The Truth Before The Lie
1368 Words
Sienna
I was sitting on my bedroom floor with my back against the wall when my phone rang.
I'd been home for twenty minutes and I still hadn't changed out of the coat Nina's team gave me. I was just sitting there in the dark replaying the way he'd said "which part" and the way I'd almost answered honestly before catching myself.
The phone kept ringing. Dominic's name was on the screen.
I picked it up.
"Are you home?" His voice sounded different from the man I'd just had dinner with.
"Yes. Why?"
"I need to talk to you. Can I come up?"
I looked around my apartment. The folding chair, the empty shelves, the mattress on the floor in the bedroom because the bed frame was the second thing I sold after the couch.
"I'll come down."
I met him outside on the front steps of my building. He was still in the same clothes from dinner but his tie was loosened and he was leaning against his car with his phone in his hand and a look on his face that made my stomach drop.
"What happened?"
"Nina called me on the way home. A tabloid is running a story about you tomorrow morning."
I stood very still.
"They dug into your background and found the divorce records."
I didn't say anything for a long time. The street was quiet around us, just the sound of a taxi passing and someone's television playing through an open window two floors up.
"Okay," I said.
"Ok?" He looked at me like he was expecting a bigger reaction.
"This was always going to happen, Dominic. The moment that photo went online, someone was going to start looking. That's how this works."
"Nina says they're going to spin it. They're going to make it look like you moved from one man in the industry to another."
"Of course they are."
He was watching me carefully, trying to read something in my face that I wasn't giving him.
"You don't seem surprised."
"Of course, I'm not surprised. This is what Marcus does. He controls the story and has been doing it since the day I found out about him and his track star."
The words came out before I had time to decide whether I wanted to say them. But once they were out, I didn't take them back.
He was standing in front of me at eleven o'clock at night because he thought I deserved to know what was coming. The least I could do was tell him why it was coming.
"He cheated on me," I breathed. "With one of his clients. A twenty-three-year-old track athlete. I found a hotel receipt in his jacket pocket. Two nights at a hotel charged to the card we shared while I was stranded in another country asking him to send money to my account. He told me the joint account had issues that wouldn't be fixed until the following week."
Dominic didn't move. He just stood there and listened.
"When I confronted him he didn't deny it. He didn't even apologize."
"Sienna..."
"I'm not finished." I took a breath and kept going because if I stopped now I'd never start again.
"The divorce was fast because I couldn't afford a real lawyer so I walked away with my car and whatever fit inside it while he kept the house, the savings, basically everything."
"And the blacklisting?"
I looked at him. "How do you know about that?"
"You told me you were overqualified for entry-level on your first day at the clinic. You have six years of experience and a specialization and you were restocking tape in a supply room. I'm not stupid, Sienna. I just didn't want to push."
I felt something crack behind my ribs that I'd been holding together with sheer stubbornness for eight months.
"After the divorce he made calls. I don't know what he told people but every clinic I'd ever worked with went quiet. Interviews that were going well would suddenly go cold. Callbacks stopped. A colleague I'd known for years crossed the street when she saw me coming out of a pharmacy and pretended she hadn't seen me."
I was not going to cry. Not here, not in front of him.
"He didn't do it because he hated me. That's the part that makes it worse. He did it because I was inconvenient. He wanted me gone by any means necessary."
The street was quiet again. Dominic hadn't said a word through any of it. He was still leaning against his car with his hands in his pockets and an expression on his face that I couldn't read in the dark.
"So when that story runs tomorrow," I said, "it won't be the truth. It will be his version. The same version he gave everyone else. And people will believe it because that's what they do. They believe the version that's easier to swallow."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Nothing." I shrugged.
"Sienna."
"I mean it. Don't do anything. Don't react or call the tabloid or have Nina issue a statement."
"They're going to make you look like a gold digger."
"I know that, but if you react, it becomes real. If you fight it, you give it weight. If you ignore it, it stays as gossip that burns for a few days and then they move on to someone else."
He stared at me for a long moment like he was trying to decide whether to listen to me or ignore everything I'd just said and go to war anyway.
"You've done this before, haven't you?" he said quietly.
I nodded. "Marcus taught me exactly how the media works. He just didn't expect me to use the lesson against him."
Something moved behind his eyes but he didn't argue. He pushed off the car and stood in front of me and for a second I thought he was going to reach for me but he stopped himself.
"I won't react," he said. "But I need you to know that I wanted to."
"Thank you."
"And I need you to know that what they print tomorrow doesn't change anything about the arrangement."
"I know that too," I breathed
We stood there on the sidewalk looking at each other and the distance between us felt different than it had an hour ago in the restaurant.
"You should get some rest," he whispered.
"Are you going to tell me what to do every time we have a conversation?"
"Probably."
I rolled my eyes before heading inside. Once in, I locked the door behind me and sat on the floor of my apartment and waited for the morning which didn't take very long.
I woke up to my phone buzzing on the floor beside my head, three missed calls from Nina and a text from Chelsea that said "don't read the comments." There was a notification from a news app I'd forgotten to delete.
The headline sat there on my screen like a slap.
"DOMINIC ASHFORD'S MYSTERY WOMAN: Former Wife of Sports Agent Marcus Hale Exposed."
I opened it even though I knew I shouldn't.
The article was worse than I expected. They didn't just find the divorce records. They found Marcus. Or Marcus found them.
The quotes in the article were too specific, too carefully worded, too perfectly aimed to be accidental. Things only he would know, framed in a way that made me look desperate.
"Sources close to Hale describe the marriage as troubled, with Morretti exhibiting increasingly erratic behavior in the months before the split."
Erratic behavior. That was his phrase. I'd heard him use it on the phone to describe me once when he didn't know I was listening.
My hands were steady when I put the phone down. I'd already survived the worst thing Marcus could do to me. He took my career, my home, my savings, and my name. A tabloid article was nothing compared to that.
But when my phone buzzed again and I saw Dominic's name on the screen with a comforting message, the tears fell without control.
For the first time in eight months, someone was paying attention.
- Writer
