The Interview

by Alice Ward

  Bernadette Fry was still talking as I mused. “Please don’t misunderstand my call, Ms. Danes. It was wonderful to see our little theater’s name in a New York paper, and just as wonderful to be linked with someone as prominent as Tate McGrath, but we don’t want our audiences to have any false notions about us. Aside from talented, enchanting, diverse, and all the other great traits a playhouse hopes to be, it’s important to us to uphold an honest reputation as well.”

  “I understand.” My head was heavy and my stomach hollow. I felt the opposite of sick. I felt charged, amplified. Adrenaline had taken the place of blood in my body. “I apologize on behalf of myself and The Apple for failing to fact-check properly. Hopefully, this hasn’t put you out in any way.”

  “Not at all.” She laughed again, a tinkling laugh that made it clear she was oblivious to the emotional hell I was suffering in my claustrophobic cubicle. “Actually, we’re opening a new play tonight, and it’s already sold out for the next two months. I’m normally not here this early, but we’ve gotten so much interest that there’s quite a bit to do before curtain.”

  I flicked my gaze to the time in the bottom corner of my computer screen. Barely past eight. That meant it was five there. “Well, I appreciate the call, Ms. Fry. Good luck tonight with your opening, and thanks for reaching out.”

  She bid me a cheerful farewell, but I’d already pulled the phone from my ear before she was finished talking and placed it into the cradle. How was I going to face Tate knowing what I now knew?

  I was supposed to go to his house tonight for dinner since it was one of the two nights a week Concrete wasn’t playing, but I couldn’t fathom sitting across from him over meatballs or minestrone and pretending everything was fine. If I was being honest with myself, I wasn’t just in a budding relationship with Tate. I was falling in love with him, which made this hurt all the worse.

  Talk to him.

  Jenna’s words flew through my mind like a flash of lightning. They mingled with the adrenaline, and I stiffened. Yeah, I was going to talk to him. Screw my fears of offending him. He owed me an answer, and damn it, I was going to get that answer, even if it was one I didn’t want to hear.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Tate

  I was being haunted.

  My talk with Artie kept charging me at the most inconvenient times, like when I was on stage or arguing with my agent about doing another round of TV interviews.

  Sleeping had become easier, probably because I’d become so exhausted by insomnia that my brain refused to stay awake and mull anymore, but I was still mentally shot from the internal tug-of-war I was constantly waging.

  Calling Artie had been like biting the bullet because I’d been sure he was going to cinch a decision for me one way or the other, and in some ways, that would’ve been a relief. I was wrong about him though. His insistence I break it off with Sadie and keep my past in the past had only made me more certain I needed to tell her. I didn’t want to defy my brother’s wishes — or demands and pleas — but I’d realized during our conversation that I couldn’t stand the thought of sending her packing because I was afraid.

  The mysterious creature had somehow made me more afraid of losing her than losing everything.

  She was supposed to be arriving at my apartment any minute. I’d sent Phillip out to pick up dinner from a quaint Mexican restaurant in the West Village, and it was already waiting on the table in unopened Styrofoam containers. If all went according to plan, we’d joke over the guacamole, flirt over the enchiladas, and I’d finally have the courage I needed to tell her everything over flan.

  I couldn’t spill my guts without first warning Artie that I was going to do it, though. If he turned out to be right about my story going public, which I sincerely doubted, he deserved a heads-up. I picked up my phone from the table where I’d left it when I’d set out two plates and assorted cutlery, scrolled to his name, and called.

  “Hey, bro.”

  He sounded strange, like he was straining to talk. My older brother antenna went up at once. “What’s wrong?”

  “Damn doctor’s office. Can’t get away from people hacking up a lung.”

  “You’re sick?” My heart stilled. “Is it serious?”

  He chuckled weakly. “Isn’t it always?”

