ETHAN’S POV
He turned the last page over and set it face-down on the stack and sat very still.
“How…?”
Before he could ask Nathan another question, he was asleep on the office couch, jacket folded under his head, shoes still on.
The office was quiet except for the building’s ventilation.
Ethan’s coffee had been cold for an hour.
He had not touched it since he started reading.
He sat at Nathan’s desk and looked at the closed folder and did not move.
‘My mom was a part of this?
Oh poor Lily’.
Ethan thought.
He picked up his phone and dialled his mom’s line.
It rang twice.
“Ethan…”
“Tell me it wasn’t you.”
She kept mute for three seconds and the line went dead.
He looked at his phone.
‘What?
She didn’t say what are you talking about.
She had not said I don’t know what you mean, explain yourself.
She heard my voice voice ask the question and she hung up.’ Ethan thought, staring at his phone in astonishment.
That was the whole answer.
That one click contained three years and a hotel room and papers on a table and Lily’s face when she said I have nowhere to go, and his mother had heard his voice and hung up rather than deny it.
He set the phone down on the table.
‘She did it.’ He stared at the wall.
‘She built the whole thing.
She found an actor and paid for a photographer and watched Lily walk into a bar she had put on the family calendar without thinking twice, and she built a frame around four seconds of a stumble and called it evidence.
And I believed her.
Oh!
Stupid me.
I did not ask one question.
I looked at a photo and I believed my mother and I called Nathan before I called my wife.’
Nathan stirred on the couch.
Ethan stood, picked up the folder, and walked out.
The apartment was lit when he got home.
Three in the morning and Vivian was on the couch with her phone, a blanket across her legs, the lamp on low.
She looked up when he came in and read his face.
‘Is he alright?’ she thought.
She sat up straighter.
“Babe.
What is it?
Come sit down.”
He did not sit.
He stood in the middle of the living room with the folder in his hand and looked at the wall and tried to find the right place to start.
“Ethan.
Talk to me.”
“I made a mistake.” He said, hitting his hand on his head.
The words came out flat.
“Hmm…What kind of mistake?”
“Lily was framed.” He turned and looked at Vivian.
“The photo, the messages, all of it was staged.
I didn’t listen to her.
I didn’t ask one question.
I signed those papers and she was telling the truth the entire time.”
Ethan said, leaning on the wall and sliding down to the ground in frustration.
Vivian went very still.
“Calm down,” she said carefully.
“You don’t know that for certain.”
“I have a file, Vivian.” He set it on the coffee table between them.
“I have the actor’s name.
I have the payment trail.
I have the burner phone registration.”
She looked at the folder but did not reach for it.
“Lily has moved on,” she said.
“She has a company, she has a whole life, she is fine, Ethan.
You need to calm down.”
“No.” Ethan said ruffling his hair.
“Ethan…,”
“She had nobody.” He was not shouting.
He wished he were shouting because shouting would have been easier than this, this flat, gutted certainty that was going to be sitting in his chest for a long time.
“Her parents were already gone and I took everything else and I did not give her five minutes.
She stood in that hotel room and asked me to look at her and I looked at the window.”
Vivian stood up and rolled her eyes.
Her voice stayed even.
“So what now?” she said.
“You want to go back to her?”
He looked at her for long.
“I need to fix what I broke.”
He went to the bedroom, he sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and put his face in his hands and stayed there.
In the living room, Vivian stood with her phone in her hand.
She looked at the folder on the coffee table.
She did not open it, she already knew what was in it and what was not in it, and the thing that was not in it was the thing she needed to know.
Only Margaret’s name.
She looked at her phone screen.
She did not dial.
But her thumb moved over the contact and she stood there very still, calculating.
*****
Ethan went to the LChen Events office the next morning.
“Can I see Ms.
Chen?” He asked the receptionist.
She stared at him.
“No sir, Ms.
Chen is currently unavailable”.
“Oh”, he paused.
“Oh then, I’d wait”.
He said, smiling.
He sat in the reception area for forty minutes with his elbows on his knees, watching the glass door to the studio, watching Lily’s staff move around inside, efficient, purposeful, a room that ran because someone had built it to run.
Then Lily appeared at the glass door.
She looked at him through it but did not open it.
She stood on her side of the glass with her portfolio against her chest and her expression giving him absolutely nothing, not anger, not sadness, not the four seconds of doubt he would have taken and held onto.
“Lily.” He stood.
He moved to the glass.
“Five minutes.
That is all I’m asking.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
Her eyes moved over his face the way you look at something you used to know and are deciding how much of it still applies.
Then she turned and walked back to her desk.
He watched her go.
And as she moved across the studio, he saw, in the corner, at her desk, a small boy sitting in the chair.
Serious-faced, both hands on a red toy car, pushing it slowly across the desk surface and making quiet engine sounds to himself.
The boy looked up at the movement of Lily crossing the room and his eyes drifted to the glass.
They found Ethan’s and Ethan stopped breathing.
The boy looked at him with calm, direct curiosity.
No recognition.
No wariness.
Just the open and honest stare of a child who had not yet learned to pretend he was not looking at something.
And in that face, in the jaw, in the set of the brow, in the way the boy held himself even sitting still, Ethan saw something that made his hand come up without instruction and pressed flat against the glass.
‘That is my son.’ The thought arrived complete and certain, not as a question.
‘ That boy looked at me like he was waiting for someone to show up and was not sure if I was the right person.
And he does not know who I am.
He has never known who I am.
And Lily has been turning him away from this window for three years.’
Lily reached the desk.
She picked Theo up, settled him on her hip, and turned his body deliberately away from the window.
She did not look back at Ethan.
The turn of her shoulders said everything.
He kept his hand on the glass.
Then the blind came down.
All the way.
She had pulled it from inside, and now he was standing in the corridor looking at a white blind with his hand still flat against the glass and nothing on the other side of it.
He stood there for a long time then he got a text from an unknown number.
No name with just one message.
“If you want to know the full truth about what happened to your marriage, there is someone you should
speak to first.
Before you go to Lily.
Before you go to your mother.
His name is Derek Chow.”
What do you think of Derek?