CHAPTER 13 — The Interview
844 Words
The journalist was a woman named Rachel Torres.
She had spent fifteen years at Miami’s most respected longform publication — the kind of outlet that won awards and had standards and whose stories people actually believed. She was not the gossip account Stella had used the first time. She was the real thing.
Victor Romano made the call on Wednesday morning.
Rachel Torres called me on Wednesday afternoon.
“I’d like to hear your story,” she said. “All of it, from your perspective.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I agreed to this.”
We met at the Coconut Grove house — my choice of location, which Rachel accepted without pushback. She arrived with a recorder and a notebook and the specific quality of someone who had been doing this long enough to understand that the best interviews were conversations and not interrogations.
Dante was not there.
I had asked him not to be.
This was my story. My words. My voice.
He had accepted that without argument.
Rachel Torres asked good questions. The kind that required real answers — not the setup questions designed to generate usable quotes but the genuine investigative questions of someone trying to understand a situation accurately. I told her about the gala. About the drink that had been spiked. About stumbling into the wrong room. About waking up before dawn and going home and finding out six weeks later what the night had produced.
I told her about Stella. Carefully, specifically, with the documentation Dante had provided about the footage from the gala. About what Stella had said to me in the kitchen when she found out about the pregnancy. About the first leak and where it had come from.
I did not tell it as a victim’s story. I told it as mine — a woman who had found herself in an impossible situation and had made decisions about it with her eyes open and her chin up.
Rachel took notes throughout. When I finished she was quiet for a moment.
“The Romano family,” she said. “How do you characterize your relationship with Dante Romano?”
I thought about that.
About a dock at sunset. About I don’t know how to be someone’s father. About a hand covering mine briefly across a kitchen table.
“We’re figuring it out,” I said. “Together. Like two adults who were thrown into a complicated situation and have decided to handle it with honesty.”
“That’s a careful answer,” Rachel said.
“It’s an accurate one,” I said.
She looked at me.
“Mia,” she said. “Why are you doing this? You could manage this privately. With the Romano family’s resources you wouldn’t need to—”
“Because my stepsister is about to try to tell a version of this story that makes me look like a victim who needs saving,” I said. “And I’m not a victim. I’m a twenty-three year old woman who made choices and is standing behind them.” I held Rachel’s gaze. “I want people to hear that from me.”
Rachel Torres looked at me for a long moment.
Then she smiled. Just slightly.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s make sure they do.”
The story ran on Friday.
It ran long — four thousand words on the publication’s website with a photograph of me that Rachel’s photographer had taken in the garden of the Coconut Grove house, the bay visible behind me. I was not posed. I was not performing. I was just standing in the afternoon light with my hand at my side and the specific direct quality that apparently came across in photographs as what Rachel described in the piece as uncommon composure.
The headline was: Her Story: Mia Collins On The Night That Changed Everything And The Choice She Made After.
By noon it had been read by four hundred thousand people.
By three that afternoon Stella called my phone.
I answered on the second ring.
“You talked to a journalist,” she said. Her voice was perfectly even. The evenness was worse than shouting would have been.
“I did,” I said.
“You told them about the drink,” she said.
“I told them the truth,” I said.
Silence.
“You have no idea what you’ve started,” she said.
“Stella,” I said. “I know exactly what I’ve started. That’s the point.”
I hung up.
Outside the window the bay was doing its afternoon thing — blue and silver and entirely indifferent to the complicated human situation playing out on its shore.
I pressed my hand against my stomach.
My phone buzzed immediately.
Dante.
I read it. You were extraordinary.
I looked at the message.
Typed back: I told the truth. That’s all.
Three seconds.
That’s everything, he sent back.
I put the phone down.
For the first time in weeks I felt like myself.
Fully, completely, unmanageably myself.
- Writer