  A knock at my door cut through my concentration, and I darted a glance in its direction. “Shit. I have to go, but I needed to tell you about the thing we were talking about a few days ago.” A second knock ripped through my otherwise quiet apartment. I started moving toward the door, but I was getting the sinking feeling I wasn’t going to have the chance to forewarn Artie like I wanted. “Remember what we talked about?”

  “Yeah.” He barely got the word out before exploding into a series of wrenching coughs, and I closed my eyes. I couldn’t tell him, not when he was like this and not with Sadie literally feet away behind a door.

  “You know what? I’ll just give you a call later. Let you get some rest. I’ve got company, anyway.”

  We bid one another goodbye, and I ended the call with a nervous fluttering in my stomach that had nothing to do with what I’d planned on telling Sadie. With Artie still at the forefront of my mind, I opened the door to see the lovely theater critic waiting on the other side… but she didn’t look so lovely.

  Her face was as pretty as always, her figure as enticing, but the entire vision was marred by the expression she wore. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, though.

  Sadness?

  Disappointment?

  Anger?

  “Hi.” I would’ve leaned in to give her a kiss, but something in her eyes told me that wouldn’t have been met the way I’d hoped.

  “Hi.” Her voice was toneless.

  I had no idea what to make of it. In all the time we’d spent together, Sadie had never once been in a bad mood. It was one of the things I liked about her, actually. Not that I thought she never should’ve had a bad mood, but she wasn’t one of those people to dwell in the negative as so many were wont to do. Stepping back to widen the berth for her to enter, I cocked my head and studied her quizzically. “Had a rough day at work?”

  “You could say that.” She came into the apartment and waited for me to close the door behind her. After I did, I turned toward her expectantly, figuring she’d offer further explanation, but she didn’t. Her jaw was clenched, and her cheekbones were rigid like she was gearing herself up for something.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Maybe she just needed a shoulder to cry on.

  “I don’t know.” She let her purse strap slip off her shoulder, but she didn’t set it on the sideboard like she normally would have. My stomach twisted. Not only was something off with her, but I was getting the impression it had something to do with me. As if reading my thoughts, she added, “We need to talk.”

  There it was, that phrase that started every break-up in the history of relationships. I was struck with a sudden bout of tinnitus, as if my body was trying to protect me from hearing what she was going to say. With a numb hand, I motioned toward the living room. She nodded and moved in that direction, and I followed silently. It didn’t escape my notice that she was still clinging to her purse. Even the first time she’d come to my home, she’d set her purse down. All the signs were pointing to losing her in the next half hour, and I was sick.

  She lowered herself onto the loveseat, leaving enough room for me to sit beside her, but I wasn’t sure I should. I was afraid she was going to tell me we needed to go our separate ways, and I’d end up throwing my arms around her and begging her not to leave me.

  Adding humiliation to heartache wouldn’t serve me well. Figuring it was in my best interest, I chose the adjacent couch and leaned my elbows on my knees, knitting my fingers together. “So, what’s going on?” The words floated out of my mouth without permission.

  “I got a call today.” Deadpan, toneless, but her eyes shifted up to mine, and I saw determination within them. “From Bernadette Fry. Do you know Bern
adette Fry?”

  I searched my memory banks, waiting a beat before answering to give the question proper consideration, but the name didn’t ring even the tiniest bell with me. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, Bernadette Fry does PR for The Gold Rush Community Theatre.”

  My mouth instantly became sawdust dry, and I was suddenly feverishly warm. “Yeah?” This wasn’t good. “Don’t think I remember her. Did she start after I left?”

  Liar. I was a fucking liar.

  And from the look in Sadie’s eyes, she knew I was one too.

  “Probably, but the funny thing is that she told me she dug through all their records herself, and she couldn’t find a single one with your name on it.” Sadie’s eyes were inflamed now, and I was positive I saw at least a flicker of fire inside her pupils. She didn’t speak as though she was angry, but the dense aura radiating from her left no room for doubt that she was furious. “In fact, she told me that the Gold Rush is not now, nor has ever been, affiliated with you.”

