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An inkling of fear fizzled deep in her brain. Worry that she’d gone too far, and he was going to fire her and add yet another leg to the scandal beast.
“Please,” she added.
“I—” he started but didn’t finish.
Lucy felt the many years of their relationship stretch between them. She’d done more than her share of cleaning up his messes: tabloid breakups, radio show scandals, Twitter rampages. That was all in her job description though, so she couldn’t hold it against him. But then there were some literal messes—trashed hotel rooms, bloody noses—that fell outside the scope. And that time she invited him to Christmas at her parents’ house in Orange County the year his parents flew to Barbados and he broke off his engagement to a British TV star, because she couldn’t stand to think of him so lonely. Even if she was fond of him, it was about time he repaid the favors.
She waited for him to finish his thought, fully anticipating a snarky remark, some megastar egotistical sass, but he kept quiet.
Was he actually... listening?
Feeling victorious that she got through to him, she wanted to pump her arms in celebration. But at the same time, she worried that she had just torched one of her most important relationships. Due to the latter, she blurted, “Oh, and you’re invited to my birthday party tonight. Perch at eight,” before she jabbed the button to end the call.
She had a solid twenty minutes of peace while she drove. She kept the radio low and pictured the Deadline story leapfrogging its way across the industry. It would infect social media and spread around the web. Other outlets would pick it up, reprinting excerpts and adding voices to the cry. If it got big enough in the next few hours, it might even make the six-o’clock news. And all of it was exactly what she wanted. They had broken the silence, and now they needed all the noise they could make.
But for the moment, Lucy was enjoying the relative quiet of her car. The office would be anarchy when she returned; full-scale publicist meltdown. With Lily secured, Lucy needed to get back to her desk and assure the rest of her client list that the situation was being handled. She planned to enjoy the next ten minutes alone in her car before her skills were in high demand. She might already have emails from clients; she hadn’t been able to check while she drove. She was at least respecting the laws of the road by having her phone in her lap and not in her hand. She smiled at the thought of what Adam said about her phone never leaving her hand and had the urge to tell him he was wrong. But she needed his number for that, and that was something she did not have. And anyway, calling him to say she didn’t have her phone in her hand seemed counter to the point. Maybe she would drive by the bar later.
The thought made her smile bigger as she pulled off the freeway. The rushing whir of high-speed traffic softened right as her phone rang.
Her mother was calling.
She swore the woman had radar for the moments Lucy most wanted to be left alone.
She pressed the accept call button on her steering wheel because the phone would ring all the way back to work if she didn’t. “Hi, Mom.”
“Lucy! What on earth is going on? Your company is all over the news! They’re saying employees have been harassed and are coming forward with allegations? I see your name in the article! It says your boss tried to pay you off?”
She sighed, already exhausted by where she knew the conversation was going.
“It’s true, Mom. I helped write that article.”
“You what?!” she shrieked. Lucy heard no knitting needles in the background. She imagined her mother instead scrolling Deadline on her iPad, wearing her reading glasses that bugged her eyes to 3× zoom. “What does that mean, Lucy?” The question was accusatory, and she couldn’t take an interrogation by her own mother after everything else.
“It means exactly what you think it means, Mom.”
Her mother sounded flustered, and Lucy knew it was because she was in denial. “Well, I don’t—”
“It means that I was one of the employees being harassed, Mom. And I never told anyone because I didn’t want to lose my job.”
Maryellen sputtered again, unsure where to place her anger. “Well, you could have told me, Lucy!”
Lucy hit her brakes hard at a yellow stoplight and summoned an angry honk from the driver behind her. “Why, Mom? So you could lecture me about it? So you could tell me to do something about it when I didn’t have any options I felt safe doing?”
Maryellen scoffed. “That’s not what—”
“That’s exactly what you would have done, Mom. You would have told me I wasn’t handling the situation right, that there was more I could have done, like you always tell me. I never do enough for you! Or I do the wrong thing!”
And suddenly, a dam busted loose.
“You never give me space, Mom. I know you care, but I’m not your project. I have my own life, and I’m living it how I want to live it. I love my job, despite its faults. I want to build my career before I focus on a family. I actually don’t even know if I want kids! And that’s just something you’re going to have to deal with. And I guess now is a good time to tell you Caleb and I broke up, so I won’t be getting married anytime soon anyway. And I don’t know what’s going to happen with this scandal, but I finally spoke up because it was the right thing to do and I was ready. The point is, this is my life, and I will figure it all out!”
She was a few blocks from her office and her mother was speechless.
Of all the bridges she could light on fire, that one had the greatest chance of not burning down. And she felt justified in being so honest because those words had been caged up in her mind easily since high school.
In the silence, Lucy heard a news alert chime from her mother’s iPad as she was in fact reading it. Maryellen’s interests ranged wide; it could have been anything from a new knitting pattern to world politics to a sea turtle rescue in Hawaii.
“Oh,” Maryellen said. “Well, isn’t that interesting.”
