“To be fair, we’ve only been together about a year,” I said. We’d discussed getting engaged a while ago, though. I’d really thought it was going to come soon. “It’s okay if he wants to wait.”
“But you didn’t say he wanted to wait, did you?” she said. “You said he didn’t want to get married.”
I hadn’t said any of that, but okay. “Again, to be fair, we haven’t really talked about it.”
“It sounds like you’ve talked about it enough,” she said. “Maybe he’s waiting for you to beg. Sometimes men like that.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”Right?
“Trust me, as someone who’s been married three times”—I was definitely going to have to google that third one. Where would she even have fit it in?—“if you’ve got too many differences in how you grew up, it won’t last. He’ll never really be able to understand our world. He’ll always feel like an outsider, and, over time, it will cause resentment between the two of you. Like he moved to a different country where they speak a different language than you.”
Well. All the corn bread I’d eaten balled itself into a wet, heavy lump and dropped to the bottom of my stomach. She’d hit on all my greatest fears in one short speech.
“I can see the panic in your eyes,” Bibi said. “Don’t worry. I can always set you up with my nephew. Chip. Do you know him? I think he went to Princeton with your brother.”
Of course I knew Chip. He’d played squash, taken a beaming photo on top of Mount Kilimanjaro without the porters who’d carried all of his stuff up, and was (in)famous for vomiting out of a skydiving plane the morning of his twenty-sixth birthday. We’d hooked up a couple of times a few years ago and he’d proven himself a competent and enthusiastic lover, if not particularly inspiring. That Pom of a few years ago probably would’ve considered him as a good match for when all of her friends started coupling up and having kids.
This Pom couldn’t stomach the thought of marrying someone who had never thanked the person who made him coffee—not because he was malicious or anything, but because he’d never think to do it, because he’d never really thought about the person making him coffee as a person. And yes, I could tell him to say thank you, and if he cared about me, he’d do it. But it would be like the time I got mad at Opal so I skipped her birthday party and jetted off to the South of France. I was still mad at Opal, just mad at Opal in the South of France. And then later she killed my grandmother.
Maybe I kind of lost the thread there. Anyway. “Thank you,” I said politely to Bibi, because politeness was everything, at least when somebody was giving you a building in Chelsea for free. “I appreciate the offer, but Gabe is very important to me.”
“Well. If you change your mind.” She slung her bag, a classy white Chanel, off the back of her chair. “Shall we go?”
“Don’t we have to pay?”
“It’s on my tab,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. Conrad is treating.” She laughed. I laughed back to be polite, even though I was slightly appalled.
“Thank you. I appreciate it.”
“You’re quite welcome,” she said. “Though now you really can’t tell your father. He’d be quite displeased.”
I furrowed my brow as I plucked my own bag (a floral Chanel in a slightly more modern, boxy silhouette than hers) from my chair. “What do you mean? I thought he cheated on you. Surely he couldn’t be angry that you moved on.”
A new laugh from Bibi: less of a bray, more of a cackle. “Oh, my dear. Is that what he told you?”
I nodded yes, somehow feeling like I’d reverted back to a little girl, back when I’d say something adorable at the dinner table, like about how I knew how babies were made, they were handcrafted in factories in Paris and purchased by the highest bidder, and everybody would chuckle.
“Oh no, my darling,” Bibi said. She glanced over her shoulder as we were maneuvering our way out of the restaurant, sidestepping people’s tables and letting waiters sidestep us. “I cheated on him first. I cheated on him often. My affairs were legendary.”
Her affairs couldn’t have been that legendary if who she’d ended up with was Conrad Phlume, of all people. But I nodded anyway, because I wanted her to keep talking.
“He cheated on me with Grace for revenge,” she continued. “And then she got pregnant, so he was stuck. He cried when I told him we’d be getting a divorce.” I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen my father cry. Not even when his own father died. He’d drunk about three bottles of scotch, gone to the funeral, passed out on the couch at home, and then gone to work the next day like nothing had happened, except that he sat in his father’s office instead of his own. “Oh, he was so upset when he found out I was engaged to Conrad. Called me at night while your mother was sleeping and begged me to take him back. But I had zero interest in stepchildren.” She glanced back at me. “No offense.”
“None taken.” It wasn’t me she was talking about, after all.I would also have zero interest in raising a Nicholas. “Yeah, wow. Nobody ever told me any of this.”
She snorted, opening the glass door to the restaurant and ignoring the host telling us to have a nice day. “Of course they wouldn’t. Your parents are so lucky that the tabloids were all distracted by the Trump divorce of the day. Otherwise they would’ve been on every page.”
Her shiny black car pulled up smoothly at the curb, not even having to double-park. “Anyway, Pom, this was lovely,” she said as her driver stepped out to open her door. “I’ll be in contact about the building. I’d love to speak with you about any work you’ve already done in my apartment.”
I nodded. I probably should have said something appreciative again, but I seemed to have lost the ability to speak. She nodded back, then stepped inside the car and was whisked away.
My phone buzzed. God, I hoped it was my driver; I really needed to go home and stick my head under my pillow and either scream into it or try to suffocate myself. But no, of course not. It was Millicent blowing up my group chat with her and Coriander again.Pom you went to Avianna without us???
Then Coriander.Omg Pom and you didn’t even sit by the front window??? How are people even supposed to know you went there?
They’dfound out somehow, so there. I tucked my phone away with a sigh. I didnothave time for them right now. Not while I was busy reevaluating everybody’s potential motives. It seemed safe to say that Bibi was not a real suspect any longer—I mean, I wasn’t comfortable fully counting anybody out without real evidence (I’d done that with Opal early in my investigation last time, and look how that had worked out), but she didn’t seem to have much of a motive.
Not as much of a motive as some other people in the mix. Like, maybe a man who’d been abandoned by the woman he loved for a man he despised, and was still smarting about it yearslater, but whose feelings had been held mostly at bay by scotch and by the distance imposed by his wife. Only to have that distance evaporated by his oblivious daughter, leading to an explosive confrontation with that man he despised, which ended in a push from a high place and a fall onto a sharp object.