  Shit. “Why would she call you to tell you that?”

  “Because, in your interview with me, you mentioned having gotten your start at the Gold Rush, remember?” She was closing in on me. I could feel it, like an animal being backed into a corner. “It was the first time you ever put a name to your theater beginnings, which is probably why she reached out to me. I’ll add that she said she would’ve loved to have been able to say they were affiliated with you, but they didn’t want to falsely advertise themselves. Understandable, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t answer. My heart was beating a million miles a minute, banging against my ribs and deafening me with bloody bass notes in my ears. There was a large part of my brain that insisted this was just a bad dream, and I was going to wake up any second, but that second never came.

  “Tate.” The determination was back in her eyes, and I noted a hint of desperation in her voice. “I need to know the truth. Were you really involved with the Gold Rush? Or was this woman just a prankster trying to get her name connected to yours?”

  Tell her you didn’t lie.

  Say the woman was a fame seeker looking for her fifteen minutes.

  Who’s she going to believe, a complete stranger or you?

  I couldn’t lie to her… but could I tell her the truth? The only thing I seemed capable of doing beneath her discerning stare was breathing, and even that wasn’t going so well. My lungs would inflate, but there was no oxygen inflating them. I was starting to get the lightheaded feeling that came with holding one’s breath for too long or spending too much time trying to perform a handstand in a pool.

  “Tate, please.” Jesus, the rawness in her words shredded my insides. It physically pained me to know I was hurting her.

  “She was right.” I had to give her at least that much. “I never performed at the Gold Rush.”

  A long silence stretched between us. I felt her watching me and the weight of her gaze, but I kept my own eyes lowered to my hands in both anxiety and shame. Finally, I saw her in my peripheral vision lean back against the loveseat and run her fingers through her hair. She exhaled a loud whoosh.

  “Okay. So, you lied to me.” For some reason, she didn’t sound as surprised as I would’ve expected. “Why?”

  “Don’t.”

  Again, silence spread between us, but this time it was ripe with shock and indignation. I looked up at her to see her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open.

  “What the hell do you mean by that?” she snapped. “Don’t? You lied to me, and I’m not allowed to know why?”

  Something was spreading through me like poison. Was it despair? I felt helpless, hopeless, and at a loss for words, but I knew I had to talk to her or she’d be gone. She already looked like she was one foot out the door with her purse resting on her lap and her shoulders squared. What was I supposed to tell her, though?

  I couldn’t be honest, not yet. I hadn’t even gotten a chance to warn Artie that I was going to out my secrets — that I was going to out his secrets. Regardless of how I felt about Sadie, he was my brother, and I couldn’t do that to him without letting him know first, at the very least.

  And he was sick, so this wasn’t the right time to open the closet and let all the skeletons come tumbling out. It would make it worse. He could…

  I shook my head.

  I’d been mentally preparing myself to come clean with her, but my imagining of how that scene would play out certainly hadn’t been anything like what was happening now.

  “Sadie.” I tried to impart as much sincerity through my expression as I could. “I want to, but I can’t. Please, just trust me.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?” She got to her feet so quickly that her purse tumbled to the floor and her hair bounced around her face. With the amount of energy she used just standing up, I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if she’d swung at me just to release some of the adrenaline I could see pulsing in her throat. “You won’t open up to me, you shut me down any time I ask you the simplest question about something any normal person would want to know when dating someone, and now I find out from some woman across the country that you lied? What about that scenario screams trust to you?”

  No! This is not how it was supposed to go!

  Just tell her! Get it over with!

  My brother’s face, pale and sunken, swam in front of my eyes, and I closed them. I was stuck, not between a rock and a hard place but between a piranha-infested pool and the Grand Canyon. There was no way out.

  If I told her the truth and she turned on me… my heart squeezed at the devastation her betrayal would leave in its wake.

