You Are the Waves, You Are the Wind novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Keep It
Sadie signs a sixty-million-follower account away in open court to keep her daughter's face off it, then hears Garner swear he never put a camera in the kitchen.
Thirty minutes before court opened, every seat in the public gallery was taken.
People stood along the back wall with their phones raised.
The clerk leaned toward my lawyer and whispered that the livestream had passed a hundred thousand viewers.
I sat at the table in the gray suit my best friend had picked out for me.
Across the aisle, Garner sat in navy with his hair cut for the cameras.
He hadn't looked at me once.
For eight years we had ended every video the same way.
I said, "You are the waves."
He said, "You are the wind."
Sixty million people knew it by heart.
Now they were waiting to see which of us would walk out owning the account.
A girl in the front row held up a hand-lettered sign with our sign-off on it.
The bailiff made her lower it.
My lawyer straightened a stack of papers that didn't need straightening.
My hands were cold, so I put them under the table.
Bree slid into the row behind me and squeezed my shoulder.
She had been my best friend and our producer since the first month of the channel.
She set a coffee in front of me, oat milk, no sugar.
"Breathe," she said. "I changed the account's recovery email to mine last night, so Garner can't lock you out in the middle of this."
"Thank you," I said.
"Whatever happens in there, I'm on your side."
The judge came in, and the gallery stood and sat down again.
Garner's lawyer rose and said the court needed to see what our five-year-old daughter was living with.
My lawyer objected.
The judge allowed it.
A screen was wheeled in front of the bench.
The video was dated last April, 3 a.m., and it was my kitchen.
It had been shot from high up, looking down from inside the pantry.
I saw myself in a bathrobe, screaming into a dish towel.
I saw myself throw a pan at the wall.
Poppy stood in the doorway in her pajamas, crying, holding her stuffed lamb.
That was the night Garner phoned from Denver to say he was moving out.
A man at the back of the gallery said, "Jesus."
Someone else was already typing.
I could hear the thumbs.
Beside me, my lawyer wrote on her pad: We can fight this. It will take months. The stream stays up the whole time.
I looked at the screen, where Poppy was crying, and I knew what a hundred thousand people were screenshotting.
Her face would be on a thousand pages by lunch.
Four of the six most-watched videos on our account were of her.
Garner's lawyer asked for sole custody and sole ownership of the account.
Garner was not looking at the screen.
He was staring at his own lawyer, and his jaw was tight.
I stood up.
"Your Honor, I'll make this simple," I said.
My voice shook, so I said it again.
"I'll sign the account over to him today. All sixty million followers. Every dollar it makes."
The gallery went quiet.
"I want two things. He drops his request for custody, and every video and photo of my daughter comes off every page by tonight, and never goes up again."
Garner's lawyer smiled.
She thought she had won.
Garner opened his mouth, and I watched him realize that a hundred thousand people were watching him decide.
He couldn't ask for more.
Not on camera.
"Fine," he said.
"The respondent agrees?" the judge asked.
"I agree," Garner said.
A woman in the gallery groaned out loud.
Somebody whispered, "That's it? She's just giving it away?"
So I gave him the account.
I signed where the clerk pointed.
It took less time than signing for a package.
In the hallway, Bree hugged me so hard my coffee splashed.
"You did the right thing," she said. "Poppy first. Always."
"Always," I said.
My lawyer was already talking to a reporter, so I walked to the end of the hall by myself.
Garner caught up with me by the water fountain.
His face was gray.
"Sadie, that clip," he said.
"Don't."
"I'd never seen it before today. I've never put a camera in that house."
"Then who did?" I said.
"I don't know," he said. "I was in Denver that night. You know I was."
I did know.
I had the flight receipt in my email.
So somebody else had been standing in my pantry, filming me, six months ago.
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