resisted the urge to hug him, knowing as I did what it felt like to be left without a forwarding address. Instead I fingered the chain around my neck. But before I could run the risk of looking as if I was taking sides by trying to console this head-shaking, hand-wringing tree of a man, Lydia whooshed back in from the ladies’ room.
“Oh, so now I gotta tell you where I’m goin’ every minute of the day?” she spat at him, taking a seat and ripping off her white-rimmed sunglasses to reveal striking and furious blue eyes. “Do I always know where you are, Cameron? Huh? Do I? Oh, or maybe you just own me?”
After crossing her legs she brought her puffy, defiant eyes to rest on mine.
“What the hell is she talking about?” Cameron looked from me to Jonathan. “How am I supposed to deal with a woman like this?”
“What I am talk-ing about, Cam-ron,” she overenunciated, “is reality. Somethin’ you lost touch with.”
“Pshhhhhh…whatever,” Cameron protested to no one in particular, leaning back in his chair with a neck and eye roll in her direction.
“Lydia,” I jumped in. “I hear you. You want equality. And Cameron, you want communication. These are good goals. Although the first step is empathy. Lydia, Cameron was just telling us how your reaction to the tabloid article made him feel. The key in reconciliation is to separate emotions from actions, and then try to improve communication. Once you understand each other’s motivations, you can decide if and how you can function better as a couple. Now, are you willing to give this a try, Lydia?”
She sighed, fished a cigarette out of her purse and then signaled with her eyebrows for me to continue. Quoting the building’s No Smoking policy would’ve gone over as well as pointing out that her roots were emerging under that chestnut dye-job. I decided to let that battle go and picked another.
“Baby,” Cameron murmured, “what the hell? What are you doin’?”
“Nothing,” she hissed, blowing smoke in his face. “That’s what I’m doin’.”
“Do you believe this?” Cameron looked to Jonathan for some male bonding over female irrationality.
“Oh, so my smoking bothers you?” She sat upright, mocking him. “Tell ya what. Maybe you’ll get lucky and your new hot-tub girlfriend won’t feel the need to smoke after sex. Oh, wait a minute, what am I talkin’ about maybe? You already know whether or not she smokes after sex because you already had sex with her!”
“I didn’t sleep with her!” He slammed a fist down on the table beside his chair, causing me to glare a little.
“And I’m not smoking!” she fired back, breathing more smoke in his face.
“Hey, guys, clearly there’s a lot of hurt and confusion in this room. But let’s remember why we’re here. We want to be productive and try to make sense of the situation together. You’ve taken the first step by coming to us, so now let us try to help you, okay?” I asked.
Cameron nodded like a schoolboy who’d just admitted to putting glue in another child’s hair during nap time. Lydia didn’t acknowledge me.
“Cameron,” I tried, “why don’t you tell Lydia how you felt about her reaction to the story. Remember—don’t place blame, and don’t attack her actions. How did her leaving suddenly make you feel?”
Lydia rose to look out the floor-to-ceiling windows of our skyscraper. The city lay prostrate before her, and the mountains waited patiently in the distance as her husband beseeched her.
“Lydia, when you took that trash rag’s word for it, without even talkin’ to your man first, without even hearin’ his side of the story, I felt like you weren’t on my side anymore. We used to be on each other’s side. Always. I always knew you had my back.”
“And?” I led him along.
“And, I felt…abandoned.” He blinked his eyes hard and sniffed.
“Don’t do that, Cam,” she warned him, twisting around to reveal the dragon tattoo climbing up her right shoulder. “Don’t even think about it. I am not your mother. You can’t blame me for her splittin’ on you and your pops.”
“It’s not about that,” he told his hands.
She straightened before asking, “Why can’t you look me in the eye when you say it?”
“Baby, I—”
“No! Don’t give me that!” she yelled and gestured with the lit end of the cigarette. “I see the way your dumb teammates look at me. They’re laughing at me, and I don’t know why! You have the balls to say that I’m not on your side? What about you bein’ on my side for once? What about not letting them laugh at me! I’m your wife, damn it. Not some stripper you guys called up to the room in Vegas and think the wives won’t find out about it!”
“Look, it’s like I told you,” Cameron attempted to get a word in.
“Like you told me? What did you tell me, Cam? Huh? I can’t remember the last time I got a straight answer from you. Are you tellin’ me now that you were never in that hot tub with her?”
He hung his head.
“Answer me!”
“Not…” he started, his voice rising about twenty octaves “…not exactly.”
Lydia froze, and I saw a vein in her temple go live. She took a step forward, slammed down her palms, leaned forward on the conference table and dared him to finish his thought.
Cameron wouldn’t look up, and Lydia’s knuckles were turning white as she dug her lengthy, bejeweled fingernails into the taut black leather of the conference table, so I took the next step for them.
“Cameron, could you clarify that for us?”
“Okay, like…here’s what it was. I mean, I was with her in that hot tub.” He reached out for his wife. “But it was before you and me even got engaged! You were on tour and it was like…two months since I even seen you. But those pictures from that magazine…they weren’t me. That party was at the same place, but it was during the playoffs, and that was waaaaaay after we already got married. It was the same girl with a different guy. I didn’t break my marriage vows with her, boo, I swear!”
Lydia was stoic, her unflinching glare burning a hole into Cameron.
After what seemed like forever, Cameron turned to me. “Monica, you said to tell her the truth.”
two
MOMENTS AFTER OUR MORNING ASSOCIATES’ MEETING I COULD feel Cassie, our team’s assistant, struggling to catch up to me. She would have been a lot more aerodynamic if she didn’t insist on wearing those five-inch heels to work every day. Besides, compared to my shrimpy five feet four inches, she was practically a giraffe in the first place. Leaping up from her desk just outside the conference room, she tailed me right into my office and kicked the door shut behind me.
“Can I help you?” I smiled conspiratorially, rounding my desk.
“God, she is such a witch!” She
