Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
VIVIENNE
Vivienne, who knows the good hotels. Vivienne, who gets us the table. That's how they'd said it for years, all of them, like I was a concierge somebody kept in a phone, like the taste was a service I performed instead of a thing I actually was.
The ship pulled off the dock while we were still unpacking. I stood at the wall of glass with champagne already sweating in a bucket nobody had asked for and watched the island shrink. Somewhere on the far side of it, behind a heron gate, my three friends were checking into Cala Sombra.
Claire's text reached me that evening, late, the way messages drift in from a place with almost no signal.
Made it. Not exactly what the website promised, ha. Miss you already. Hope Rosalind's okay — squeeze Viv for us and tell her we're not mad, just wish she was here.
I read it in the closet with a silk dress over my arm, and yes, something in me flinched.
Tell her we're not mad. Of course they weren't mad.
That was the whole thing about them, about her.
I'd dropped them into a hole I dug and their first move was to reach up and reassure me I wasn't to blame for the hole.
I thumbed back fast, before the flinch could turn into anything: Oh no, is it rough?
? I'm SO sorry, the reviews looked gorgeous.
Rosalind's stable, keeping her overnight.
I'll make it up to you all, I swear. Try the waterfall hike, it's supposed to be magic.
Love you, don't think about me. Every word a small clean lie, laid down like tile.
The reviews looked gorgeous. I'd read the real ones at two in the morning.
Don't think about me. I was the only thing I wanted her not to think about.
Then I turned the phone facedown on the shelf and went back to the dresses, because the alternative to hanging dresses was standing still, and standing still was where the flinch lived.
When they were all hung I stood at the mirror in the dressing area, the good kind, lit so you look like the best rumor of yourself, and did what I'd done in expensive rooms my whole life.
I imagined I lived there. Only this time I didn't have to imagine being a guest. I said it out loud, quiet, to the glass.
This is my suite. My trip. My man in the next room.
The sentences fit better than they had any right to.
Claire wore this life and didn't notice; I'd have worn it like it was tailored, because to me it would have been.
In that light I looked exactly like the woman everyone already assumed she was.
The effortless one. The one the money liked back.
I'd read every review of that place. I didn't book it by accident.
I read the one-stars the way other women read the five-stars, hungry, taking notes.
No air conditioning. Staff insists it's "the philosophy.
" Wi-Fi is a rumor. Could not leave. Trapped four days in a beautiful prison.
Beautiful prison. I laughed at that one, alone at my kitchen table at two in the morning, and then the laugh curdled, because a decent person doesn't laugh at that.
"You're brooding," Grant said. He'd come up behind me, jacket off, sleeves rolled, the way he does when he's decided to enjoy himself. "Don't brood. We earned this."
Earned. I let it sit. That he believed it undid me a little every time.
He honestly thought he'd earned the suite, the champagne, the card with his wife's money moving invisibly underneath.
A week before, planning this in a hotel bar forty minutes from both our houses, he'd said, I'm tired of being the luckiest man in the room.
I want to be the best one for a change. And I'd put my hand over his on the bar and thought, I can do that.
I can make you the best man in the room.
It's the one thing I've ever been good at.
"I'm not brooding. I'm looking at the view."
"View's this way." He turned me by the shoulders toward the room instead of the window, toward the bed and the flowers and the little envelope of spa vouchers fanned on the pillow, and he kissed me like a man who'd made a decision and was relieved it was over.
"Four days," he said against my mouth. "Four days where nobody looks at me and thinks, there's the one who married a Whitmore. "
There it was. I filed it with the rest, because a woman in my position learns to file things.
"Nobody here knows what a Whitmore is," I said.
We went down to dinner and I watched him become the man he wanted to be, and I helped.
The ma?tre d' put us at a two-top by the window, and Grant did his thing, learned the man's name in ten seconds and used it in the last, thank you, Emil, this is perfect.
Emil beamed the way people always beamed at Grant, because Grant made being useful to him feel like a promotion.
He ordered a wine he couldn't have named blind and described it back to the sommelier like he'd grown up on it, and the sommelier played along, because that's the deal at that level, everyone agrees to pretend.
I sat across from him in a dress I'd bought for exactly this table and felt the whole room arrange itself around him, and through him, faintly, around me, and I thought: this.
This is what I've spent my life outside of with my nose on the glass.
"You're doing the face," Grant said.
"What face."
"The one where you're keeping score." Fond about it. He topped up my glass. "You don't have to keep score here. There's nobody to beat. It's just us."
But there's always somebody to beat. Grant wanted to stop being measured; I wanted, once, to win the measuring.
And that night, with Emil hovering and the wine open and the black water sliding past the window, I let myself believe I had.
I reached across the little table and took his hand and said, "Tell me about the office," because that was the fastest way to make him glow, and he told me — the deals, the men who reported to him, the corner he'd fought his way into.
I asked the right follow-ups and never once said the name Whitmore.
He glowed and glowed, and neither of us said the true thing.
That every deal he'd closed had ridden a name that wasn't his, in a company he'd married into, and that the corner office had a family portrait in the lobby he passed every morning, and it wasn't his family.
"Exactly." He pulled back and grinned, and for a second he was twenty-five, the version of himself he was always trying to get back to. "Four days where nobody gets to tell me I'm lucky. Nobody looking at Claire's father and then at me. Just a man who booked a suite for a beautiful woman."
A man who booked a suite. He'd tapped the card at the terminal himself, and I'd watched him do it, watched the little green light, watched him tuck the card back with the quiet satisfaction of a man paying his own way, and I hadn't said a word about whose name sat on the account underneath, because saying it would have broken the spell, and the spell was the whole point. The spell was what I was buying.
I let him kiss me again. I let him believe he was the man who booked the suite. It cost me nothing, and I knew exactly what I was doing.
Out past the glass, the island was almost gone.
Claire, I thought. I could see her stepping off that van.
She'd be gracious about the villa — that was the maddening thing, she'd be gracious, because complaining would mean admitting she'd noticed the gap between this and the life she was born into, and she'd sooner die than be caught noticing.
What I'd have given to be embarrassed by a five-star room.
She'd forgive me the trip, too. Claire never spent anger she didn't have to.
By the time she worked out the truth, if she ever did, it would just be a story we told.
Remember the year Viv's aunt broke her hip and we got stranded at that awful place?
And I'd be home inside my own life, except now it would have a new room in it, and nobody would ever know I'd lifted the key while she wasn't looking.
Nobody gets hurt, I told myself, if Claire never finds out.
I set the champagne down and picked up the spa vouchers. "There's a couples' massage at four. Under your name."
"Under my name," Grant said, pleased, and reached for me, and behind him the last of the island slid off the edge of the window and was gone.