Chapter 6: Public Humiliation

By morning I was everywhere, and I was no one.

BLACKWOOD TRADES UP. That was the kindest one. I read it on my mother's couch with a blanket over my knees and my thumb doing the thing I'd told myself I wouldn't do, scrolling, scrolling, feeding the wound.

The photos were beautiful. That was the cruelest part. Damien and Vanessa on the ballroom stage, lit like a movie, the little girl on her hip, all three of them glowing.

And then, further down, the ones of me. Frozen mid-flash at the gate, mouth open, mascara gone, one hand up against the light like a woman being arrested.

"Aurora." My mother's voice came from the kitchen doorway, soft. "Put it down, baby. Come eat."

"They're calling me 'the barren wife,' Mom."

"I know what they're calling you."

"There's a poll." I laughed and it hurt. "There's an actual poll. 'Do you blame Aurora for the divorce.' Sixty-one percent yes."

"Aurora."

"Sixty-one percent of strangers looked at my face and decided it was my husband's fault." I couldn't stop. The comments were worse than the articles, a scroll with no bottom. No wonder he left her. Have you seen her before and after? Some men just need a real woman. "They're talking about my body. People who've never met me are talking about my body."

Clara crossed the room and took the phone right out of my hands, gentle but final.

"That's enough of that."

"Give it back."

"No."

"Mom, give it, there's a thread, I need to see if anyone's saying anything about it, about a rumor, I need to know how bad it is."

"What rumor?"

I hadn't told her. The word had been sitting in my throat since the gate.

"A reporter last night," I said. "She saw me put my hand on my stomach. She shouted, asked if I was pregnant. It's out there now, Mom. Somebody wrote it up. 'Is the discarded Mrs. Blackwood expecting?'"

Clara went very still.

"Then you especially do not need to be reading it," she said.

The front door banged open and Oliver came in with two bags of groceries and a face like a storm front.

"Don't look at your phone," he said.

"A little late," I said.

"I mean it." He dumped the bags on the counter. "It's a feeding frenzy out there. There's a van parked at the end of the street, Aurora. A news van. On Mom's street."

Clara pressed a hand to her chest. "Here?"

"They followed the divorce. Somebody sold them the address." He came around the couch and saw the tears I hadn't managed to hide. His whole body changed. "Hey. Hey, no. Don't."

"I'm fine."

"You keep saying that word like it means something."

"It's a word people say, Ollie."

"Not you. You don't get to lie to me, we're past that." He crouched in front of the couch so we were eye to eye. "Talk to me. For real. Not the version you give Mom so she'll sleep."

I looked at him, at the grocery bags he'd bought because even furious he'd remembered we'd need to eat, and something in me cracked open a different way.

"It's the comments," I whispered. "That's the part. Not him. I expected him. It's a thousand people I've never met agreeing that I got what I deserved for being fat and boring and barren, and Ollie, the worst part, the worst part is some little voice in me thinks they might be right."

"They are not right."

"You have to say that."

"I don't have to say anything." He took my hands. "You are the smartest person I know and the only reason that man ever had a nickel, and one day the whole world is going to find that out. But not today. Today you just have to stop feeding yourself poison off a screen."

"You're not fine, you're crying on your phone, give it here." He reached for it, realized Clara already had it, and turned back to me. "You listen to me. You are not going to sit on this couch and cry over people who wouldn't cross the street to spit on you if you were on fire."

"Ollie."

"No, I'm serious." His voice cracked and he shoved it back down. "Every one of those comments, every reporter, every stranger with a keyboard, not a single one of them was there. Not when you were nineteen selling your car to pay his rent. Not at three in the morning fixing his numbers. They don't get your tears. You hear me? They don't get to have them."

I wiped my face with the heel of my hand. "When did you get smart?"

"Around four this morning on the interstate." He almost smiled. "I had a lot of time to think about what I'd say."

Clara sat down on my other side and put her arm around me, and for a minute the three of us just breathed.

Then, quietly, I said the thing I'd been circling all night.

"He hasn't said anything."

"Good," Oliver said. "Let him rot in silence."

"No, you don't get it." I stared at the muted TV across the room, some morning show with Damien's face already on it. "He could stop this. One statement. One line from his people, 'we ask for privacy, we ask that Ms. Bennett be treated with respect,' and it would all soften. He knows that. He's built his whole empire on managing the press."

"So?"

"So he's not doing it." My voice went flat. "He's letting them tear me apart. He's watching it happen and he's letting it."

I thought about a gift I made him once, four Christmases ago, our fifth anniversary. I'd stitched something by hand, stupid and small, and stayed up nights like an idiot. He'd smiled and set it aside and I never saw it again. I always assumed it went in the trash the second I left the room.

That's the kind of man I married. The kind who throws away the thing that took you three weeks and keeps the receipt for the watch.

"Turn it up," I said suddenly.

"Aurora, don't."

"Turn it up, Ollie."

He found the remote. He didn't want to. He turned it up.

Damien was on a step outside the Blackwood building, camel coat, sunglasses, walking to a car through a wall of microphones. Cool. Untouchable. A reporter's voice cut through, sharp and clear.

"Mr. Blackwood, any comment on reports your ex-wife may be pregnant?"

The room went dead silent.

On screen, Damien slowed. He turned his head toward the camera, and for one second, one single second, I let myself believe he'd say something human. Ask them to leave me alone. Anything.

"I don't have an ex-wife," he said. "I have a business to run."

Then he got in the car and shut the door, and the anchor moved on to the weather.

I didn't cry. That was a strange thing. I'd been crying all morning and now, at the exact moment I should have shattered, I felt something in my chest just go quiet and cold and still.

That was it. That was the last of it, whatever small stupid piece of me had still been waiting for him to be the man from the apartment on Fifth. It died right there between the divorce coverage and the seven-day forecast.

"I don't have an ex-wife," I repeated softly.

"Aurora." Clara reached for me.

"No, he's right." I stood up. My legs held. "He doesn't. She's gone."

My phone buzzed in Clara's hand.

She glanced at it, and her face changed, and she didn't hand it to me right away.

"Mom. What is it."

"It's a number I don't know," she said slowly.

I took it from her. One message, no name, gray bubble.

The family would like to know if the rumor is true. Be smart, Aurora. Don't make this harder than it needs to be.

I stared at it. My hand didn't shake. That scared me more than if it had.

The word "family" did something to the back of my neck. Not Damien. Damien didn't send texts, Damien had people. This was Margaret's kind of sentence, polished and patient and cold, or Richard's. They weren't asking. They were letting me know they were already watching.

"Aurora?" Oliver was on his feet now. "Who is that? What does it say."

I looked up at both of them, at my mother's small safe apartment that suddenly didn't feel safe at all, at the news van idling somewhere down the street.

"They already know," I said.