“Come on in,” said Brad, with an ironic, courtly gesture. “Make yourself at home.” Diana waited a minute, then took a seat, perched on the edge of an armchair that was one of a matched set, upholstered in a fawn-colored velvet. She wondered if he’d gotten them in the divorce, carted them out of the marital house and brought them here, to this sad-single-dad apartment.
“I recognize you now,” he said. “From Starbucks. You came in a few days ago, right?” Before she could answer, he said, “It’s a rehab job.” He sat down heavily on the couch, which was brown leather, enormous, and out of proportion to the daintier armchairs. “Probably wondering what an Emlen man’s doing, steaming lattes.” He shrugged. “When you go to rehab, at a twelve-step place, they tell you to get a job like that. In the service industry, or as a custodian. Stocking shelves, mopping floors. We’re supposed to be of use and stay humble. And it helps to have somewhere to go in the morning.”
Diana couldn’t help her gaze shifting to the open beer bottle on the side table, next to the chips. Brad saw her looking, and shrugged. “I’m staying off the hard stuff. They call it harm reduction.” Diana thought they could more properly call it bullshit, but she kept quiet. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh, sure. What with all this #MeToo stuff in the news…” He waved one hand above his head and declaimed, “First they came for Harvey Weinstein, and I kept silent, because I was not a big-deal Jewish movie producer. Then they came for Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer, and I kept silent, because I wasn’t on TV. Then they came for Brett Kavanaugh, and I kept silent, because I’m not a judge. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak.” He turned the bottle in his hand. Speaking quietly, he said, “I’ve been waiting a long time for this. For you. So.” He put down the bottle and clapped his hands together, the bluff, hearty host welcoming a guest to his abode. It reminded her of Reese, except Reese was always sincere, he genuinely wanted to host people, to make them feel welcome, whereas this man only wanted her gone. “Here you are.” He picked up his bottle again and raised it in a toast. “What happens next?”
“What?”
“I mean, there’s kind of an order to these things now, right? You tell my boss, or the paper, or my ex.” She saw his throat give a jerk as he swallowed. “Or my kids.”
Diana didn’t answer. Knowing that Brad had children, knowing that any revelation would hurt them, too, had been bad enough when the kids were just theoretical. Now that she’d seen them, the knowledge weighed on her even more heavily.
“So what do you want? Money?” He gave a smirk. “Can’t help you there. Could have, once. But two divorces and four kids will clean a man out.” He looked at her closely. She imagined she could feel his attention, like an insect, something many-footed and loathsome, crawling on her skin. “So what, then? An apology?”
She swallowed, as best she could. “Words are cheap.”
Brad Burlingham put his hand on his heart. In a mocking tone, he said, “How about my solemn pledge to never, ever do a terrible thing like that again?”
She looked at him steadily. “It was a terrible thing.”
He glared at her for a minute. Then his shoulders slumped. “Yeah,” he said. “It was.”
They sat for a moment in silence. Diana thought that this wasn’t the leering, laughing boy she remembered from that night at the beach. Brad seemed… the word “damaged” dropped itself into her mind. She pushed it away, watching as he drank, his Adam’s apple bobbing and jerking with each swallow. He drinks like it’s his job, Diana remembered the bartender saying.
“You know what I want?” she asked. “How about this. I want to know why. You had to know…” She wiped her hands on her legs. “You had to know that what you did to me was going to have consequences. That it was going to hurt me. To the extent that I was real to you at all.”
He looked at her, rubbing at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Look,” he finally said. “The guy—the one who did it—he wasn’t my friend.”
“Oh, no? Because you seemed pretty close.”
“None of those guys were my friends,” he said. His voice cracked. “I thought they were. I wanted them to be. But they weren’t.”
“So that’s why you let Hal Shoemaker rape me? That’s why you laughed about sloppy seconds? You were trying to get in with the in-crowd?”