had no idea you were coming.”
“Yes, I know. Otherwise, you would have continued lying.”
“I'm such an asshole. I know that. I've just been working so much and I've been so overwhelmed with everything. Can we talk about this?”
“How long has this been going on?” I ask, crossing my arms.
He hesitates.
“You wanted to talk so answer me.”
I whip my hair around and walk over to the enormous floor-to-ceiling window. I look down at the street below and stare at the restaurant where I just got takeout at for my fiancé and contemplate how much my life has changed in the last twenty minutes.
Alex walks over to me and puts his arms around my shoulders. I brush him off, but he does it again.
“I'm really sorry, Emma. I'm such a dick. I'm such a shit-head.”
“You're also a liar and a cheater,” I say.
“I know.”
“How long has this been going on?” I ask him again.
Again, he hesitates.
“Listen, you were the one that wanted to talk. You want to explain yourself? Then do it. Tell me the truth.”
“Jen is my boss,” he says.
She's also ten years older than you, I want to add, but I bite my tongue. I want to hear what he has to say.
“The truth is that, and this is really difficult to say… we have been together for a long time.”
My mouth drops open. A part of me thought that this might be a one-time thing. Not that that was okay, but at least it would be…
“What are you talking about?” I ask, feeling all the blood drain away from my face.
“Jen and I have been together since before you and I met. We've been dating for about five years.”
“Dating? She's married. She has two children.”
“I know, but it was just something that happened and then it kept happening. I knew that she did not want to divorce her husband and that was okay with me. I didn't want anything serious either.”
“You didn't want anything serious?” I ask. “We have been together for two years. We've been practically living together. You asked me to marry you.”
“I know,” Alex says. “I didn't want anything special with her. When I met you, I knew that I wanted to have a life with you.”
“So why didn't you stop seeing her?” I ask and shake my head.
“I tried,” he says with a shrug. “We never really saw each other outside of work. This occasional rendezvous over lunch, a few times a week, that's just something we started doing five years ago and it just continued. It never got serious and it never got past that point of just…sex. We became something like coworkers who slept together occasionally, at work.”
I stare at his beautiful toned face, his luscious lips, and his thick ash blonde hair. I can't believe that this is the same person who I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with.
Outside of our very demanding jobs, we have practically spent every minute together.
We stopped hanging out with friends and acquaintances. We missed family dinners.
We stayed up late talking into the night when we had to be up early the next day.
When I met Alex, I never thought that I would ever connect with someone like this. I never thought that there would be a person who intuitively understood every part of me. Then he came along and suddenly all of these things that I thought were important no longer were. I thought that he felt the same way.
Tears start to gather and I blink to make them go away.
A big gulp forms somewhere in the back of my throat.
I'm crying because I caught him cheating on me, but it's more than that. There's this dissipation of trust. There's this feeling that this life that you have been living for two years is nothing but a lie.
“Emma, please,” Alex says, tugging on my hand. “Please don't cry. I hate to see you cry.”
I pull my hand away and wipe a rogue tear with the knuckle of my index finger.
“I can't believe that you've been lying to me for so long,” I say quietly. “Our whole relationship is a lie.”
“No, it's not,” Alex says, shaking his head.
I cock my head and look into his eyes, unconvinced.
“I know that I shouldn’t have been doing this. I know that I should have cut things off with Jen a long time ago, but you have to believe me when I say that it didn't mean anything. It was just a stupid physical thing. We have been doing it for three years up until we met. I broke things off for about a year. Then we were both working late one night and it just happened again.”
“So, you broke things off at first?” I ask, my voice cracking.
“Yes, when we met,” Alex says urgently.
“And then when things got a little bit too boring with us, you just went right back to her?” I ask.
He reaches over to me, but I turn away from him.
This time, however, I don't just pull away. I forcibly remove his hands off of my shoulders.
“No, that's not what happened. It was just stupid. It was something we did for a while and it's just like… a bad habit.”
“Well, in my opinion, cheating is not the same thing as smoking. The problem is that you never gave it a second thought about what it would do to me. You didn't care how much it would hurt me. You don't care about any of that.”
“I did,” Alex says, his voice getting more desperate. “I still do.”
“No, you don't,” I say with a sigh.
