Page 47 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

“Okay.” He absorbs that the way he absorbs everything, no judgment landing anywhere. “Then here’s my whole speech. You have three hours, and you have two problems that need two different answers. The first problem is how to protect June. The second is how to protect Margot and Teddy. Get dressed. I’m coming over.”

He hangs up. The room is gray and gold. The lamp is still on.

I tell her all of it, plainly, the way she told me her whole story yesterday: the tabloid, the screenshots of the archived page, her name attached to them, the headline, the three hours. And last, because I have to, the photo from the winter concert.

June doesn’t move while I talk. She sits very straight in my bed with the sheet clutched to her, and her face — I watch it happen, and I’d give anything not to. The softness of five minutes ago closes up, piece by piece. What’s left sitting in my bed is the person from the interview. Composed. Contained. Employable. Her hands are perfectly still on the sheet, and by now I know what her still hands mean.

“June.”

“Margot has school Monday,” she says, level, like she’s reading a report. “You said the photo is from the concert. Margot was next to me all night. That means Margot’s in the photograph.”

“June. Look at me.”

She looks at me. My first thought, instant: get in front of this, protect her — lawyers, statements, every professional Mitch can put on a phone, nobody touches her. My second thought, one beat behind, cold in the stomach: my daughter’s face in a tabloid photo, my son’s school hallway on Monday. Nora’s foundation, with its pediatric ward and its gala donors. Both thoughts are true. Both are mine. They do not agree with each other, and they’re both awake now. There’s no version of the next hour where I don’t have to be two men at once — hers, and theirs.

“We’ll handle it,” I say. “I need you to hear that. We. Together. Whatever happens now happens to both of us — that’s the whole point of last night.”

“I heard you,” she says.

She’s already out of bed, already reaching for her clothes, already somewhere I can’t follow. Downstairs, a car pulls into my driveway at 6:19 in the morning, and the day starts whether I let it or not.

June

The story goes up at 9:04 in the morning. By 9:20 I’ve read it four times, which is three more than anyone needs and one less than it takes to stop shaking.

They wrote it exactly the way Gus said people would hear it, back in November: the website and the money, and nothing else. They think those two facts tell them everything, and every single thing they think they know is wrong. Screenshots with black bars. The word ANONYMOUS doing heavy lifting. My first name, my real one, sitting next to Juno’s like they’ve always known each other. They do the ages in the second sentence — twenty-seven, forty-nine — set side by side and left there, so the reader can do the sneering personally. And the photograph from the winter concert. Me in the crowd, clapping. Up on the risers, in focus, wearing her mother’s braid, a nine-year-old girl the story calls the Vaughn daughter. Like she’s set dressing.

Here’s the thing nobody else in this house can do this morning: work out where it came from. Archived last summer, the story says. There was exactly one window last summer — the eleven hours in August, 3:40 in the morning to 2:40 the next afternoon, when I turned the page back on. The site sent a notice to every old subscriber the moment it came back up: JUNO is back. Most of those men had moved on months before. But somebody opened his notice, understood the page might vanish again, and spent my eleven stupid hours saving every frame of it.

Saved screenshots alone aren’t a name, though. My mask covered me from hairline to the tip of my nose — but my mouth and chin were on camera for two years. And in October, in the frozen-foods aisle of the international market, Kyle stood two feet from that mouth and chin while Teddy shouted my name across the aisle. Twice. A man with eleven hours of my page archived could go home from that aisle, put his screenshots next to what he’d just seen, and be certain. And he wouldn’t need to prove it. A tabloid doesn’t need proof from a tipster — it needs a tip. They took his tip, matched their own archived material against a public photo from a school concert, and ran it with black bars and the word ANONYMOUS to cover the gap. It’ll come to me, he said, in that aisle. It came to him.

I can’t prove any of this. It’s a guess — I’d bet everything I own that it’s the right one, but a guess. So I don’t say it to the room. There’s nothing the lawyers downstairs could do with it anyway.

The house fills up with response. Mitch at the kitchen table with two phones and a legal pad, drafting language — no comment, private matter, statement to follow. A lawyer on speaker, calm and colorless. Gus moving between rooms with his public voice on, steady, giving nobody anything, and finding my eyes every time he passes like he’s doing his headcount. The kids go to Carol’s by ten — “a fun surprise Saturday, Grandma’s idea.” Teddy is delighted. Margot is silent, looking back at me through the car window all the way down the driveway, with a face I know from a bench outside a principal’s office.

I do what I do. Food gets made that nobody eats. I keep the coffee going, and wipe counters that are already clean, and listen to good people spend a Saturday defending my old life. Somewhere around four in the afternoon, drying the same mug for the third time, I finally let myself do the thing I’ve been avoiding since 6:01 this morning.

I think about what happens next. Not about the story — stories fade, even this one. About the months and years after the story. Because there’s a decision sitting quietly under all this noise, and it’s mine, and I owe it an honest look.

Monday, Margot walks into Lakewood, where fourth-graders have older siblings with phones. Tuesday, the Foundation board meets — the meeting was already on the calendar, and it isn’t moving. The gala circuit, the pediatric ward with Nora’s name over the door, the donors who give because Augustus Vaughn is the last clean thing in sports. In every one of those rooms, somebody is now going to ask about me. And he’ll fight for me. I don’t hope that — I know it, because I watched him do it before breakfast, watched him say we and mean it as a promise. He will stand in front of me for years and never once flinch. And fighting for me could take the Foundation from him, or the ambassador role, or the ordinary Monday morning Margot needs at school. He’d give up every bit of it before he’d let go of my hand.

That’s the whole problem. He will never choose to let me go. So the leaving has to come from me.

Follow it plainly, June. The story isn’t really about him — famous men survive embarrassment, and his whole part in it is being lonely and kind. The story is about me. I’m the scandal. I’m the reason anyone clicks. Remove me, and the whole thing collapses into old news within a week: a nanny who left, a family that said nothing, nobody to photograph, nowhere for the story to live. Keep me here, and every camera has a reason to stay pointed at a house with two kids in it.

Standing at this sink, I admit to myself exactly what this reasoning is. It’s the list from October all over again. It’s the same well-dressed lie I told myself all fall — silence protects them, distance protects them, June alone in a room protects them. It might be a lie now too. He’d say so. If I put this on the table, he’d take it apart bolt by bolt with that patient voice, and Mitch would agree with him, and they might even be right.

That’s why it doesn’t go on the table.

Because there’s one piece of it they couldn’t argue away: leaving only works if it’s fast and complete. A leave of absence, a we’re-just-taking-space statement, a girlfriend kept at a discreet distance — any of those keeps the story alive, because there’s still a woman to photograph and a next chapter to wait for. But if I’m simply gone, there’s nothing left to cover. Gone ends the story. A week of noise, then quiet.

* * *

The house goes to sleep in stages, the way it does. Gus last, of course, checking doors that were already checked. He stops outside my room. I asked for my own bed tonight, and he heard everything in the request and honored it, because that’s who he is. He stands there a long moment. The light under the door. His hand, I know without seeing, raised to knock.

He doesn’t knock. He goes down the hall, and his door clicks. I lie in the dark on top of my quilt, dressed, and let the tears run sideways into the pillow until they’re finished. All of them. Every single one, now, on schedule, because there’s no time for them at three.

At three I get up.