Page 58 of The Husband Hour
The irony of timing was too much for him. He didn’t even have money to pay the sound guy and his DP.
“What changed your mind?” he asked, really just curious about the extent to which the universe was fucking with him.
“You were right about one thing. I do care about the truth.”
He looked at his packed bag just inches away from her. He thought of the two dozen index cards in the garbage upstairs.
He thought of Rory, chasing the puck in the crease, forty seconds left on the clock, game six of the Stanley Cup semifinals. He shoots, he scores…
“Come back in twenty minutes,” he said.
Lauren’s decision to talk to Matt had been a knee-jerk reaction to Emerson’s warning, and now that the moment had arrived, she was scared.
She stood outside Henny’s front door, her heart beating so hard and fast she felt she could barely breathe. I can just leave.
But no. She’d been going over and over it in her mind, and talking to Matt was the right thing to do. Yes, when he’d first shown up, when she’d learned about the film, she saw it as Matt asking something of her, taking something from her. And then when Emerson told her not to talk to Matt, she realized that Matt was actually offering her something. The chance to tell her story. Maybe it could serve a purpose. The truth might matter.
“Hey. Come on in. Almost ready for you,” Matt said.
“Wow. Is Henny okay with all of this?” Lauren asked.
All the framed photos and Henny’s signs were gone from the walls, and most of the chairs and the sofa had been pushed to one side of the room.
“Yes, she’s fine with it. Don’t worry. We’ll have this room back in shape by the time she gets home tonight. Can you have a seat in that chair?” He directed her to a dove-gray armchair that had been angled in front of the window.
“We’re going to…like, get right into it?” she said nervously.
“Let me check the setup here,” he said, twisting the legs of a tripod to stabilize it. She perched on the edge of the chair.
“And you said this would just take an hour?”
“Lauren, if you can just slide back an inch,” he said.
Lauren fidgeted nervously in her seat. Matt moved from behind the camera and sat across from her. He grabbed some papers from a nearby end table and handed them to her.
“Before we start shooting, I need for you to sign this release.”
“What? I never agreed to sign anything.”
“It’s standard operating procedure, Lauren. You don’t have to sign it, but if you don’t, I can’t film you.”
She glanced down at the pages in her hands.
“You don’t have to answer any question you don’t want to, and you certainly don’t have to say anything you don’t want to.”
“But everything I say on camera you can use or edit?”
“Yes. Once you’ve spoken on camera, the material becomes, essentially, property of the film company.”
She scanned the paperwork, then looked up at him.
“I need to know why you’re doing this film,” she said. “Why this? Why Rory?”
He met her gaze, and the intensity was unnervingly familiar to Lauren. There had been only one other person she’d known who could convey all his passion and focus in a quiet glance.
“My older brother, Ben, was a Marine,” Matt said. “He enlisted right after 9/11. Fought in Operation Enduring Freedom. And we lost him in 2004. There was no fanfare. He wasn’t on the front page of the New York Times. There was no memorial in an arena televised for the world to see. No one except for the people who loved Ben cared that he was gone. He was just another statistic. But when your husband died, he became America’s hero. I couldn’t tell my brother’s story, but I knew I could at least tell Rory’s.”
She nodded slowly. And signed the release.
