Chapter 23
Ian fucks his side piece in a shabby brick apartment building surrounded by much grander-looking row houses—the kind that sell for millions to senators and lobbyists—on a narrow, leafy street on Capitol Hill.
I know that now because I am parked across from it, a coiled snake waiting and watching for two disgusting rats.
Her response: Another lunch? When’s your next day in the office?
It goes on like this, week to week, them arranging dates in the middle of workdays. They met at the W the first few times, near Ian’s office. But then he started to get nervous:
Worried we’ll run into someone from work. What about your place?
So she texted her address.
After their first rendezvous here, in apartment 201, she sent him a photo of herself in a full-length mirror, naked and pubeless, tousled dark-brown hair, making the pouty duck face of a billion Kardashian selfies.
She looked like a teenager—tiny enough that I could crush her like an engorged mosquito.
Along with the photo, she’d included a note: Cum back soon. XO.
The next poet fucking laureate.
After reading that Sunday afternoon—while Ian was allegedly out for a run, giving me my first moment alone with the phone since discovering it—I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sleep next to him.
At least not without waking up in the middle of the night to hold a pillow over his face.
But then I realized what had happened: the rage had fully taken over, shutting out the despair.
Basking in the anger, I was perfectly comfortable sitting there on our bedroom floor, on the sisal rug that we picked out together a lifetime ago at West Elm, excavating his betrayal.
So, that’s just what I’m doing now: leaning hard into the rage, at least until I figure out how I want to play this.
Now it’s a little past twelve thirty on Tuesday, a time when they almost always meet.
(Not to mention TWO FUCKING DAYS till the dream house is supposed to hit the market.) As a tan Lexus comes to a stop in front of the apartment building, I sink down lower in the driver’s side of the Prius.
I’m parallel parked between two cars; Ian will never notice me over here, a rare benefit of driving something so unremarkable.
The curbside rear door of the Lexus swings open.
Out steps my husband, in the same blue button-up and khakis that he wore to the office this morning, a sight thoroughly familiar and alien all at once.
He ascends the front steps to a buzzer by the entrance.
Punches something in, says something into the intercom.
A second later, he lets himself into the building. Alex must be waiting upstairs.
My mind wanders to the vile things they’re probably doing up there.
They were here together the day we saw the dream house for the first time, too.
That morning, right before Ian told me he had to be at the office for “a lunch meeting,” she’d sent him a shot of her ass.
That was it. Just the ass. Ian, thank God, hasn’t texted her any visuals in return.
At least that’s one way his aversion to risk has worked in my favor.
It’s after one o’clock now. Only when I begin to lose feeling in my hands do I realize I’m squeezing the steering wheel so hard my knuckles are white. I breathe in deep and remind myself about their more recent text messages—the way a disconnect seems to be emerging between them.
Why don’t we go out for lunch today? Alex texted Ian last Wednesday, the day before I had sex with him on our sofa. We can still come back to my place after.
You know we can’t do that, he wrote back. I hate it when you make me into the bad guy.
The week before that, she’d begged to go with him to Pittsburgh. (Yes, he really was out of town with those goddamn coasters in the back of the car. Otherwise, I would’ve smothered him with my pillow already.)
It’s a business trip. Don’t be ridiculous, he’d responded.
When she wouldn’t relent, he came up with a compromise: Fine. I’ll come to your place when I get home Friday night and tell Margo I’m in Pittsburgh till Saturday morning.
Seeing him use my name with her had momentarily paralyzed me.
I sat there unmoving on the bedroom floor before an overwhelming urge to break everything started pumping through me like venom.
I wanted to punch through the walls, smash all the furniture.
Instead, I tore furiously through Ian’s nightstand until I found the maroon velvet box holding his great-grandfather’s watch, the one Ian had worn at our little nothing courthouse wedding—the family heirloom that he dreamed of one day giving to his own son.
I snatched it from the case and ran full speed from our apartment all the way to the trash chute at the opposite end of our floor.
