Rumors Have Names
2051 Words
Breakfast is quiet enough that I can hear the clock in the hallway.
Mrs. Calloway sets down a fresh pot of tea and mentions it almost in passing. “Mr. Rothwell left before six. Board meeting ran long, apparently.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Not for him. Unusual would be him sleeping past six.”
She pours the tea without being asked, the way she's started doing every morning, and sets a small plate of toast beside it before heading back toward the kitchen.
The house feels bigger with him gone, the way it always does, though I've stopped minding it as much as I used to.
I eat slower than I need to, no particular reason to hurry anywhere, sunlight moving across the tablecloth as the morning goes on.
I almost relax into the quiet.
My phone buzzes against the table. Then again. Then a third time before I've even picked it up.
Unknown number: Is it true?
Unknown number: Call me.
A third message comes through before I can even process the first two, a number I don't recognize with no name attached, just three words: everyone's talking.
I set the phone down, pick it up again, set it down a second time.
Lena's name flashes up next, the screen lighting the whole table.
I watch it ring instead of answering right away. Some part of me already knows what this is about before I hear a word of it.
“Don't open social media,” Lena says the second I pick up, no hello, straight to it.
I open it anyway, phone propped against the teapot, thumb already scrolling before she finishes the sentence.
“Ari, I mean it.”
“Too late, I'm already looking.”
Nothing's trending yet. No headlines. Just a handful of gossip accounts, the kind Lena used to mock openly before one of them apparently found something worth posting.
A blurry photo, taken from across the street, Robert and me at the café table where Xavier found us. Another, me climbing into the back of Adrian's car outside my old apartment.
Neither photo actually shows anything. The comments underneath do the rest of the work.
Looks like Xavier's replacement.
Business meeting? Sure.
She's way too young for him.
Watch, this is going to be a whole thing.
Anyone know her name?
Give it a week, someone will dig up her whole life story.
I put the phone face down on the table.
I pick it up again thirty seconds later. I hate myself a little for that, but not enough to stop.
“Ari. Are you still there?”
“I'm here.”
“Don't read the comments.”
“Too late.”
Lena sighs, the sound crackling slightly through the phone. “Of course it is.”
“They don't even have my name yet.”
“They will by tonight. These things always figure it out faster than anyone wants.”
“That's comforting.”
“I didn't say it to comfort you. I said it so you'd stop refreshing the page every ten seconds.”
She isn't wrong. I set the phone down again, further away this time, and don't pick it back up for a while.
“How bad does it look? Be honest.”
“It looks like nothing yet. Two blurry photos and a lot of people with too much free time. Give it a week and something else will be the thing everyone's talking about instead.”
“A week feels like a long time to be the thing everyone's talking about now.”
“Welcome to dating a billionaire, I guess.”
“We're not dating. We're getting married.”
“Same headline, worse grammar,” Lena says, and despite everything, I actually laugh.
Robert comes home mid-afternoon, hours before I expect him, jacket already off before he's fully through the door.
He isn't angry. He doesn't look surprised either, which somehow unsettles me more than either reaction would have.
“You've seen it,” I say.
“I have.”
He sets his phone down on the hall table, screen dark, and looks at me for a long moment before he asks anything else.
“Has anyone bothered your parents?”
That isn't the question I expect. I check my phone quickly, scrolling through nothing from my mother, nothing from my father, no missed calls at all.
“No. Nothing.”
“Good.”
“That's what you're worried about? My parents?”
“Your parents didn't sign up for any of this. You did. That's a different thing entirely.”
He picks his phone back up and dials someone from memory, already walking toward his study as it connects.
“This is Robert Rothwell. I need eyes on the coverage from this morning. Not to respond. Just monitor it.”
He hangs up less than a minute later, the whole exchange over before I've fully processed that it happened.
“Is that it?” I ask, following him into the study doorway. “Just monitor it?”
“Responding gives it more air than it deserves. Silence usually bores people faster than anything I could say.”
“Usually?”
“There are exceptions. This might not be one of them yet.”
“What happens if it is?”
“Then we deal with it properly. Lawyers, statements, the whole unpleasant machine. But not before it's earned that response.”
“You make it sound like triage.”
“It is triage. Most crises are, if you catch them early enough.”
He says it so matter-of-factly that I wonder how many times he's had this exact conversation with someone else, in this exact study, about a completely different set of headlines.
Lunch happens because Mrs. Calloway insists on it more than because either of us wants food. The plates sit mostly untouched between us.
