If ever I had doubted my team, I appreciated them anew that morning. The way they rallied for me. They were so calm and collected, and they went about the rest of the day as if I had not potentially put us all in danger.
“Thank you,” I said to Lulit, later that afternoon, in the office.
“For what?”
“For not saying ‘I told you so.’”
She laughed at that. “Hey, even I could not have dreamt up this. I just told you to use a condom.”
“Hmm.” I smiled. “You did.”
Lulit peered into my eyes for a minute and then frowned, shaking her head. “Whatever. It’syourvagina.”
Isabelle had a sleepover at Rose’s. The girls’ friendship had been strained since November, and I knew it had everything to do with my romance with Hayes. The idea that my daughter’s relationships were unraveling because I had found love seemed like a cruel and poorly timed joke. And yet another reminder that it wasn’t “Just us. Fuck everything else.” Rose had invited both her and Georgia that night to watchFriday the 13th, and Isabelle was thrilled to be back in her good graces. I dropped her off in Westwood and returned to the house alone, still a little on edge from that morning’s incident.
I’d only just stepped in and was sorting through the mail when I came across the package: a large padded manila envelope, with no return address, postmarked from Texas. I did not, to the best of my knowledge, know anyone in Texas. But that did not stop me from ripping it open and reaching inside. The second I touched it, I recoiled, horrified. I knew, without looking, precisely what it was. And for the second time that day I was shaking and sweating and feeling physically ill. Because there in the package was an enormous dildo. There was a note accompanying it. “Go fuck yourself,” it said, “and leave our boy alone.”
They’d found me. Somehow. They’d tracked me down and discovered where I lived and violated me in such a way that it felt as if they were in my house. I could hear panting as I rushed to put on the alarm and every light, and it took me a moment to realize the panting was mine. All the glass doors facing our cherished view were black and foreboding, and even when I turned on the patio lights I could not be certain someone was not there lurking. And it felt foolish to be so unnerved by what I was certain were teenage girls, but I could not rationalize it away. The fear.
I tried calling him. Over and over. But of course he did not answer. He was onstage in Colombia, drowned by the screams of thirty-five thousand girls. How could I expect him to pick up his phone?
I had the inclination to call Daniel, but then remembered he was against this all along. And the idea that he would leave his twenty-seven-weeks-pregnant wife on a Friday evening to come and check on me, when Isabelle was not even here, was absurd.
And it hit me then, how alone I was.
I called my mom and cried. And she listened to me blubber about being scared and torn, at the same time elated that I’d found someone who had taken the time to know me, and all the little things that made me so very happy. And how I did not want to let him go. And for the first time in as long as I could remember, it seemed to me she did notjudge.
“C’est ça, l’amour, Solène. Ce n’est pas toujours parfait. Ni jamais exactement comme tu le souhaites. Mais, quand ça te tombe dessus, ça ne se contrôle pas.”
Love, she said, was not always perfect, and not exactly how you expected it to be. But when it descended upon you, there was no controlling it.
Hayes called in the middle of the night. The show had gone well, he said, but he was alarmed by my numerous messages.
“What happened?” His voice was hoarse, froggy. It was almost two their time. In the morning they were flying to Peru.
I told him everything.
“Oh, Sol,” he said when I was done relaying the extent of the day’s lunacy. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s harassment, Hayes. I’m being sexually harassed… And I know it’s probably harmless young girls, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels threatening. It feels real.”
He was quiet for a moment, and then: “What kind of security do you have there? At home?”
“I have an alarm system.”
“Do you have cameras?”
That seemed extreme. “No.”
“You need cameras.”
“Hayes, this is crazy. They’regirls. I don’t need cameras.”
“You need cameras. I’ll pay for them. I’ll have Rana ring you in the morning and she’ll get it all sorted.”
“Hayes…”
“You should have cameras, Solène. Why didn’t your ex-husband put in cameras? You’re a beautiful woman and a thirteen-year-old girl living alone in the hills. You should have cameras.”
