“Do you want to talk about it?” I said generously.
She was quiet for a moment, both of us looking around the bathroom. They’d wallpapered it with pages from art books, so that all around us lounged naked women and also horses, a strange combination from the decorator. “Your boyfriend isn’t here.”
If I wanted her to be honest with me, I probably had to be honest, too, as distasteful as that was. “That article wasn’t exactly kind to the two of us. He’s taking a little space.”
“I see. I’m sorry.” She was quiet for another moment, which gave me some time to be sad about that space Gabe was taking. Then again, if he’d been with me last night, I probably wouldn’t have gone clubbing with Millicent and Coriander, and I probably wouldn’t have had my life-changing epiphany, and maybe thatepiphany would be key to making sure the two of us wouldn’t want to take space from each other in the future, so it could be that the article had saved us all.
Millicent and Coriander: casually mean saviors of humanity.
Persimmon went on. “Kevin’s being really shady lately. He’s definitely hiding something, and I think it might be an affair. Last night he got a call right in front of me and I couldn’t avoid thinking about it any longer.”
My instinct was to go in for a hug, and she didn’t stiffen when I leaned in, so I let it happen. “I’m sorry,” I said into her hair. It smelled like tangerines. Or maybe persimmons. What did persimmons smell like anyway? “He’d be insane to be having an affair when he’s got you.”
“I know, right?” She pulled back, eyes flashing. “Men are supposed to cheat on their old wives with young women, not cheat on their young girlfriends.”
“Right,” I said firmly, then realized what she’d actually said. “Wait, what?”
“It’s just the way of the world,” she said, which was depressing but also, I supposed, expected, considering what she’d seen from her father. Last I’d heard, he was on his third wife. Or fourth? The wife couldn’t be that much older than Persimmon, if she was indeed older at all. “I thought that, by being the younger woman with the older man, I’d be… safe.” She sank down onto the toilet seat, which was, thankfully, closed. “Now I don’t know what to do.”
There was nowhere else for me to sit down, so I hovered uncomfortably above her. “What happened with the call?”
Somebody knocked on the door. We both ignored it. “He’s been taking frequent phone calls in the other room. He changed the password on his phone. And he’s been coming home with marks on him he can’t explain. But yesterday I saw the name on his phone before he snatched it away and went outside with it. Why would he be hiding a call with a Jessica if it wasn’t becauseof an affair?” She wrinkled her nose. “The name ‘Jessica’ just sounds whorish, honestly.”
Jessica. I laughed, which made Persimmon’s eyes widen, as if she thought I was mocking her. “I think I know what’s going on,” I said. “Jessica is my brother’s fiancée. I learned from my parents earlier that my brother and Kevin have been colluding to try and take over the Afton family business. My brother’s probably been using her phone so that his calls don’t show up on the family phone bill.”
“Oh my God. Are you serious?” Persimmon rubbed her head. The person at the door knocked again, more insistently this time. Persimmon glanced at the door, then back at me. “Oh. You know, that actually makes a lot of sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I asked about it, he told me that he’d made a bargain with the caller,” she said. “That he was helping out the caller so that the caller would help him with something. He wouldn’t tell me details, which is why I figured he was lying.” She let out a breezy laugh. “You know, I suspected Denise Ryan. They had a very cozy lunch the other day. But she’s way too old, right? He would never cheat on me with someone who’ssomuch older. Oh my God, I feel way better now.”
I wished I could say the same. The pieces were slowly slotting together on multiple fronts, slipping and sliding in a way that made me queasy.
“Nobody is quite who they claim to be,” I said slowly.
Before I could say anything else, the knocking on the door turned into a thunderstorm. “Please!” someone called desperately from the hallway.
“We should probably let them in,” said Persimmon, and opened the door before I could ask her for one more moment in the quiet. Somebody shoved past us in a blur. Together, we headed back to the dining room, where half the circle was standing, bags thrown over shoulders or fastened over waists, brushing goodbyekisses over cheeks. I was too deep in thought to be insulted that everybody was leaving so soon after I’d arrived. After all, so what? I was sick of trying to pretend to be somebody I wasn’t. That only worked for so long, could only make you so happy.
As I was beginning to understand.
I swooped in on Vienna for a quick hug. “I’m really glad I came,” I said, grabbing my own bag. My stomach lurched with the movement.
“I’m glad you came too,” Vienna said. She squinted at me, cocked her head. “Did you just figure something out?”
I gave her an enigmatic smile in response. The answer was, of course, yes. I’d cracked it again, or, at least, I was pretty sure I had. I had a few calls to make. To Nicholas. To Jessica. To Jack Wohl. To whomever those calls would lead to.
Into the car. “To the bakery,” I directed. If I was going to have to rock the foundation of my entire world, I wanted to do it from the safety of my favorite place.
CHAPTER
Twenty-Four
Iwas incredibly productive over the next several hours. I made a bunch of phone calls and even a field trip to find Nicholas when he ignored my phone calls. I made a literal chart and timeline of how I thought things must have gone, and backed it all up with what I’d heard on the phone (or, in Nicholas’s case, in the pool of the Afton, where he was swimming laps and only ignoring me by virtue of not having his phone). I took out some nervous energy on customers who were yelling at my employees for no reason and, in bursts of wild inspiration, planned the bakery’s specials menu for the next month. Ellie wasn’t totally sure how we would accomplish everything-bagel-and-cream-cheese Danishes, but I told her I’d figure it out. I’d have a lot more downtime soon.
By the time I came up for air, it was dark outside, and my heart was racing, probably because everything I’d eaten today had come from the bakery and contained a metric ton of sugar. “What time is it?” I asked nobody, then decided it didn’t matter. I’d accomplished a lot today. But there was one more thing I needed to do, and it was the most important thing of all.
It took another hour to figure out how exactly I was going to do it. Part of me wanted to do that grand gesture of a stereotypical movie scene where, to beg for forgiveness, you got a boom box and played it outside someone’s window at night toget their attention. But the rest of me figured that going to Queens was a big enough gesture, and also that playing a loud boom box on a quiet residential street this late at night would get me drawn and quartered. Also, I had no idea where I’d get a boom box. I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually seen one in real life.
