“Mon Dieu,” Adele gasped, hurrying toward her. There was blood trickling though Margery’s fingers.
“Get away from me,” Margery cried out. “You’re a monster!”
“Adele?” Rutherford’s voice jolted her out of her thoughts. “Adele, can you tell us about that day?” She looked up at him and caught his concerned expression. She wondered how long she’d been sitting there, eyes closed, reliving it all. Had it been seconds, minutes, longer?
She nodded. “Yes.” Her throat was suddenly dry. As she reached for her water and gulped down a few sips, she realized what a heavy weight she’d been carrying on her shoulders for so long, a secret that only she could know. She realized now how she desperately wanted to be free from it. She looked up at Rutherford.
“I regret that day deeply,” she began. “If you are interested in the truth, then I will give you the whole truth,” Adele said.
Rutherford nodded eagerly. He wanted viewers, he wanted ratings. Fine, she thought, she’d give him what he so desperately wanted.
“The truth is, I drugged her.”
There was a gasp. Adele didn’t know if it had come from Rutherford or one of the camera crew or from her friends in the kitchen, but she couldn’t stop now and she didn’t want to. The words poured out of her. She explained everything that had happened before the match, including the crumbled pieces of a sleeping pill that she had sprinkled into Margery’s drink.
“It was a stupid, childish thing to do, and I’ve wanted to tell that truth and to apologize to Margery, for many, many years now, but I’ve been too cowardly to do it, hiding away from the world instead.”
“My goodness.” Rutherford looked shocked, but Adele forced herself to continue on relentlessly. “The thing that the press got wrong,” Adele said, “was that I did not intentionally throw my racket at that woman. That was an accident. I was angry, yes, I was furious, I was confused; I wanted the pill to affect her. That’s a hideous thing to say, but in that moment, I was so obsessed with winning, I threw that racket, yes, I admit that. But I did not throw itather. It ricocheted off the court and hit her eye. I did a terrible thing that day, but I never, never intended to do that.”
When she finally took a breath, she saw the disturbed look on his face. There, he had it, the full truth. The papers would go wild after this.
“Well, I have to say, you’ve rather astonished me and likely our audience, Miss Léglise. I had no idea.”
Adele looked away, not sure what to make of the feelings swirling around inside of her. Was that relief she felt, to finally get the truth out, or was that dread and fear of how everyone would now react?
She took a deep breath and hardened her face, preparing herself for Rutherford to demolish her on television.
“I was there that day,” he said, and Adele tilted her head in confusion. “I didn’t know about the sleeping pill—I don’t think anyone did—but I witnessed the incident just as you describe it. I tried to speak with you at the end of the match, but you were too distraught. I saw up close everything that happened, and I saw your frustration and rage. But I can attest that you did not throw your racket toward Margery; I saw you direct it toward the line where you asserted the ball was in—”
“It wasn’t in.” She cut him off. “That was another act of desperation.”
“But you didn’t intentionally hurt her with your racket. I know that, and I think every other journalist on the court that day saw that too; they just chose not to report it. You have your regrets, but my regret,”Jonathan said, and he looked at her sincerely now, “is that I didn’t fight hard enough to tell the truth about that. I wrote the story the way I saw it, but my editor didn’t want that story; he wanted the villain and the good-girl story, the sensationalized version, the story that sparked a fire, that caused the greatest public outrage. I was just a junior reporter, and I wrote what he wanted in the end, but I should have fought harder to print the truth, and for that I’m truly sorry.”
Adele tried to absorb this information. She couldn’t quite believe it. Had he really been there? Was he too using this moment to assuage his guilt?
“How can you defend what I did, after what I just told you?” Adele said.
“If I had succeeded in getting an interview with you that day,” he went on, “and not just writing what was expected of me, maybe you would have told me what was really going on. I had been following your career for several months, and I noticed you had a fraught relationship with your father.”
She tried to arrange an expression of neutrality on her face, but she felt the camera zooming into her and realized she was too late.
“He was strict. Yes.” she said, sitting upright.
“If I may, he was more than strict; he was abusive,” Jonathan said. “I noticed the way he spoke to you. He berated you in public, at tournaments, and humiliated you. You were a child when you started to compete. Most would say that he was cruel in his treatment of you. Would you agree with that statement?”
She shook her head; she couldn’t have her father’s name tarnished on television like this. “You need to understand,” Adele said, “he was very gifted, but his life had not provided the opportunities he gave me. My father needed me to win. He could be cruel because he himself was crushed anytime that I let him down. As a child, I could see that winning made him happier, but it never lasted.” Adele paused and looked down at the floor, flooded by memories that threatened to consume her. “Both as a child and then a young woman who knew nothing about the real world outside of tennis, except what he taught me, I knew Ihad to do better, always, that I always had to win, above all else, or I would lose my father.”
Adele stared past Jonathan to the framed photograph of her father and her that hung on the wall behind him, and a tear rolled down her cheek.
“Adele,” Jonathan said, “did he demand too much? Was he responsible for your downfall?”
She wiped away the tear, then forced her eyes back to his and shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “You would have had to ask him, but he died soon after that day.”
When the match was over, officials and Margery’s family and coach had rushed to the court along with the press. As reporters were shooed away from Margery, they turned to Adele, harassing her with questions.
“What happened today? Why were you so angry? What happened to your game? Why did you strike her?”
They closed in on her, and Adele had to push them away, feeling the breathlessness and panic rise up in her. She looked around for her father, or even her mother, to help her out of the situation, but they didn’t come.
