Homewrecker

25 - 𝓵𝓲𝓿𝓮

"Going live in five, four, three, two . . ." Instead of completing his countdown, one of the crew members with a tattered baseball hat and clipboard wedged between his side and his elbow held up his index finger to us strategically arranged on the couch. David and Amy were seated in the center, and I was beside David, of course. Andi, Jason, and Kimberly were on the barstools from the kitchen that had been brought into the living room, behind the couch, and Danny and Natalie were next to Amy. Miles was leaning against David's legs, panting and distracted by the movement behind the beams of direct white from the stage lights pointed for us. Sitting in one of the chairs from the dining room was Kelly Bright, a television reporter who looked vaguely familiar to me with her straightened blunt blond bob and powdered complexion as she smiled at us.

"Thank you, Jack and Sandra," she said, and I fought the urge to glance around the room, even though I knew Jack and Sandra were the anchors back at the news station. "It's so nice to meet with you, Senator Soliday, Mrs. Soliday. Thank you for having us in your lovely lake home."

David smiled, like this was all normal and his eyes weren't blinded by the glare of the stage lights distributed around the room. "It's our pleasure, Ms. Bright. Thank you for being here."

"Of course. Now, I understand you have a bit of an announcement to make."

He nodded, then his pupils flickered over to me before he touched a hand to my shoulder. The weight felt strange and too warm against my clothes, feeling the wire from the microphone shift against my skin under my shirt. "Yes. I would like to introduce to the public my daughter, Bronwyn Larson. Until recently, she had been living with her mother but her passing during the devastating Shiloh tornado has brought her to come live with our family now."

Kelly Bright smiled at me, although I wasn't sure if the smile had faded from her lips yet since the cameras started filming, but the word during kept tumbling through my mind, breaking through all of my other thoughts and the techniques Deshaun told me I tried to remember. During, he said, not before. Tornado, he said, not strangled. "It's great to meet you as well, Bronwyn," she told me. "And I'm so sorry about the passing of your mother."

It took a second of silence for me to realize I was supposed to respond to this. "Thank you."

"So, what was your reaction to all of this? This must have been a massive transition for you. Had you known before that Senator Soliday was your father?"

The hand on my shoulder stiffened somewhat, fingers starting to slide away from my back. "Yeah, I always knew he was my dad," I said. "My mom told me when I was younger."

She nodded, like this was something she knew, which it was. Everything that had been planned out and told to us to say had been typed out in an email sent to one of her assistants the night before. "And there had been a conscious decision to keep you in the dark from the public," she remarked.

"It was something of an agreement her mother and I had come to when she was born," David answered, and I realized the muscles in my sides were clenched and tight as he spoke, or lied, actually. "We thought that was what was best for her, to grow up without so much scrutiny or lack of privacy."

"And there would be a lot of scrutiny," Kelly said, "from the public since she was born outside of your marriage. Tell me, how exactly did that all happen? Had you been unfaithful to your wife?"

David smiled, but it was a stiff and sluggish movement of his lips as his gaze drifted away for a moment, the stage lights reflected against his brown pupils. "Well, I suppose the only answer is yes, I had been. Our marriage started to take a back seat to my career and raising our young children, and like a muscle that doesn't get exercised, our relationship became weak. We separated not many months after our daughter, Andrea, was born."

I hesitated, focusing to keep my eyes pointed still for the darkened lens of the camera one of the crew members had told me to earlier, but I wanted to look away, to glance at him as he talked about a separation I had never heard of it. How he and my mother met, what it was like before—before she was pregnant, before he went back to his wife—that had been like a fairytale my mom told me all my life. And never once was a separation mentioned.

"I met Donna—her mother—while we were separated and we became involved, romantically. But I still loved my wife and I had an obligation to my children, so we ended it a few months later."

Kelly nodded, almost somberly. "You say you had an obligation to your children. How long was it before you knew that you had one more obligation to think about?"

Minutes, I thought. That was the part of the fairytale when my mom's voice got a little bit louder, a little bit angrier, a little bit tighter. It was minutes after telling him she was pregnant that he told her he was moving back in with Amy.

"We found out not too long after Donna and I ended our relationship," he replied, nonchalantly. I pressed the groves of my teeth together in my mouth, grinding them together, at how everything sounded when it came from his lips. Like their affair was something they had both decided to end, or that he found out about me after they broke up. That was when I realized the separation he mentioned wasn't the truth either. It was just another embellishment to protect his reputation from crumbling around his pathetic and cowardly decisions.

"And, Amy, how did you feel about learning that not only had David been seeing another woman, they had conceived a child together?"

Something flickered across her expression before she poised herself. "It was hard, of course. And unexpected. But it didn't take long to fall in love with her. I wouldn't have our family any other way now."

She reached over David and grasped onto one of my hands limp on my lap. I knew this was being broadcasted on live television, so I sat there motionless but everything in me wanted to recoil away from her because I knew that she was lying too. No one had fallen in love with me, then or now.

David was embarrassed looking at the souvenir from his adulterous affair, Amy was polite because years of being the wife of a politician had brainwashed her into that as an automatic response. Jason barely acknowledged me, Andi outright hated me, and Natalie only liked me because I was nicer than Andi. Danny went around like he thought I was a cousin or some foreign exchange student or something. Miles was the only one who seemed to tolerate me for me, and that went likewise.

"How amazing," Kelly concluded, smiling like this was some sort of happy ending. Completely ignoring that whatever kind of ending this was, my mom had been murdered for us to get here. But sure, yeah, amazing. "Well, thank you all so much for having us and we look forward to hearing more from you and your loving family soon."

"You're more than welcome."

"And . . . cut! Alright, thanks everybody. Good job," one of the crew members echoed from behind the camera as movement suddenly resumed after moments of constrained silence. I stood up from the couch and started walking toward the hallway, realizing how frustrated and exhausted I felt by this—by everything that wouldn't stop happening—when a voice called out to me from the living room.

"Uh, wait, you still got our mic on . . ."