I lobbed it with such force into that dark, metallic abyss that there’s no chance it survived the impact with the dumpsters below.
That had done the trick. The rage subsided to its comforting, rolling boil; my head cleared enough that I could focus on the silver lining—that Ian was sounding increasingly annoyed by Alex.
A light rain has started to fall now, pattering on my windshield.
While I wait, I confirm tomorrow’s Zoom interview between the New York Times reporter and Causa’s general manager, and follow up with the Rivière team about settling on a date for the media dinner.
The street is quiet. Hardly any cars have driven by since I’ve been here, but now a white Hyundai pulls up and idles at the curb.
Ian walks out of the building a minute later.
Alex trails him.
This is why I’m here. I needed to see them together for myself.
She is impossibly young, not more than a year or two out of college, in tight black workout shorts and a white tank top, dark hair falling in disheveled layers around offensively buoyant tits.
She’s so thin, it would take no effort at all to shove her to the ground, to kick in that pretty face.
Especially if I took a running start from this side of the street. I press the button to unlock the car, let my fingers curl around the door handle.
She stops Ian at the bottom of the steps, standing on tiptoes to wrap her arms around his neck. But he pushes her away, looking anxiously over his shoulder. Even from all the way over here, I recognize the aggravation in his eyes and the desperation in hers.
I loosen my grip on the door handle—it would be dumb to interrupt them now, and I didn’t come here for a confrontation.
She’s saying something, but he waves her off. Before he gets into the back of the Hyundai, he rakes a hand through his hair. They must’ve had an argument upstairs.
If you bother to watch closely enough, even a fleeting, wordless interaction like this one can be incredibly revealing. When I saw Ian with the other girlfriend—the one he was with back when I met him—I could tell that he was different from the other assholes I’d dated.
A couple of days after he first kissed me in that bar, I waited for them outside the law firm (she was an associate there, too).
I was tucked into a bus shelter on the median so they wouldn’t see me, but I had a clear view of them.
She was willowy like a ballerina, nearly as tall as Ian in her kitten heels, auburn hair pulled into a ponytail.
I didn’t love that she was so beautiful.
But at least she wasn’t Asian. I wasn’t interested in wasting my time on some creep with a fetish.
I liked the way Ian held the door for her—propping it open, then lightly placing his hand on the small of her back once she was through it.
As they made their way down the sidewalk, he offered to take her laptop bag.
The entire sequence was passionless—she looked about as fun as a pap smear, I could see easily why Ian was ready to end it—but it was all so considerate.
He followed this exact same routine the next night, and the night after that. Ian was a good guy.
I’m not sure he’s a good guy anymore, of course. In fact, I’m fairly certain I could kill him. But based on the display I just witnessed, whatever he has with Alex won’t last.
And I can’t turn my frozen eggs into a baby on my own. I can’t, at my age, tear everything down and start from scratch. Not if I still expect to get the life I’ve been working so fucking hard to build.
I can’t keep Ian’s family—the perfect holidays together, the sweet check-ins from his mom, the advice from his dad about how to fix literally anything—if I throw Ian away.
Once we’re in the dream house, especially once I’m pregnant, this will all get much easier to compartmentalize. I don’t have to like Ian. I just need him to be there.
After the Hyundai drives away with my piece-of-shit husband in the backseat, I find the number for Erika’s real estate agent in my email.
It rings once. “This is Derrick.”
“Hey, Derrick, it’s Margo Miyake. Erika Ortiz connected us last week?”
“Oh, right. It’s nice to hear from you.”
“I’m sorry, I meant to call sooner, but life got a little crazy.”
“No problem at all. What can I help you with?”
“The easiest sale of your career, I hope.”
He laughs. “All right, you have my attention.”
“There’s only one house that I want. It’s supposed to hit the market in two days, but I think we can get it sooner. I don’t need to tour it or anything. I just need you to help my husband and me submit the offer.”