The List (45 page)

I heard his car door shut and faint footsteps on the wooden stairs. When he finally
knocked, I sprinted forward and opened the door, trying to stay calm. I was going
to keep my cool; I was not going to jump into his arms or burst into tears.

But the person standing on my stoop with a phone in one hand and keys in another wasn’t
Sandro. It was Olivia Campo.

I quickly looked past Olivia to see if Sandro was behind her but she put her arm out
to stop me and I almost fell against her. She shoved me against the door with her
pale hands and my right leg hit the side of it.

“Olivia!” I screamed both at the sight of her and because she had just pushed me,
hard, away from her.

She didn’t respond, she didn’t smile, and she didn’t lift her hand up to slap me across
the jaw. She just stood there silently. If I looked exhausted, she looked worse. She
was even paler than before. The confidence she always radiated had evaporated. All
that was left was a worn-out girl with a husband who clearly loved her, not me, and
very little else.

Brushing past me, her bony shoulder stabbing my arm, Olivia walked into my living
room.

“I came here to tell you you’re a selfish bitch,” she said with her back to me. She
stood in silence as I felt my heart rate speed up. She finally turned around after
observing the curated contents of my apartment.

“You look ridiculous, by the way. Is that all for my husband?” she said, gesturing
toward my unnatural cleavage.

Before I could answer, she raised her voice and said, “I thought it would be a nice
idea to catch you off guard. Give you a tiny taste of how I felt when I answered Upton’s
call last week. I was in a restaurant with the president in Jakarta, but I doubt he
told you that part.”

I opened my mouth to confirm that Upton hadn’t given me the details of their chat,
but she shook her head to silence me.

“You are a selfish, heartless bitch. Just like me.” She looked at my made-up face,
my straight hair and bright dress, and moved toward me. “That’s what you think of
me, isn’t it?”

I stood there, unable to respond.

“And you didn’t get this so-called story about me and Hoyt because you’re a good reporter,”
she added. “You got lucky. You happen to live here. Period.”

“Olivia!” I said again. I was still in shock. I didn’t know what to say besides her
name. I had been waiting for Sandro, I had just spent the past hour thinking about
what I would say to him, and now his wife—the woman I had spent months trying to psychoanalyze—was
here in my living room.

Olivia’s red hair was brushed back and her thin arms were locked by her side. She
stared at me expectantly, and when I said nothing, she marched in her flat sandals
back outside, stopping on the small wooden landing at the top of the stairs. I followed
after her.

“Look at you,” she said finally, smiling sarcastically at me. “Adrienne Brown. Style
section reporter extraordinaire. No one ever paid much attention to you—any attention
to you—in the newsroom so you figured that the way to get some recognition was not
through actual work, but by ruining my life.”

“That’s not what I intended to do!” I said quietly. “I was just—”

She cut me off.

“
You
threw yourself at my husband,
you
spied on me in the middle of the night,
you
photographed
me
having sex! Then you flew to Arizona and asked everyone in my hometown all about
me! Then—and this is probably my favorite part—you talked to the very woman the government
trusted to protect me when I was eight years old. The rest of your dear readers might
not know who your ‘anonymous source’ was but I certainly do. I lived with Victoria.
That woman used to bathe me because I couldn’t stand in a shower until I was fifteen
years old. Did you know that? Because that’s where I found my mother, collapsed in
a pool of her own blood. Are you aware of how sick it is, to pry into that world?”

I bit the inside of my lip as she screamed. I had asked Victoria for details, but
she hadn’t told me that.

“What you did is vile!” Olivia continued. “You should be the one getting slammed by
the press, not me.”

She hit her little balled-up fist against the wall, took a deep breath, and tried
to lower her voice. It quickly rose again.

“And after you finished snooping around like my fucking biographer, you tied it all
up in a bow, handed it to Upton, and sat around celebrating while he fired me even
though you
knew
I was halfway around the world with no friends or family. When I got home, jobless,
with my name smeared beyond recognition, I got to watch you talk about it on national
television every
chance you got. You sure soaked that up. It was just radiating from your hopeful face.
‘Look at me! Someone finally gives a shit about me.’ But guess what? They didn’t and
they don’t. They just wanted to hear you talk about the senator. About
me
.”