Before he can say another word, the door swings open and Jen walks in. She’s tall and elegant with hair that looks like she has just walked off the red carpet. On the outside, she is a much better match for Alex than I am. When Jen stands next to him, I can almost see that glitzy, airbrushed magazine photograph of the two of them, smiling with their big pearly whites from ear to ear. Hell, they would even look good on the cover of Coast.
“Emma, I just wanted to stop by and apologize. This was very disrespectful and a terrible thing to do. I'm really sorry. It should have never happened.”
I give her a slight nod. As a woman who writes for a living, it is not lost on me that her veiled apology is not really an apology at all. There is a detachment, not just in her tone but also in her choice of words.
“I promise you that this will never happen again. From now on, our relationship will be strictly professional,” Jen adds.
“I don't really care,” I say quietly but sternly. “You can do whatever you want because I'm not going to be with someone who treats me like this.”
Jen nods and looks at me with sympathy but also admiration.
I've had enough of this. I take a deep breath and walk toward the door, but when Jen reaches out and touches me with her manicured fingers, my whole body shudders.
“Don't touch me,” I snap.
“Please, Emma, I'm sorry. I just have to ask you a small favor.”
“You want to ask me a favor?” I parrot her words back to her, flabbergasted.
“Please don't tell anyone. This whole thing is so stupid and Alex and I should have never happened. I love my husband and my family. I don't know what I would do if I were to lose that.”
Not knowing how to respond to that, I just walk out.
4
Emma
I keep my tears at bay on the way down the elevator and in the lobby. But as soon as the brightness of the sun hits my face, all the tears come rushing out. They burst out of me and I start to suffocate. Gasping for air, I fold in half and collapse onto the ground.
Someone walks up to me and asks if I'm okay. I see his mouth moving, but I can't hear any of the words because my ears are buzzing so loudly.
“I'm fine,” I keep repeating to myself over and over again.
Eventually, he leaves and others appear, walking around me, clearing me with a six-foot radius. It's almost as if whatever kind of sadness I have, they never want to experience it and would rather not look at me than confront the possibility.
When I'm able to breathe again, I force myself to my feet and then start to walk in the general direction of my office building. Frankly, I have no idea how to deal with this.
I've had girlfriends back in college get cheated on, but it never happened to me. They were upset, of course, and jealous, but I never really understood how they felt until this very moment.
I look at the ground.
Suddenly, I'm standing in quicksand. My head starts to spin and I have to lean against the wall to keep my balance. The whole world tilts on its axis because the things that I knew for certain about my life are the complete opposite of that.
I knew that I loved Alex and that Alex loved me back. I knew that he understood every part of me. I knew that he cared about me in that true way that only someone who wants to spend the rest of his life with you would care about you.
What I did not know was that Alex had a secret life.
What I
did not know was that Alex was already with someone else when he met me and they stayed together after we got engaged.
He tried to explain it as if it wasn't a real relationship. She's married, and she has another life. But the truth is that he and Jen spend a hundred hours a week together.
How is that not a relationship?
She may be married, but she's also a workaholic, just like Alex.
What they’ve had over the past five years was probably so much more than what Alex and I had.
Take a deep breath.
Comparison is the death of joy. Mark Twain said that and he is right. I'm walking here trying to compare what Alex and I had to what he had with his boss when really it has nothing to do with any of that.
The only things that matter are that Alex lied and that our relationship was not what I thought it was. These lies cut so deep that it makes me question whether or not I can ever come up for air again.
In the meantime, my phone rings and when I look down at the screen, I see that it's Lindsey. She’s probably calling with an update about tonight's festivities.
My throat closes up.
No, no, no.
This is not happening.
What the hell do I do now?
Our engagement party is in a few hours and, in addition to all the Southern California locals who have to brave rush hour traffic to get there, there are people flying in from Seattle, San Francisco, and New York.
The last time that I heard the headcount it was a little bit over 200 people. The guest list got so big that it might as well be the wedding itself, but my mom insisted that no one could be missed.
My phone rings again.
It's Alex.
I don't want to answer, but I don't know what to do about the party.
He starts talking as soon as I press the green button, profusely apologizing for something unforgivable.
“This isn’t why I answered,” I interrupt. “I'm not changing my mind. But we need to discuss the party.”
All the Lies Page 2
