The One-Star Husband

Chapter Five: The Star Report

The script was already on the prompter when Ottoline sat down at the anchor desk, waiting above the lens in neat glowing lines.

Her father had sent one of his own aides to stand at the back of the gallery and watch. Under the desk, resting on her knee, was Raff's recorder, with a cable running from it to the port where guests plugged in their laptops. Nobody had asked what it was. Nobody ever questioned the most trusted face in the city.

The floor manager counted her in with his fingers. Three, two, one.

"Good evening," Ottoline said. "Tonight, the Star Report can reveal that the video at the centre of the Kemble case was forged by the Moretti family."

The second line rolled up the prompter. She looked at it for a moment. It said her husband had deceived the Chief Justice. It said his family should be investigated, his mother too, and the sister who had stood in the witness box in a crooked blazer. Behind the gallery glass, her father's aide folded his arms. Then she reached under the desk and pressed play.

Every monitor in the studio filled with floodlights and sawdust. Across Asterholm, on every screen tuned to the evening news, the city watched Davey Kemble's last fight from the first punch to the last. They watched him fall and try to get up, and fall again. And behind the camera, bored and clear, they heard her brother's voice telling the referee to let it run.

In the gallery, someone was shouting. Nobody cut the feed. Perhaps nobody could bring themselves to.

When the screen went dark, Ottoline looked straight into the lens.

"My brother was in that room," she said. "My husband's sister told the truth. And in this family, the one-star has been the best of us for four years."

The network cut to an advert for washing powder.

For a few seconds, the studio held nothing but the hum of the lights. The floor manager lowered his hand and stared at her as though he were watching a woman step off a ledge, and in a way he was. Ottoline unplugged the recorder, slipped it into her bag and walked out before anyone thought to stop her.

The votes came all night, thousands of them, from accounts that hadn't existed at sunset. By morning, she had fallen from five stars to one point four. The network let her go before breakfast in a two-line email. By nine, her father had taken her name off the family accounts and the house, and her key card no longer opened the gate. At ten, he stood on the Bureau steps with a sad, patient face and told the morning news that his daughter was unwell and the family asked for privacy.

She watched it on her phone in a taxi crossing into the Underbank, with one suitcase on the seat beside her.

The alterations shop was a narrow front room with a sewing machine in the window and rails of other people's clothes along the walls. Graziella Moretti was at the machine. She looked up when the bell rang, and she looked at Ottoline for a long moment, at the suitcase and the good coat and whatever was showing on her face. Then she got up, took a needle and a reel of thread from a biscuit tin, and handed them over with a pile of trousers that needed hemming. She went into the back and came out with a bowl of soup, set it on the cutting table and pulled out a stool.

"Sit," she said, and that was all.

Ottoline sat. She had never hemmed anything in her life. When Lucia came home from school that afternoon, she stopped on the bottom stair at the sight of her, then came over without a word and showed her how to fold a cuff.

Enzo arrived after dark, still in his driver's jacket with the collar pinned. He stood in the doorway and looked at his wife with a needle in her hand, and for a while he didn't say anything.

"You didn't have to do that," he said at last.

"Yes," Ottoline said, pushing the needle through a cuff. "I did."

Then he told her what she had already half guessed. The accounts that had brought her down were the same kind that had gone after his sister.

"The Critic," he said quietly, as if the name explained everything. She didn't know who that was, and she was too tired to ask.

Later, while he dozed in the chair by the stove, she looked him up on her phone for the first time in four years of marriage. One point six. Since the hearing, strangers had been rating him up, hundreds of them, people who had heard about the boy who gave away five stars. Some had left a word or two with their vote. Thank you. For your mother. She was still reading them when his phone lit up on the table beside her.

The message came from a contact saved only as D, and it was one line long.

Careful. Two is the line.

It meant nothing to her. She looked at her husband, asleep with his head tipped back against the wall, and turned his phone face down.

Graziella went up to bed at midnight. Ottoline couldn't sleep. She lifted Enzo's jacket from the back of the chair, took out the safety pin and began to mend the collar Raff had torn, stitch by careful stitch, under the lamp. Halfway along the seam, her fingers found something hard inside the cloth. She worked it toward the tear with her thumb until she could see it.

A small brass star, five points, with one point filed flat.

She had seen that exact shape this week. It had appeared on the Starboard behind her father's head, beside Lucia's climbing number, while the whole square said its name.

Before she could look closer, a hand rested lightly on her shoulder. Graziella stood behind her in her nightgown. Ottoline hadn't heard her come down the stairs. Gently, without any hurry at all, the older woman took the jacket out of her hands.

"That one stays where it is," Graziella said, and she sat down under the lamp and sewed the seam shut herself.