“He’s no longer a senator,” I murmured, but she didn’t hear me.

She lifted her head up higher and looked at my tense face, my grinding teeth. “All
you are is a messenger. You’re not a reporter. And why you’re not crying and groveling
for my forgiveness right now, I’m not quite sure. You did hang your own peer without
a second thought.”

“I don’t think you have ever regarded me as your peer, Olivia.” My body was tingling.
I felt guilt—of course I felt guilt—but then in Arizona, and now on TV, I was just
doing my job. She of all people should understand that.

And she would have done the exact same thing.

Olivia was tense and silent, looking off to her left at my parents’ big white and
green house bathed in late afternoon sun. Now that she wasn’t screaming, you could
hear the cicadas chirping.

“How long did you know about it?” she said finally. “About us.”

“Since March.”

Olivia looked up at a small white moth flying near her hair and swatted it away.

“Well, it went on for much longer than that. It had been over a year.” She looked
at me, standing stiffly, waiting for me to react. “Do you want to take out a notepad
or something?” she asked. “I’m sure you’ll immediately want to file that tidbit off
to your pal Upton.”

Over a year? Had they really been coming to Middleburg for that long? It was amazing
I was the first to catch them in the act.

“I don’t want to write anything down,” I said finally.

She put her hands in the pockets of her loose black shorts and gave me a once-over.
“Your biggest problem is that you don’t understand this town,” she declared. “You
Style girls just sit back there complaining about how hard you work, but there are
thousands of people lining up to take your jobs—as trivial as they are. And hundreds
of thousands want mine. If you think Christine Lewis is the only person working a
seventy-hour week to get the word
senior
next to her title, you’re very naïve. Everyone wants to cover the White House. But
very few—”

“You never even wanted to cover the White House!” I countered. “All you wanted was
to destroy Stanton.”

Olivia’s face turned whiter than usual and her tired eyes looked straight through
me. “Destroy?” she repeated quietly. “I didn’t want to destroy him.”

I rolled my eyes and moved toward the railing. I knew better. From the moment she
learned the name Hoyt Stanton she was ready to rip it out of the history books.

“You didn’t think he killed your father?” I retorted. “That he was responsible for
his death?”

Olivia put her hand on the wooden railing and sighed, looking disparagingly at me.
“Obviously I did, for years. I hated him, the whole family, for decades.” She tilted
her head back proudly, her freckled face creasing around her eyes as the sun moved
lower in the sky.

“I needed somebody to blame, so I did my research. It was all I thought about, all
I did. My parents in Texas tried to put the past behind me and I tried to make them
happy. But as soon as I got to college, it turned into an obsession.”

No wonder she wasn’t writing for the
Battalion
. She was too busy with her own investigative reporting.

“But there’s nothing,” she said firmly. “Trust me,” she said,
lowering her eyelids. “If there was anything to find on Hoyt and his family, I would
have found it. This is my life we’re dealing with, not yours. I’m sure you were betting
on finally doing some hard-hitting story now, but please don’t insult my intelligence
by saying you’ll wrap the whole thing up by morning.”

I knew it would take me a little more than twelve hours, but I still planned on squeezing
something important out of the past. Or maybe Olivia was just going to hand it to
me. She had already told me an intimate detail about her mother’s death. She seemed
ready to talk—or yell—about her relationship with Stanton. Maybe because it was already
public knowledge and she was out at the
List
and now Stanton was out of a job, too.

“I already wrote a hard-hitting article,” I pointed out. “Maybe you read it?”

Every muscle in her face scowled at me.

“You probably think your article is the best thing to ever get slapped on the front
page of the
List,
” she said, scratching her nails into the wooden railing next to her. “You’re probably
having the damn thing framed.”

