Page 71 of Everyone Is Lying to You
So I planned for Gray and Marsden to meet out there thenight I spent with Lizzie at the conference. I wanted them to think they were alone so they could have it out. I’d placed the cameras in there so I could record their entire conversation. I needed to have it all on the record that Grayson and Marsden colluded to trick me. And once I had that proof I could properly make my escape. I’d tell them I’d go public. I’d ruin them. Ruin Dr. Carmichael. Ruin the church. But I would only do it if they didn’t let me and the kids go.
That’s all I wanted—freedom.
The planning had been exhausting, but planning was my full-time job as a mother and content creator. I was used to it. I tried to think of the recording I was hoping to capture as just another piece of content. How could I get it perfectly?
Men never talk on the phone. I just sent Marsden a text from Gray’s phone and then deleted it. I made a dummy email account for Marsden and emailed my husband. I knew there wouldn’t be much back-and-forth after they agreed to meet up, but I kept an eye on it.
The barn is their favorite place to hang out together. Both of them hate being in the house with the kids crawling all over them for much longer than an hour or so. In the barn there’s a dartboard where Mars and Gray have been playing the same game for a decade, the score constantly updated in scratch marks on the wall with a bowie knife kept out there for that specific reason. They smoke cigars when they play, something I’ve always ignored, but I gag when I go out to milk the cows for at least a week afterward because the stench of cigar smoke never truly goes away.
In the hours leading up to their rendezvous I sent Marsden the real reason I wanted them to get together. An ironclad contractfor him relinquishing all parental rights to my children. I also sent over the DNA tests and the disgusting emails my husband had sent to Veronica. I made it clear that I would publicly destroy both of them. All I wanted was his silence and my babies.
I got Marsden’s text right after I left Lizzie’s room.
You won’t get away with this you fucking bitch.
They came from G, or Marsden Greer. I kept him in my contacts as that because I hated seeing his stupid name. I could abide by just the one letter on the few occasions we communicated.
I ignored it. He and Gray would have plenty to talk about in the barn and that’s exactly what I wanted.
That’s when I went to Dan’s. I was wound so tight. I needed a release. I needed comfort. It was quick.
I was back in my suite when I watched the live video feed from our barn. I knew they’d meet after tenp.m. because Marsden wouldn’t come over until the baseball game was finished. I’d spent a lot of money to set up a surveillance camera and microphone in the rafters that no one would detect. It was all too easy to order on the Internet. Home security systems are now at the level of CIA espionage tools. It all operated over Wi-Fi and streamed to my phone. It was the audio I cared about the most. I wanted them to have it out about what they had both done. I wanted proof in their own words.
I sat in my room and saw it all on my phone the same exact way my nine million followers have watched my family and me for a decade. Because of that none of it felt real at first.
I watched as Marsden came into the barn drunk and seething with rage. Gray was confused and caught off guard from the very start. He’d been tossing darts. He had no idea what Marsden knew. He just stood there smoking a Cuban.
When Mars came in Gray offered him a cigar, but his friend smacked it out of his hand.
I’d wanted them to discuss the children and the horrible thing they’d done. I wanted all the details revealed. But I’d made a mistake trying to catch Mars off guard with the emails Gray sent to his wife. I’d meant to drive a rift between the two of them from the start, but it became Marsden’s singular focus. I could hear the two of them so clearly I felt like I was in the barn with them.
“Did you think I wouldn’t find out about the pervy emails you’ve been sending my wife?” Marsden shouted. “I knew you wanted her, but I didn’t think you had the balls to try to do it. You really think she’d go for it? You think she’d choose a limp dick like you over a man like me?”
“What are you talking about, man?”
Gray denying it only infuriated Marsden more.
That’s when Marsden punched him right in the jaw. Gray attempted to fight back. He grabbed the bowie knife from where it hung on the wall over the dartboard and slashed at Mars’s face, but he missed. They ripped at each other’s clothes. At one point Gray’s shirt just sort of fell off his body.
The bird’s-eye view from the camera perched in the rafters was like watching amateur ultimate fighters go at each other.
It seemed evenly matched at first, but that was impossible. Marsden was a professional athlete and I always suspected that he took things to enhance his performance on the field.
They wrestled. Gray gouged at Marsden’s eyes, begging for the two of them to stop and to talk. He denied ever being with Veronica, apologized for the emails, said they were all a dumb joke.
Marsden delivered a kick directly to Gray’s left kneecap, causing him to buckle to the floor.
Gray was howling in agony, screaming out for help over and over again as I watched.
I thought back to my husband’s crumpled face and his apology fourteen years ago when he beat me and locked me in that closet in San Francisco.
I’m a terrible, broken man, he had said then. I heard it so clearly so many years later.
“Terrible. Broken. Yes, you fucking are,” I whispered to the screen.
I could have called the police and an ambulance to go rescue him. I just sat there.
I didn’t kill my husband, but I didn’t save him either.
