Eliza Starts a Rumor(64)

“I bet it would still fit you.”

“No way.”

“Absolutely,” he said, placing his hands on her narrow waist and pulling her toward him. “Let’s take a break.”

“Did you make up this project just to get me alone in here?”

“Possibly.”

He kissed her again, as he had done nearly every chance that he’d gotten since their rainy-day interlude. He apparently didn’t shave on the weekends, his silvery scruff making him even more handsome but prickly to the touch. Fifteen minutes in and she had to stop, citing beard burn. It was both true, and an excuse. As the shock was wearing off about all that had happened over the past weeks, the magnitude of what Carson had done, and her impending divorce, felt omnipresent. It cast a cloud over their dalliance, along with every other sunny thing in her life. She left, saying she had to get back for her kids.

Before stepping out of the car at home, she checked herself in the mirror. Between her smudged makeup and chafed cheeks, she looked like she had indeed spent the day making out in the costume closet. As she wiped the stray mascara from beneath her eyes, she caught a glimpse of a limousine idling on the street, an odd sight in Hudson Valley for sure. She got out of the car and knocked on the driver’s window.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“No, I’m just waiting out here for Carson Cole.”

She took a beat before entering her house, promising herself that she would not lose her cool, no matter which Carson, combative or contrite, she found inside. She entered, armed with the confidence of being on her home turf.

“Hello, Mandy,” he said, clearly on purpose, again, to soften her. Everything with Carson was a manipulation. It was why he was so successful in Hollywood: He always had an agenda, and he twisted and turned everyone around until he got his way. But she had an agenda as well.

“What are you doing here?”

“I brought Pippa’s guitar.”

“It’s not a puppy; you didn’t need to hand deliver it.”

“Well, I missed my family, so I did. Is that OK with you?” His tone was biting. He didn’t seem to be going for the repentant approach after all. She countered, suddenly not caring about her lawyer’s advice to stay civil.

“If you had any respect for me, you would not have shown up at my father’s house unannounced.” She held the front door open. “You can leave, and come back when you’re invited.”

He closed it.

“Pippa invited me.”

“So you’ve seen them.”

“Yes, all afternoon. Where have you been?”

The question threw her, but she collected herself and ignored it. “How long are you in town?”

“I’m staying through Thanksgiving. I’ll text you to make arrangements for the girls to come to the city to see me. I’m at the Plaza, and Sadie is excited to stay where Eloise stayed.”

She remembered him reading Eloise to the girls when they were little. He even once brought home Eloise dolls from a business trip to New York. More bribery, she thought. Although, if she were being honest with herself, she would have to admit that the girls missed him. Pippa may have been a little too young still to understand the nuances of consent and power dynamics, but if nothing else, she was angry that her father cheated on her mother. Even so, she loved him and was concerned for him. Amanda had certainly felt that way when her own mother walked out. The really deep and permeable anger came later.

In that moment, she wished he had been an awful, negligent father and that she could have nothing further to do with him, but having been a child on the receiving end of that kind of rejection made her sensitive to its repercussions. She was happy for them that he cared enough to come east for a while. She admonished herself for feeling something positive about Carson when, as if on cue, he admitted his real reason for staying.

“I need to hide, and I can’t run away to Europe right now.”

Any shred of compassion was wiped away.

“Do you realize the damage you’ve done?” Amanda asked, her voice rising. “Not just to our family, but to the women, the women you abused?”

“Do you think I need to hear this from you, Amanda?”

She laughed at him. “You’ve got to be kidding. You don’t think I have a right to be angry? Your infidelity is the least of it. You don’t see that I have been abused all these years, too?”

“Me too! Me too!” he shouted, mocking her.

“I’m married to you, Carson. It wasn’t supposed to be ‘me too’; it was supposed to be just me.”

“You knew who you were marrying. It’s not like I’m Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein. It was all consensual! I’m the victim! I got caught up in this witch hunt.”

“You know better than to say it was consensual, and it’s not a witch hunt! The witches were innocent, and you didn’t get caught up, you just got caught, period.”

“Powerful men have been facing these allegations for years, but all of a sudden it’s a life sentence?”

She could barely wrap her head around everything that was wrong with what he was saying, but standing in the foyer of the house she had grown up in, having moved her kids across the country, she felt brave. She felt responsible to show this man, her husband, who had hurt so many women under her nose, the pain he had inflicted. She collected herself and gave it to him.