Page 57 of I Would Die for You

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said smiling. “It wasn’t really me they were after at all. They just wanted the dream—the man they saw on stage—who I could never live up to.”

“That, and the accolade of being able to say they’d slept with you,” said Nicole.

“Exactly!” he exclaimed. “So, who was using who?”

He had a point.

“Is everybody behaving themselves?” Nicole asks now, knowing how keen Ben is to make a good impression on the American public.

He lets out a heavy sigh. “Michael’s doing his usual: entertaining unsavory individuals, burning the midnight oil…”

“He needs to be careful,” she warns.

“You think I don’t know that?” he snaps.

Nicole can’t help but be taken aback by his tone. While she can empathize with his frustration, she’d not borne the brunt of it before.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to…”

“It’s OK,” she says, letting him off just this once. She can’t imagine how difficult it must be having to manage Michael, tiptoeing around him to avoid upsetting the equilibrium of the band.

“It’s just exhausting,” Ben goes on. “It’s like babysitting a naughty toddler.”

“Maybe something needs to give.”

“What do you suggest?” asks Ben, glibly. “A media exposé? A spell in rehab?”

Nicole hadn’t really thought about it. “Maybe sit down, as a band, and air your grievances once and for all. Get your feelings outin the open so that you’re not constantly feeling like you’re waiting for the hammer to fall.”

Ben sighs. “I’m afraid that if I do something like that right now, I’ll say something I’ll regret.”

“What can you possibly say that will make anything worse than it already is?”

There’s a moment’s silence. “That if he doesn’t sort himself out, I’m going to leave.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath, but Nicole doesn’t know if it came from her or him at the unexpected admission.

“But you love what you do,” she says.

“I used to,” he says. “But Michael seems intent on destroying everything we’ve created, and I’m not going to be left standing on a sinking ship.”

“But you’re on the precipice of cracking America,” says Nicole. “You can’t let him control your future—Secret Oktober is your life.”

“I dunno,” he says despondently. “Sometimes it feels like my only choice—that I’m going to have to take decisive action before somebody else does it for me.”

If either of them had heard the click as the extension phone was put down, they would have known that it would happen sooner than they could possibly have imagined.

27

CALIFORNIA, 2011

“Where’s Daddy?” asks Hannah, coming into what used to be our bedroom. Our safe haven, where we hid from the world—at least until a week ago, when the world decided it was coming to find us.

“He had to leave for work super early,” I lie, wondering if there’s anything in the room that might suggest to an eight-year-old that he hadn’t slept here at all.

I don’t blame him for leaving. We both need time and space to get our heads around the secrets we’d kept and the lies we’d told. Well, the secretsI’dkept and the liesI’dtold. But as he slammed the door, I doubted that he’d ever come back. Our problems seemed too insurmountable, our issues too deep-rooted to overcome. How can we move forward when he knows even less about his wife now than he did this time last week? This new version paints a very different picture to the original he’s been admiring for all these years.

“M-my sister called?Here?” I’d floundered when he dropped the bombshell last night.

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