We don't talk about the photos. Robert brings up security instead, a name I don't recognize, someone he wants added to the gate detail through the wedding. Then the date itself, whether three weeks still makes sense or whether we should move it up.
“Move it up? That seems like giving in.”
“Or taking control of the timeline instead of letting a gossip column set it for us. Depends how you look at it.”
“I'd rather not rush something this big because strangers online are bored.”
“Fair. We'll keep the date, then.”
It's such a small concession, and yet it settles something in my chest I didn't know was still unsettled.
“Does this happen often?” I finally ask.
“Only when people think they've found a better story than yesterday's.”
“Have you? Found a better story, I mean.”
One corner of his mouth lifts, brief and dry.
“Unfortunately.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Not particularly. Ask me again in a year, if you're still curious.”
“A year. You're very confident about timelines today.”
“I find it easier to plan for things I can control. The rest, I've learned to leave alone.”
He goes back to his soup, finally taking an actual spoonful of it.
My phone rings again just after lunch. Xavier's name on the screen this time, not a text.
I let it ring out.
It starts again almost immediately.
I answer on the third ring, saying nothing, waiting to see what he does with the silence.
“Are they telling the truth?”
No greeting. No anger in it either, just something worn down and flat, the voice of someone who's been awake most of the night deciding whether to call at all.
“Yes.”
The silence on his end stretches long enough that I check to see if the call dropped.
“I saw the photo from the café,” he says eventually. “Someone tagged me in it. Half my old classmates have already messaged me about it.”
“I'm sorry you're finding out about your own life secondhand from people you went to school with.”
“That's not what I called about.”
“Then what did you call about?”
He doesn't answer right away, and I can hear him breathing on the other end, somewhere with wind in the background, outside somewhere.
“Where are you?” I ask, before he can get to whatever he actually called to say.
“Doesn't matter.”
“Xavier.”
“I'm fine. I'm not calling for that.”
“Are you happy?”
I open my mouth and nothing comes.
“I don't know yet.”
Another silence, shorter this time.
“I hope you find out.”
The line goes dead before I can say anything back.
No shouting. No begging. Not even the anger from the library. Somehow that's worse than any of it would have been.
The designer comes back that afternoon with an actual sample this time, not just swatches. She helps me into it in the same sitting room still faintly smelling of the tulle from last week.
The dress is simple, unfinished at the hem, pinned in three places where it doesn't quite fit yet. I stand in front of the mirror and wait to feel something about Robert, or the wedding, or any of it.
“How does it feel?” the designer asks, adjusting a pin near my shoulder.
“Heavy. In a good way, I think.”
She steps back to look at the overall shape, circling once, murmuring something to her assistant about the waistline. I stand still and let them work, my mind somewhere else entirely.
Instead I think about my mother's veil, the one she kept wrapped in tissue paper in the hall closet, how I used to sneak it out when I was seven and drape it over my head just to see myself in it. She caught me once and didn't get angry. She just laughed and told me to be careful with the lace, then let me wear it the rest of the afternoon.
I remember the smell of the closet more than the veil itself, cedar and old fabric, my mother's perfume still faintly caught in the folds even years after the wedding.
She never got a big wedding. A courthouse, a borrowed dress, a reception in my grandmother's backyard with folding chairs and a cake from the grocery store. She always told that story as if it were the happiest day of her life, and I always believed her.
The designer asks if I want to see the back. I nod without really hearing the question.
She turns me gently by the shoulders toward a second mirror, and for a second I catch my own reflection at an angle I don't recognize, someone standing a little taller than I remember standing.
That night, there's an envelope waiting on the floor just inside my bedroom door, slipped underneath sometime while I was at dinner.
No name on the front.
I turn it over twice before opening it, half expecting it to be something from the designer, a bill, a note about tomorrow's schedule.
Inside is a single photograph. Me and Xavier, years younger, laughing at something outside the frame, sunlight washing out half the picture.
I recognize the day almost immediately, a beach trip from our second year together, before his family had ever met me, before any of this existed. I remember who took the photo. I don't remember what we were laughing at.
I turn it over.
One line, handwritten, no signature underneath it.
Before you become someone else, remember who you were.
I read it twice, then a third time, looking for a name that isn't there.
I don't recognize the handwriting as Xavier's, not quite, though I haven't seen enough of it to be certain of anything. It doesn't match Robert's either, all sharp angles and quick strokes. It could be anyone in this house. It could be no one who lives here at all.
I set the photograph on my nightstand, next to the ring box, next to my parents' wedding photo.
Somewhere down the hall, a door closes. I don't check to see whose.
- Writer
