“A shitty dictionary,” Rae said.
She was trying, with every broken fiber of her being, to remind herself that this wasn’t about her. It was about Dustin and his health. Objectively speaking, it was a good sign that his sex drive was coming back. And as his friend, she’d agreed to be there for him through the highs and lows, the easy times and the impossible times.
What kind of a person turned her back on someone in pain who hadn’t done anything wrong and who had, in fact, made it explicitly clear that they were only friends?
Rae tried to make headway with rationality, but the image of those sandals scattered on the floor was too vivid to bear. Ellen had been right all along—Dustin had other people to support him, people who were probably in his bed right now, tangled up in the sheets he’d long since washed after that one night, a year and a half ago now, when she’d stayed over and fallen asleep and woken up in the arms that had felt like an envelope to all the love letters no one had ever written her until then.
“Can you find a home for Phyllis?” she asked Ellen, gesturing to the windowsill, where Rae had set the plant down when she’d gotten home last night.
The leafy symbol of her bond with Dustin was too painful to keep, but tossing it in the trash was out of the question. Understanding the paradox, Ellen took Phyllis into her own bedroom, out of view.
“I’ll bring her in to work,” Ellen said, returning a moment later. “I’ve been feeling left out in theBring your pet to the officepolicy, and I can feed her some of the free seltzer.”
Rae gulped gratefully. Then, after glancing at the bare windowsill, she deleted Dustin’s number.
She’d stopped going on dates since she’d started being his friend, having no desire and no time, but this now felt like a horrible miscalculation, a sabotage of her overly generous imagination, always expecting that once Dustin got better, he’d start loving her better.
But maybe believing in that healthy, happy version of Dustin was like believing in Santa Claus. It was time to take off the red felt hat she’d been wearing, the hat that had been blocking her view of the truth.
The value of their stock had crashed straight to zero, if there had been any value at all. Perhaps the whole time she’d just beenballooning the delusion that they’d end up together, when he’d clearly never wanted that at all.
She couldn’t invest in him any longer.
Her phone buzzed again. Dustin’s name no longer showed up, but the 203 area code scraped even more, reminding her that there was a reason she wasn’t letting herself look at his name, because the mere arrangement of those six letters had the potential to wreck her and leave her wrecked.
Deleting his number wasn’t enough. She blocked it too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE REBOUND
“What’re these?” Rae asked, walking into Ellen’s room and holding up thin strips of lacy fabric, all brightly colored.
“Thongs,” Ellen answered, as she tossed a red bikini into her suitcase.
“Yes, I know whatthongsare, thank you,” Rae said. “What I meant was, how did they end up in my bag?”
“I put them there,” Ellen said. “Thought your underwear drawer could use a lake house refresh.”
They were packing for an August getaway at Elmer Lake in Indiana, where Rae and her parents had spent every summer when she was a kid, back before the divorce.
Still stinging from The Sun Hat Girl Scandal, Rae needed a change of scenery, something with a water view, and she’d outgrown the over-the-top Hamptons debauchery. Last summer, the Scramblettes had persuaded Rae to join them at a share-house in Montauk with Mina’s boyfriend of the moment and his twenty closest friends. Montauk was a seaside village at the eastern point of Long Island, and its cabana-clad beaches and castle-like mansions were something of a New York rite of passage. Getting a glimpse into thelife of $15,000-per-night abodes, lobster decks where the pompous prep school crowd in pastel shirts vented about incompetent waiters, andAre you on the list?beach bars with a sort-of-famous DJ spinning EDM beats while everyone did coke in plain sight had entranced Rae ever so briefly before exhausting her with its vacuous glamour.
During her bathroom breaks at work, she’d been looking up deals for plane tickets to exotic places from Morocco to New Zealand, but when she’d found a link to that Indiana cottage—“Our Little Yellow House,” she’d called it as a kid—she’d gotten such a pang of nostalgia that she’d rented it for all of August, right on the spot.
It was the quietest time of the year on Wall Street, with all the bosses and wannabe bosses at their Southampton palaces or seven-bedroom “cottages” up in Nantucket, and she’d gotten approval to work remotely for three weeks, so long as there wasn’t any delay in her responsiveness. It was as close to freedom as she’d come in her four years of work.
Sarah wasn’t joining, too busy with business school applications, and Mina wouldn’t hear of going to “the literal middle of nowhere” when she could be meeting her next true love at a Montauk beach concert. The Scramblettes were becoming increasingly scattered, it seemed, birthdays and breakups the glue holding them together.
At least Rae still felt inseparably close to Ellen, having talked her ear off about how fine she was cutting Dustin out of her life. Rae hadn’t yet grown bored of the plot, but she’d become tired of it, which was at least progress.
Ellen, too, wanted a more low-key vacation, and she and Aaron were tagging along to the lake house. Rae told herself it would be basically the same as if it were just her and Ellen like she’d wanted.
“No one ever sees my underwear,” Rae told Ellen now. “So what does it matter what it looks like?”
“No one ever sees your underwear because you don’t expect them to see it,” Ellen retorted. “It’s like the chicken-and-the-egg phenomenon. Which came first, the sex or the thong?”
“Clever,” Rae scowled.
