Linda’s chest ached. They were right, and she’d done what Deja had wanted.
“What did Deja promise you?” Sabrina narrowed her eyes.
“Nothing! I was frustrated with her, that’s all.” She wrung her hands in her lap.
“I mean, she promised me stuff, too,” Sabrina said. “I think that’s how they get you.”
“We’ll tell if you’ll tell,” Charity said.
Linda tried to keep her voice steady. “She promised me the same kinds of things she promised you, I imagine. Money. Fame. Glory. That she’d show my good side.”
“Fine, keep your lips zipped tight then.” Charity clicked into a folder titled MARION, opening something new. The three women gasped in chorus. On screen, Tristan and Marion writhed in the half-dark of a bedroom. It wasn’t the manor.
“That hussy!” Charity laughed. Linda tried to laugh, too, but her mind was on her own footage, and something about the intimacy of the on-screen couple’s connection paired with the nakedness of the camera on them stirred pity in her.
“He slept with her, too?” Sabrina’s voice was tiny, her face fallen.
“Too?” Charity said.
“You shouldn’t worry so much about so-called infidelity,” Leo said. “Becca, Jazz, and I don’t worry about any of that.”
Linda ignored Leo and stared at the screen until Charity turned it off, and only then did Linda realize the implication. Only then did she shake herself out of her fog, turn, and place a hand on her friend’s hand. Sabrina’s bottom lip trembled while Linda froze with indecision. She didn’t know the script here, and the cameras were still rolling. Was she supposed to act angry or understanding? She looked to Leo, a question in her eyes, but he didn’t notice. Instead, he grinned at the prospect of drama, a fight, a raise when he got the perfect shots. He aimed his camera at Linda’s face in that moment, and later, the dailies would register her disgust.
Chapter Sixteen
Linda
Some of the contestants longed for a career as a reality star, increased followers on their social media accounts, a chance at being The Bride when that show’s next season rolled around. In the video Deja made her send in, Linda had told the other producers that she curated her own social media account, where she posted photographs of plants and landscaping techniques for her husband’s business, but she found no pleasure in it. She gained followers, and it meant nothing to her, the way her marriage had meant nothing to her, the way losing her virginity meant nothing, the way every big event since middle school meant nothing to her, at all.
But she wanted to be seen by the masses, to be judged decent. She wanted to hear the words from tabloids that she never heard from her mother: You’re a good person. What happened to you wasn’t your fault.
When Sabrina ran from the shrine room, giving her an out, Linda seized the moment. As Leo followed after, trying to catch the meltdown, Linda ambled, dazed, in the other direction.
“Where are you going?” Charity called after her, but Linda needed to be alone. It was an urge as simple as breathing.
To locate any degree of privacy, she’d have to open doors the producers demanded remain closed. She felt her way in the half-light, finally choosing a door in the hall outside the parlor. It led to yet another hall that stretched unlit into the distance, devoid of shadows. Linda took her first tentative step inside.
The floor beneath felt knotted. She wondered if she might be walking to the servants’ quarters, an area of the manor that the owners had perhaps spent less money on, leaving the floors uneven. Linda scoffed. She was tiring of being beholden to rich people. Or even just people who hadn’t made the same terrible decisions she had.
• • •
After graduation, she’d needed to get as far away from her foster family as possible, so she signed up for her first credit card on her eighteenth birthday, checked herself into a hotel, and drained the mini bar while she slept in a room all her own, for the first time in her life. It was intoxicating, to feel safe and unbothered, and when she woke the next morning, she thought she might finally be on the road to happiness.
After she maxed out the first card on nights at the hotel and meals ordered in, she sought out waiting jobs. Her first was at a steakhouse, where she served people in fancy suits, on dates and for business dinners. She felt okay as she ferried top-shelf whiskey to their tables, like she might become a useful member of society, until her first drunk and irate customer went off on her over a wrong order. Instead of speaking calmly to the man, like her supervisor had taught her, she shrunk to the floor as her body shook and her vision blurred. Her supervisor rushed in, soothed the man with freebies and promises to do better, then led Linda into the backroom.
Linda told her supervisor it would never happen again.
It happened again, and Linda found herself fired.
She tried other jobs: warehouse gigs, where panic overtook her at any hint of pressure; retail, where the customers’ anger seemed fiercer than the drunk men at the steakhouse; and administrative work, where frequent absences made her an unlikely candidate for retention. Finally, she relied on credit alone, racking up one hundred thousand dollars of debt before she met her ex-husband.
He met her on a bad day as she carried a box of personal belongings from the real estate office that had canned her. He ran into her on the street, paying attention to his phone instead of the sidewalk. He helped her pick up the meager items the box contained: a box of business cards, a couple books, a jar of peanuts, and a hyacinth in a terracotta pot.
“My favorite flower,” he said as he scooped dirt back into the pot.
“It was ugly when I bought it, but then the flowers sprung free, and I was smitten,” Linda said as sweat gathered under her armpits.
He smiled. He wasn’t a pretty man, and he was nothing like her father, who had been big and round, with jet black hair and a clean-shaven face. The man who smiled at her was small, with angular features and a red beard to his chest. His long red hair was braided down his back. When he offered to buy her a cup of coffee, she agreed.
At dinner, she told him about her troubles with employment. He was easy to talk to, and he sympathized with her inability to keep a job and the looming weight of her monstrous debt.
“I might have the perfect job for you,” he said. “No angry customers. No rush jobs. Come work for me at my landscaping firm.” He slid a waxy postcard across the table.
“Landscaping?”
“I do all the designing, but you can help me with installation. You’ll work with plants, get physical activity. Trust me. My other employees are relaxed as hell, sometimes too much.” He laughed. “But I swear: as your boss, I’ll never yell at you.”
Linda had no other choice. She took the job. She let herself fall into the hard work, and she found a surprising amount of peace handling roots, planting flowers, digging holes for trees, laying grass. She enjoyed the way the plants she tended didn’t care about her credit score or her past, and for a little while, she felt that old feeling return—she might be on the journey to happiness.
Her new relationship with him didn’t hurt, the flooding of all those love chemicals that left her in an ecstatic daze.
For the first year of their life together, Linda thought her ex was non-judgmental. She told him everything, everything. He soothed her worries, reassured her he loved her, and then proposed to her.
They were married for four years. Each year, he pulled farther away. Finally, he admitted she wasn’t the woman he thought she was. She was too cold, he said, and sometimes, she got this look in her eye that scared him.
The one thing she never told him was it scared her, too.
And Deja had caught it on camera, again and again, and turned it into a story.
