“Am I wrong?”
She still didn’t answer.
“Ten thousand dollars.” He was shaking his head. “That’s what my sister’s life was worth to him.”
Ariel felt no small amount of shame: She’d extracted three million dollars, money that she’d used to buy the farm, to buy the bookshop, to buy the very best health insurance for herself and her sickly child, to establish a college savings account, to set up a trust for George, to fund her own retirement. But this guy’s sixteen-year-old sister?
“We can’t just let this predator roam the earth with impunity, can we?”
John looked so pained, so earnest, so desperate. Ariel recognized that desperation, she’d felt it for nearly fifteen years: a willingness to do anything, even as it seemed as if nothing could work.
Ariel almost had to wonder if John’s desperation was an act, if she was being set up, entrapped so that the existential threat of her could be removed, once and for all. She had to wonder if she could be jailed merely for admitting the truth to this stranger.
“It’s unfair for the burden to rest entirely on the victims’ shoulders. It shouldn’t be only the accusers who risk everything; it shouldn’t be only the aggrieved who grieve. Other people need to take real action. Not just stand in solidarity, not just post on Instagram or hang a banner or donate fifty bucks.” John looked Ariel firmly in the eye, and leaned forward. “I’m willing to do anything. And there are many things I know how to do.”
What was this guy suggesting? An assassination?
“I’m sorry,” Ariel said, and she really was. “I wish I could help.” She really did.
But instead she left John Wright sitting there with an untouched coffee that he’d driven a hundred miles to not drink. Ariel rushed out onto Main Street, tears streaming down her face, and returned to her quiet little shop, in her quiet little life, totally expecting that she’d never see John Wright again.
*
“You’ve been well?” he asks.
They’re sitting on a balcony overlooking the Adriatic, where there’s no way for anyone to be watching, or aiming directional microphones at their conversation.
“Things have been hard,” she says. Ariel switched rooms to guarantee that the new one couldn’t be bugged. They’re meeting at an off-season resort to ensure manageable crowds, easy for countersurveillance. They’re in Montenegro because there’s no extradition treaty with the United States, and because that’s where John now lives, a combination that’s not coincidental.
“I’m sure you saw some of it on the news,” she continues. “In a way, the on-air disparagement has been the least of it. I can turn off the TV, ignore social media. You know that I already did that. But the in-person stuff, that’s been rough. Hostile people come to the shop, and to my house, and bother George at school, say things to me in the supermarket. There are a lot of crazies in America, and it doesn’t take many to make life miserable.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“How’s Lucy doing?” Ariel asks.
“This has definitely brought her consolation. And the money has made a huge difference in her life. And now there’s a real chance that Wolfe will go to jail.”
Ariel snorts her doubt. Statutes of limitations are shockingly brief in cases of sexual assault; or maybe it isn’t so shocking. In her case, Charlie’s crime became no longer prosecutable after just five years. No matter what transpired afterward, no matter how many other assaults he committed, no matter what laws were eventually changed. He could never stand trial for raping Ariel.
From her point of view, jail had never been a realistic hope. But John has consistently been the unrealistic one. All along, it was Ariel’s role to manage expectations, to concentrate on achieving finite and realistic goals. On making sure, first and foremost, that they didn’t get caught.
Ariel was the one who focused on the big picture. She came up with the whole convoluted plan in the first place.
*
She’d left Jerry sitting at the bar with his fourth or fifth Scotch, and jumped into her truck, rumbling over the rutted roads to her dark farm, new home to Fletcher the orphaned goat as well as her two rescue dogs and an indeterminate number of outdoor cats and her newly surly son, locked in his bedroom doing who knows what.
What was resonating in her brain was Jerry’s comment about an NDA: If a nonsignatory discovers the facts completely on his own? There’s nothing a nondisclosure agreement can do about that.
By the time she banged through her kitchen door, she’d convinced herself that it was possible. She leafed through her notebook, each page reaching further back in time, weeks and months until she found the name and phone number of the man with whom she’d not drunk coffee.
How are you supposed to plan for life’s most important conversations? Do you set them up, construct a stage, establish expectations? Or do you just let the talk happen—push a pebble, start a landslide, gravity, momentum, it’ll take care of itself?
In school they teach you trigonometry, fruit-fly reproduction, the periodic table, Shakespeare, all this useless crap. Calculus, for crying out loud. But no one ever teaches you how to do the really important things.
“Hi John, it’s Ariel Pryce. Do you remember me?”
“Of course.”
“I have an idea.”
*
They did get married, which was an easy enough thing to do; it was also too easy to get caught not having done it. They invented their story together—the conversation they’d supposedly had at the grocery store, their awkward unpracticed flirting, their first date, first kiss, first sex, whirlwind romance and thoughtful gifts, their engagement and honeymoon, details large and small and crucial and irrelevant. It’s the irrelevant details that make it real. They rehearsed their story again and again and yet again until it was second nature, as real as their real lives. Realer.