Chapter 24 France #2
For a week, I started drafts of a post detailing what Ms. Ardley had done, painting her as the worst kind of embittered, striving, sleazy hag.
I looked at the screenshots I’d saved in the secure photo-vault app on my phone, texts from her in which she said incriminating things.
There were even a few where she mocked her powerful benefactor and paramour, Gavin Yates.
I knew those were pure gold. He’s a vain monster, and if I published messages in which she called him “a clod with all the sex appeal of a crow eating roadkill,” their alliance would be over.
But dammit, I couldn’t do it. Who am I now?
All I could think of was how such poisonous gossip had hurt Sage.
CJ Ardley may deserve payback, but I won’t stoop to her level and be the one to bestow it.
I’m not that man anymore. Whatever my future holds—with or without my Salvia officinalis—knowing Sage (and knowing myself a little better) has changed me.
When I do publish my first In the Mirrors post after the hiatus, the tone is different than it’s been in the past. Rather than gossip, it’s more race analysis, combined with some comically self-deprecating material about my travels.
I can’t help throwing in a bit of glowing praise for Sage, hoping she’ll see it.
At any rate, I end up deleting the screenshots of CJ’s messages, and to my surprise, I’m relieved. I feel free, like I can finally take a full breath, having removed some stifling, sweaty plastic Halloween mask after a lifetime of hiding behind it.
It turns out that CJ gets her comeuppance anyway, as tends to happen.
She calls me two weeks after Badrick’s wedding. I’m back in London, picking up pastries at Forno. (I can’t say a steady diet of maritozzi, pain au chocolat, and red wine is improving my performance at the gym, but at least I’m eating again.)
I pull my mobile from a pocket, balancing the pastry box on my other arm as I exit the bakery. “Ms. Ardley, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“You’re not going to get away with this,” she grits out. “I know it must’ve been you who put my daughter up to writing those things.”
I wander leisurely toward the kerb where the Austin-Healey is parked. “I assure you, I’ve never met your daughter. To what are you referring, pet?”
“Don’t play dumb with me,” she rants. “What she said on her blog, obviously! About how I’ve ‘ruined our relationship’ by reporting entirely accurate information about Sage and Julian Sikora, how I’m ‘having a midlife crisis,’ calling me a ‘social climber’ and saying Gavin put the moves on her when we met up with her and her husband vacationing in Croatia.
Making up those disgusting things he supposedly said, proposing a threesome!
And worst of all, revealing private messages, stuff I’d told her confidentially about him. I can’t—”
“Carol-Jeanne, love, let me get this straight: Your child expressed that your actions, slagging off her close friends, have damaged your mother-daughter relationship. She called you out for toxic behavior. She said that the ‘No Pity Chef’—a man universally recognized to be a womanizer and bully—propositioned her. Please, a moment of self-awareness. Are you claiming that any of this is unlikely?”
“I’m not saying it’s unlikely. I’m saying the tone is cruel.”
“Again, listen to yourself. Does it sound strangely familiar? Like… oh, I don’t know… the logical consequences of things you set in motion?”
“You must have set it in motion!” she seethes. “Sage dropped you cold—everyone knows it—because she figured you’re the one who gave me those tidbits about Julian.”
“She ‘figured’ it because you strongly implied as much.”
“Yeah? Good. Because it’ll take a lawsuit to get me to reveal my mole at the rehab.” After a pause, she sighs, switching to the weary, chiding tone of disappointed nanny. “Oh, Al. We coulda done something great together, you and me. But you got swayed by that little tramp and lost your edge.”
Reaching my car, which has the top down, I set the pastry box on the passenger seat.
“I couldn’t be happier to have retired my ‘edge.’ I’ve wounded enough people with it over the years.
Not that you need my advice, pet, but you might be happier—and your estranged daughter certainly will be—if you spend less time sharpening yours. Best of luck to you.”
I hang up and pocket my mobile. Leaning against the car, I look up at the smoochingly perfect late-June sky, streaked with clouds, and feel a wash of something like peace for the first time in five weeks. It’s going to be okay. Different, but okay. As long as Sage is happy.
I reached out to her via email (though I can’t be sure it’s the right one—I think she has several accounts) after Badrick’s wedding, as promised, but got no reply.
I then made the mistake of trying to get a message to Sage through Phaedra Morgan, and she shut me down handily, responding, You know what it means when a woman won’t reply to your overtures, right? Fuck off and leave my driver alone.
So that’s it. My Salvi is no longer my Salvi. It’s over.
I have Google alerts set for her, of course. I haven’t seen any paparazzi snapshots of her hitting the clubs yet, but it’s just a matter of time. I’m steeling myself for the pain that will come the first time I see pics of her on someone’s arm.
As I take out my car keys, my attention is drawn to a young boy dragging his mother by the hand over to the window of the bakery, pointing and pleading. She looks harried, trying for stern but telegraphing grief as she tells him, “It’s too expensive! We have buns at home.”
For some reason, the pale, lanky, dark-haired tot reminds me of the one in Bahrain to whom I gave a biscuit just before he swiped my mobile.
I remember striding into Sage’s driver room later that day, confronting her about her practical joke sending me out to the shops for those ridiculous items. The frustration I felt that she already had the upper hand where my heart was concerned.
The electricity between us when I touched her sternum with a fingertip.
How she boldly held her ground, eyes glittering.
Taking the pastry box from my seat, I hold it out to the boy and his mother as she hauls him away from the bakery window. “Please, take these. My treat.”
“Can we?” the boy begs his mother.
Her eyes narrow with suspicion, so I manufacture a quick white lie to make the offer seem less dubious. “It was the wrong order, so they gave it to me for free.” I lift the box another inch toward them. “It’ll just go to waste, truly.”
The boy hangs off his mother’s sleeve. “Pleeeeeease?”
Her arms lift, and I hand over the box.
“Maritozzi, lemon curd buns, and cornetto al pistacchio,” I tell her. “You’re doing me a favor.”
“Thank you,” she manages. The boy gazes at me like I’m the Saint Nick of sweets.
On the drive home, I feel lighter. Not just because I’ve divested myself of a kilo of baked goods and am vowing I’ll have muesli and fruit for breakfast, but because in this moment, after CJ’s call, I have a sense of closure.
The breakup with Sage hasn’t stopped hurting and may never heal completely. She will always be the ideal to me.
I’ll never have that again—the love I felt with her. No stepping in the same river twice, as it’s said. Once an unrepentant player, I now can’t stomach the thought of spending time with any woman other than Sage. But one day, perhaps, I’ll meet someone else… and deserve to.