You’re the one who brought this to my door.
That’s maybe the worst thing. At least that I can remember right now.
She sighs. Fidgets with her glasses, and then the napkin roll the server just brought over.
Finally, she looks back up at me and says—a little mechanically, as though she’s been practicing it:
“I was not honest with you about my interest in the Lynton Baltimore story.”
I don’t say anything.
But in those distant parts of my mind, I’m prodded by the questions I know there are to ask of Salem. What happened after she went home during our trip, why she was so intense when she got back, what the hell was happening between her and Charlotte Caulfield on that houseboat?
If I’m honest, her jetting off to a seaside cottage in Rhode Island isn’t the only reason I haven’t asked her about it. I could’ve called her, emailed her. Texted her until she replied.
But I haven’t done any of that, because I haven’t wanted to think at all about Lynton Fucking Baltimore, and what he brought tomydoor.
And I’m pretty sure that’s not fair to Salem, or to the job I’ve committed to doing.
“Do you want to be honest now?” I ask her, finally.
She rolls her lips inward. Steels herself.
She says, “It isn’t that I was in love with him. Not really.”
I lean back in my chair.
And then, Salem tells me.
That it wasn’t that she was in love with him, but the thing was—she thought, for a while, that she might be. That she started the Baltimore story when she had a toddler at home, when she was miserable every day with the mundanity of childcare. She resented Patrick and the freedom he had to keep living his life when she was home. She was breastfeeding for months, and struggled with postpartum depression. She expected it to ease once Pen became less of a screaming, spitting-up blob and more like her friends’ adorable toddlers, who had inspired Salem to have a kid in the first place, but the truth of it was, she didn’t much enjoy the toddler stage of parenting, either. Her fights with Patrick about childcare were endless, and he resented her eventual decision to commit more time to her work.
The Baltimore story was a lifeline, a way back into the career that made her feel most like herself. A chance to reclaim that version of Salem, the one she felt she’d lost when she became a mother.
“He confused me,” she says, and by the time she gets to this part, her food has arrived and she hasn’t touched a bite. She has managed to fold and refold her napkin about twenty-five different ways. At first, I think she’s looking at me, but then I realize she’s not. She’s looking slightly over my right ear.
“I knew his history of becoming someone else, the exact right person for whatever woman he was targeting. But when you talk to Lynton—when I talked to him, I started to think I was an exception, somehow. He . . . well, I suppose the person he became for me, at the time, was a person who respected me in my profession. Who had no interest in my life as a wife or mother. He became a person who seemed hugely impressed by my brain.”
“He probably was,” I tell her. “You’ve got a great brain.”
“Nice try, Hawk,” she snorts, deadpan. “You’re not as charming as he was.”
“I only meant—”
She waves me off, obviously embarrassed. Not so much by the compliment, I don’t think, but by this entire situation. This confession. By how it fits into the whole puzzle of the Baltimore story, and of her behavior during our trip.
I think of what she told me in that rooftop bar in New Mexico.Trust someone who’s been there. If anyone gets hurt by this, it’ll be you.
“Were you trying to find him because you were hoping to . . . ?” I trail off, clear my throat. I don’t think I’m a good enough journalist to ask this question. Or maybe I’m not a bad enough friend, and the thing is, I kind of think Salem and I are friends now.
But Salem’s shrewd enough to know where I was headed.
“No, no,” she says. “Once he didn’t show for the interview, I—after a few weeks had passed, at least, I could see it more clearly. I was waking up from a spell, in a way. It’s always been difficult to convince Patrick of that—obviously, he wasn’t happy when I told him we had this new lead on Baltimore. We worked hard to keep our marriage together after it was over the first time, you know? We worked hard for Pen, and for each other.”
She sighs, looks off into the distance for a second, gathering herself.
“But the truth is, Patrick has a point, even if he misunderstood my motivation for going back to this story. I’m over whatever feelings I had for Baltimore back then. But I’ve never gotten over it, really, that I let myself have them in the first place. I’ve never gotten over that I even for a second considered going with . . . well, never mind. I can tell you about that another time.”
“What’s wrong with right now?”