  Would she betray me?

  Ninety-nine percent of the human race would. They’d spill my story to the highest paying media outlet without a second thought.

  But Sadie? A reporter. A woman who felt the world “deserved to know the truth” as a career… I just wasn’t sure.

  “I don’t blame you for not trusting me.” I sounded so defeated that I didn’t even recognize my own voice. “I guess I’m just hoping you will anyway.”

  “Yeah, well, stop hoping, because that’s not going to happen.”

  “If I could tell you, I would.” I leveled my gaze with hers, forcing the honesty in my statement to manifest. “You can at least believe that, right?”

  She made a noise of scorn in her throat. “No, I can’t.” Bending down, she scooped her purse from the floor and roped it over her shoulder again. “I’ve known you were hiding something all along, but I kept telling myself it was my imagination, or trying to justify it because of who you are. The not-going-out-in-public thing? ‘He just doesn’t want to be surrounded by paparazzi,’ I told myself. I wrote off the awkwardness anytime I brought up family and childhood as some strange quirk. And I even defended you when my friend said you were probably acting this way because you were seeing other women.”

  “What?” The unexpected accusation made me draw back and gape at her. “What other women?”

  “I don’t know!” She threw her hands up into the air, then flopped them back down to her sides. “Jenna told me you guys act like this when you’re dating a lot of women and don’t want to get caught. She’s a gossip columnist; it’s kind of her thing to know about that stuff. But I blew her off. I didn’t take it seriously.” Her mouth thinned. “Maybe I should have.”

  “You can’t actually believe that.”

  Sadie flailed her hands again. “What the hell am I supposed to believe then?”

  I didn’t have an answer. Well, I did, but not one I could provide. If she only would’ve held on long enough for me to have one more conversation with Artie, none of this would have been a problem. I could have cleared it all up the moment she told me someone from the Gold Rush had contacted her. But I wasn’t about to put my brother in a position to be met with cameras and reporters on his front lawn without any warning, definitely not when he was in the condition he’d been in before she’d arrived.

  “L
ook, I’m going to make this really simple because I don’t want to go around in circles.” Her hand was wrapped so tightly around her purse strap that her knuckles had become whitish-yellow, and her nails were digging into the flesh of her palm. If she felt it, she didn’t care. “You need to tell me what you’re hiding, whether it’s other women or some criminal past or whatever, or I need to walk away from this.” Her voice broke, and she cleared her throat. “Because I can’t take this constant wondering and never knowing.”

  The room was spinning around me, but time was standing still. I couldn’t feel any part of myself anymore. This was it, the one moment I had to save what had become so important to me.

  And I couldn’t do it.

  She looked at me for a long while, watching, waiting. No confession spilled from my mouth, no admittance of secrets. She stood there so long that the rays of sun spiking across my living room floor actually shortened an inch. Then, the weight of what had to happen next settled over us at the same time, blanketing my apartment in thick truth.

  “Okay,” she whispered. If it hadn’t been so silent in the room, I wouldn’t have heard her. “I’m going to go.”

  And she did. The last thing I heard was the door closing behind her just seconds before my world shattered.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Sadie

  One week.

  That was all the time that had passed since Tate and I broke up, but it had been seven days of pure hell. I’d never felt so depressed in my entire life.

  In some ways, I actually thought that it had been easier being in my constant state of wondering and worrying when I was with him than to be without him at all. Getting out of bed in the morning felt like an extraordinary task and going to work was nearly impossible.

  I couldn’t face my smiling co-workers, or even my stressed ones, and writing reviews of plays that told love stories between two unlikely people was one of the most painful experiences I could’ve gone through. Better yet, I had to be unbiased. I couldn’t write that I was in excruciating, emotional pain. I couldn’t tell the world that I’d had a blissful month with Tate McGrath, the man of my dreams, the man I had idolized for years, only for it to end in heartbreak.