Page 123 of The Husband Hour
They stood in silence. Stephanie broke it first.
“I never intended for this to come out. And I still hope that Ethan never knows the truth. How could I explain this to him?”
Lauren looked at her, incredulous. “You don’t plan on telling Ethan? Ever?”
“What good would it do? Rory is gone. It’s not like telling him the truth gets him a father. And the poor kid—his very existence isn’t just a mistake; it’s the biggest shame of this family.”
Oh God. What had she done? By accusing Matt of knowing about Ethan and keeping it from her, she’d inadvertently given him the information. And now he had it, and he would use it.
“Stephanie, you’re not going to like this, but…you have to tell Ethan about Rory.”
“Lauren, please spare me a morality lecture here, okay? No matter how much I deserve it.”
Lauren nervously toyed with the end of her ponytail. “It’s not that. I…told Matt Brio. I thought I could convince him not to go ahead with the film. But he didn’t listen to me.”
Stephanie reached for her arm.
“You didn’t.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“He’s going to put this in the film?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about Ethan? He’s innocent in all of this, and he’s going to be the one who suffers!” Stephanie’s eyes filled with tears. Before Lauren could think of a response, Stephanie ran back to the house.
Chapter Fifty-One
Brooklyn felt smaller and darker than Matt remembered it. And the editing suite was hot as hell.
“Do you mind if I turn these fans up higher?” he asked the one person left in the office. The guy, plugged into his computer and surrounded by empty coffee cups, gave a faint go-ahead wave.
Matt didn’t need coffee. The return to the city had energized him, made the Sundance application deadline feel real, made the creative pressure of finalizing the cut he would send to the sales agent crushing. No matter how many times he went through this process, it would never be easy. And there was an added level of stress to this project.
He’d hoped that once he was back in New York, he would get some emotional distance from Lauren. If he could just stop worrying about her feelings, he would be free to make the best creative decisions for the project. But as it was, his thinking was muddled; instead of exposing the truth about Rory, cutting ruthlessly to bring his decline into sharp, dramatic view, he was pulling punches and trying to see what he could get away with not showing.
Matt paused the footage on an image of Lauren from the Fourth of July. She was wearing a sundress; her long hair was loose and her eyes especially dark against her sun-kissed cheeks. From an artistic standpoint, her loveliness made the story all the more poignant. From a personal standpoint, it made his job nearly unbearable.
He hit the Play button.
“He told me it was boring—frustrating sometimes,” she said. “One day he spent eight hours mowing a lawn.”
“Was this discouraging to him?” Matt asked off camera.
“No. He said, ‘I had to learn to skate before I could score.’ But he did have to get through months of Ranger School, and that wasn’t easy. I think people wanted to remind him that he might have been a star on the ice, but he was a nobody there. The thing they didn’t realize was that by that point, Rory hadn’t felt like a star in a long time. And he was deeply motivated to change that.”
“And how did things go at Ranger School?”
“He graduated with the Darby Award. Top honors. And his decision to do this was completely affirmed.”
“And in your mind?”
Lauren took a deep breath.
“In my mind, I guess something was affirmed too. The understanding that my husband was an exceptional person and that everything that was happening was part of the deal. My life with him was going to be one of high highs and low lows, and it always had been.”
High highs and low lows. Matt paused the video. Had it really been only two days since he’d seen her? He couldn’t stop thinking about the look of anger and disgust on her face. It’s my job to tell the whole story, he’d said.
