The Husband Hour(47)

“Before we start shooting, I need for you to sign this release.”

“What? I never agreed to sign anything.”

“It’s standard operating procedure, Lauren. You don’t have to sign it, but if you don’t, I can’t film you.”

She glanced down at the pages in her hands.

“You don’t have to answer any question you don’t want to, and you certainly don’t have to say anything you don’t want to.”

“But everything I say on camera you can use or edit?”

“Yes. Once you’ve spoken on camera, the material becomes, essentially, property of the film company.”

She scanned the paperwork, then looked up at him.

“I need to know why you’re doing this film,” she said. “Why this? Why Rory?”

He met her gaze, and the intensity was unnervingly familiar to Lauren. There had been only one other person she’d known who could convey all his passion and focus in a quiet glance.

“My older brother, Ben, was a Marine,” Matt said. “He enlisted right after 9/11. Fought in Operation Enduring Freedom. And we lost him in 2004. There was no fanfare. He wasn’t on the front page of the New York Times. There was no memorial in an arena televised for the world to see. No one except for the people who loved Ben cared that he was gone. He was just another statistic. But when your husband died, he became America’s hero. I couldn’t tell my brother’s story, but I knew I could at least tell Rory’s.”

She nodded slowly. And signed the release.

“I have to mic you up,” Matt said. “Normally I have a sound guy, but you threw me a curveball today.” He knelt in front of her chair, leaning close to feed a wire down the front of her shirt. Her pulse raced from his nearness. “Sorry—almost done,” he said. He reached around her to clip a sound pack to the back of her jeans.

She felt relief when he stepped away and looked at her from behind the camera.

“One more thing. I just need to fix this so it’s not visible.” Matt moved back to her and reached around her waist to adjust the sound pack. Then he checked her mic before returning to the chair opposite her, picking up a laptop, and resting it on his knees.

She exhaled.

“You ready to get started?” Matt said.

“Um, yeah.” She was still unnerved by his nearness, the way it had felt to have him invade her personal space.

“Okay, so just look at me. As if we’re having a conversation. Yeah, like that. I know it’s strange, but try to forget about the cameras.”

“I’ll try,” she said.

“When I ask you a question, I need you to respond by repeating part of it. So if I say, ‘What is your name?’ you say, ‘My name is Lauren Kincaid.’ All of my questions will be edited out, so for this to make sense, you need to repeat the question.”

Lauren swallowed hard. Behind the cameras, a tall square light beamed down on her.

“So, just to get the ball rolling: Tell me your name and your relationship to Rory Kincaid.”

“My name is Lauren Kincaid. Rory Kincaid is my husband.”

“Lauren, I’m sorry—can you repeat that but using past tense.”

It took her a few seconds to register what he was saying. When she got it, she took a short breath before saying, “My name is Lauren Kincaid. Rory Kincaid was my husband.”

“How did you two meet?”

“We met in high school. I was writing an article for the school paper about the hockey team, and I interviewed him.”

“What was your first impression of Rory?”

“When I met him, I guess you could say the school had put him a little bit on a pedestal. The hockey team was doing great, he was the captain even though he was only a junior, and he was the lead scorer. He was the lead scorer in the entire division.”

“So he was a big deal.”

She nodded. “I interviewed him for the school paper, but the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about him too.”

“What did the Inquirer article say?”

“It was about Philadelphia-area high-school athletes who had the attention of college scouts all over the country. The only one mentioned from Lower Merion School District was Rory. They even ran a photo of him.”

“Do you have a copy of that?”

“Somewhere. I can look for it.”

“That would be great. Okay, so, when did you first go to one of his hockey games?”

“After I interviewed him for the article, I went to his game that Friday night. They played against Radnor and won in a shutout.”

As much as she’d tried to be a neutral observer of the game, reporter-like in her attitude, she couldn’t take her eyes off Rory during the three twenty-minute periods. Even when he was on the bench, she watched him drink from his Gatorade bottle or wipe his brow with one of the white towels the team assistant handed around. He scored a hat trick. After his third goal, the crowd tossed their LM baseball hats and ski hats onto the ice. The energy in the rink was electrifying, and Lauren was hooked—on hockey, and on Rory. “Rory scored all three goals.”

Matt asked if Rory was thinking at that time about a career in the NHL, and she told him that he liked hockey but he was also interested in astronomy.

“Astronomy,” Matt repeated.