“I know, listen. Hey. Hey.” His voice gets soft. “I’m sorry. Listen. Genuinely, I am.” He turns away from me and cups the receiver, even though it makes no difference, I can hear every word. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise.” He pauses. “Yes. I know, babe. I do. OK. OK, bye.” He hangs up.
“That went well.”
Hugo shakes his head and downs the rest of his drink. “I don’t know. Work is so strenuous and chaotic lately. I feel like I don’t have time to breathe.”
“You like it that way.”
Hugo looks across at me. “Do I?”
“I’m sorry, are you intimating you’d rather be at home with Natalie right now than trying to charm Tweedledum and Tweedledee into a two-hundred-million-dollar building?”
Hugo grins. “You’re right.”
I hold my glass up to him. “To your future,” I say.
“And to yours. Looking bright.”
I think about Jake. About the kiss on the cheek.
“Bright or radioactive?”
Hugo considers this. “A lifetime with you could only be one thing.”
Chapter Five
On our first date Hugo took me to the Tower Bar, a well-known restaurant in a well-known hotel on Sunset Boulevard. The hotel is old-school and infamous—the cozy scene of late-night celebrity diners and travelingVogueeditor meetings. Irina is a frequent guest. Dimitri Dimitrov was the maître d’ for over a decade—there were articles published about his retirement in 2018. He knew every customer’s name, favorite table, drink order. I remember thinking Hugo had to be one of his regulars.
We sat at a table outside, right at the edge of the pool. The courtyard is beautiful, with overhead lights, and on many Saturdays, a band that plays jazz, Sinatra, and Bing Crosby.
“Romantic,” I told him when we sat down. It was almost eight, and the sun was nearly fully set, the glamour of the place coming alive in the burgeoning darkness.
“This is one of my favorite spots,” Hugo told me. “I’ve beencoming here for a decade; it never gets old. When people say LA isn’t magical like New York, I take them here.”
I considered Hugo’s age, then. I tended to date men who were my age or younger—I liked their carefree spirits, the way they didn’t have a fully molded mate in their mind you were constantly trying to live up to, but Hugo was at least five years older. Seven, actually, it turned out. I knew I was not the kind of woman he normally dated, and it made me feel insecure—or more generously, on edge.
“It’s beautiful.” Across the pool was the Los Angeles skyline, a floating city in the clouds. Palm trees and towers and homes, side by side. That’s the beauty of LA—it’s sprawling, searching, a horizontal buffet of experiences. In New York, everything is happening on top of everything else—energy and expectation, stacked up like dominoes. Here, you have to hunt for what comes next.
Something always happened to me once I got the paper—I became resigned. I knew what was coming. I felt, sometimes, like I’d hacked the system. Wasn’t the hardest part of heartbreak the unpredictability? How you could feel the most connected to a person in one moment—like being in a teardrop together, the world a watercolor outside—and like strangers in the next? Friends were always talking about how they did not see it coming. But I did. There was no need to dive in headfirst only to realize the proverbial pool was empty. I knew when to invest, and for how long. And when the end came it was sometimes painful, often disappointing. But I could never say I was blindsided. I could never say I didn’t know.
Hugo was wearing a black Henley and dark jeans. He had on a leather necklace around which hung a pendant I would laterlearn was a key to the first building he’d ever bought—a small two-story on Pico that was now a restaraunt. “It’s a family-run place, and Pico was their first expansion, their second location.”
Hugo was proud of his work, it was obvious. He talked about it with rapture—almost like a child who can’t quite believe his luck.
A twentysomething waiter came over.
“Calvin, what’s up?” Hugo said.
“Not much, man, how you been?”
“Good, good.” Hugo smiled in my direction. “This is Daphne.”
Calvin gave me a little bow. “Pleasure.”
“Hi.”
“You guys want something to drink?”
Hugo held his hand out to me. “Ladies first.”