Actually, my mother had already had the front page of the paper framed. It was sitting
in my bedroom closet waiting to be hung up somewhere. Upton said that besides the
president’s election, it was the largest type they had used for a headline in the
four years they’d been operating. When I told that to my mother, she’d screamed and
driven straight to the overpriced framing shop in Middleburg and had the thing mounted
like it was a Gustav Klimt.

“I knew it,” said Olivia when I didn’t reply right away. “Well, I hope you’re enjoying
this—really soaking it in—because this is the high point of your career. It’s not
going to get better than this.”

“At least I still have a career,” I shot back. “And the paper is printing just fine
without you.”

Olivia dropped her hand from the railing. “I’m not quite done yet,” she replied under
her breath.

I wondered if I’d misheard her. Not quite done yet? What the hell was she going to
do next?

“You got fired!” I reminded her loudly. “And what self-respecting publication would
hire you now?”

Olivia shrugged her thin shoulders and brushed a few stray hairs off the back of her
neck. “Yes. I got fired.
You
got me fired. But I’ve got something that hasn’t gone out yet.”

My mind began racing. What was she working on? Something with the White House? Dirt
on the administration? White House scandals definitely trumped Senate scandals and
I had heard Upton trying to reassign one of Olivia’s stories on the White House counterterrorism
team to Christine. A scandal involving them would be big if Olivia still had her hands
in it.

“The Foster Care Empowerment Act,” she said softly, smiling at my confused expression.
“That was mine. I wrote it.”

That fluff piece? I was aware that she had written it. How exactly was she going to
save her career with that?

Registering my expression, Olivia repeated herself.

“The act. The Empowerment Act. I wrote it.”

I leaned back against the wall, needing something to steady me. The Foster Care Empowerment
Act. That was Stanton’s bill. How could Olivia write it?

“But that was his cause!” I stuttered. “That was what changed your mind about him.”

“You really think he cared about all of that?” said Olivia, wringing her hands in
frustration. “About orphaned and abandoned kids? His wife adopted those kids so she
would have something to do while he was in Washington. If you believe that self-important,
anti-immigration, gun-loving man ran for Senate to pass bills on foster care, you’re
exceptionally stupid.”

“But you don’t think that!” I exclaimed, regaining my voice. “I saw your face when
you thought nobody was looking. I know your relationship was—”

“Was what, Adrienne?” she said angrily, cutting me off.

I suddenly wished we weren’t standing on the small landing. I wanted to be in the
city where society forced us to be quiet, civilized. Here in the country, we just
screamed.

“Please tell me about the nature of my relationship with Hoyt,” she asked bitterly.
“I’d love to get some insight from
you
.”

It was strange, off-putting even, to hear Olivia call Stanton by his first name. I
took a deep breath. “You came to D.C. because you wanted to get close to him,” I replied,
trying to sound confident. I was not going to let Olivia notice that standing so close
to her was making me suffocate. This, all this, was her fault.

“And then when you did, you fell in love with him. You didn’t mean to, but you did.”

We heard the faint boom of what sounded like thunder and we both looked up at the
sky.

“You’re wrong,” she said, seeming startled from the sudden noise. “I didn’t want to
get close to him. I needed to.”

I let her words sink in as I watched the early evening clouds move faster and faster
above us.

“Like I said, I was fixated on him for years,” she continued as I lowered my eyes
to meet hers. “You understand that, I believe. Obsession?” I thought back to all the
nights I watched my White House Correspondents’ Dinner footage of Sandro, pausing
it on his handsome face as he smiled politely at Isabelle. And the way I pressed my
body against his in Olivia’s kitchen. How I had gone to his house when I knew Olivia
was away, and had kissed him, put my arms around him. Yes, I did understand obsession.
And somehow, in these surprising moments, I was starting to understand Olivia, too.

“I hate him,” she said. “Real hate. A person like you will never understand that kind
of disgust. But that was part of the problem—that level of emotion can turn—and it
did. It became something else, something less like loathing and more like . . . ”