Chapter 16
Monday evening, Greene household
G abby pulled into the garage and parked in front of a steel shelf with boxes of Christmas ornaments, tennis rackets they never used, and her grandmother’s dishes. She’d never been so glad to see her old, useless crap. She was home safe. No more pretending and no more wondering what everyone thought of her nose or whether she was talking to a killer—not that anyone at eStocks seemed like a killer. They seemed like standard office people: an annoying brownnoser, a hungover twentysomething, and a couple of guys who golfed.
With a deep, cleansing breath, she tried to wipe eStocks from her mind. Sure, the kids had been all “we don’t care about you getting a job, Mom” this morning, but they probably missed her this afternoon. What wouldn’t she give to be picked up by someone who brought her a snack and asked how her day was?
“Kids, I’m home!” Gabby called as she came through the garage door and chucked her shoes into a pile with the rest of them. Their backpacks were tossed carelessly in the hallway—meaning no one had touched their homework yet. “Kyle, Lucas, where are you?” she called, eagerly awaiting their smiling faces and hugs.
“I’m a vegetarian, Dad!” came a strident protest from the kitchen.
Yikes.
“I’m not making steak or anything,” Phil said.
“Chicken. Is. Meat.”
“Come on, Kyle. It’s not like chickens have personalities.”
“You don’t have a personality, Dad.”
Gabby stepped tentatively into the kitchen and waved. “I’m home!” She smiled like she hadn’t heard Kyle suggest Phil had no more personality than a chicken.
At the moment, Phil looked like he could reheat chicken with the look on his face alone.
She smiled and said, “Thanks again for taking care of dinner.”
Kyle had been flirting with going vegetarian for a while, her commitment usually related to how recently she’d listened to her favorite vegetarian TikToker or if Gabby was serving meat loaf for dinner. She knew her meat loaf sucked. It’s just that she had subscribed to HelloFresh for a while, and the mini–meat loaf with garlic mash recipe was so good. Everyone gobbled it up, and she’d been trying to re-create that night ever since. Why couldn’t she make it on her own?
“Dad”—Kyle said his name like he’d committed a crime—“I am a vegetarian. I am fourteen years old. You cannot make me eat chicken.” She looked at Gabby for backup. “Right, Mom? You said I should live my truth.”
On the one hand, she had left the chicken for Phil to heat up. If they didn’t eat it, she was going to be the one stuck coming up with something else. On the other hand, it was nice to watch Phil struggle through dinner. “Um…”
Kyle put her hands on her hips and stared both her parents down. “The carbon costs of eating meat are going to destroy this planet.”
Phil fired back, “If that’s your only problem, then let’s buy some carbon credits and eat the damn chicken. You can offset anything.”
“Only if you’re rich.”
“What do you want me to do then, offset my dinner and give a homeless guy twenty bucks?”
“That would be better.” A little softer, Kyle said, “Dad, can you just bring Dr. Piggie back?”
Fucking Phil. Gabby rubbed her temples. This was too much after spending a day trying to convince money launderers she was Camille Walker. Hell, she had learned to use Excel today. That had required equations and math, neither skills that Markus had advertised.
“What’s Lucas doing?” she asked Phil.
“Playing a game, I don’t know. Not complaining about dinner at least.”
Gabby sighed. That didn’t sound promising. Lucas was not the kind of kid you could leave to his own devices for long periods of time. You’d think Phil would know that by now.
With a weight on her chest, she walked toward the living room. “Lukie, where are you??”
An ominously gleeful squeal sounded.
Sure enough, Gabby stepped into the living room to find Lucas and Mr. Bubbles covered in paint. She’d left the house for one day, and her children and bichon had gone feral. All she wanted to do was go undercover and work for the CIA. Was that too much to ask? She laughed, not in glee but in despair. Mr. Bubbles trotted over to her with his tail wagging, leaving a trail of blue paw prints.
Lest he misread her reaction, she firmed her face into a mask of disapproval. “Lucas, I need you to clean this up right now.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. I was just doing my homework and…”
She gave him an “I don’t want to hear it” look and repeated herself. “Clean this up right now. I want all the paint back in the cabinet immediately. You are going to clean the rug too.” Even as she said it, she knew that was impossible. She’d have to rent one of those hundred-pound Rug Doctors from the hardware store, lug it home, and spend a couple of hours shampooing the carpet. What had Phil even been doing?
Back in the kitchen, Phil was taking the chicken out of the oven. During the argument over how many carbon credits were needed to offset one dead chicken, he’d managed to almost blacken it, which she was guessing would cost him more credits.
Shaking his head, he dropped it on the counter unceremoniously and poured himself a glass of wine. “You want one?”
She did, but also, why was he staying? He was the one who decided to leave. He couldn’t just drop by and pour himself some wine and act like everything was fine, like they were in it together. They hadn’t been in it together for a long time.
“Phil, I asked you to watch the kids tonight, but it was not an invitation for anything more.”
“Gabs”—he gave her a palms-up, “I come in peace” gesture—“it’s just a glass of wine. I screwed up dinner. Let me make it up to you and order a pizza.”
“I’ve had a long day, Phil.” Something about the way he called her “Gabs” like he used to didn’t work. She was tired, and cracking up, and she didn’t want Phil to be the one to talk her down. That was Justin’s job at the moment. She glanced out the window in the direction of his house.
“Who hasn’t had a long day? What do you think I’ve been doing?” He gestured to the burnt chicken.
The absurdity hit her, and she let out a peal of laughter that made her sound like she was on edge, which she probably was. Cooking dinner for an ungrateful family—first time he had tried her job.
“Oh no, it’s your crazy laugh,” he said. “What kind of pizza do you want—the Athena with extra olives from Biggio’s?”
He couldn’t weasel his way back into her life with a handful of olives and an on-point pizza order, but still. At this moment, it counted for something. Divorced or not, Phil knew her better than almost anyone—at least in some ways. Netflix preferences, the ratty T-shirts she wore to bed at night, the fact that she liked an insane amount of Greek olives on her pizza. The familiar routines of married life played across her mind in a montage of comfy nights on the couch as she said, “Sure, I’ll have a glass of wine, and if you want to stay for dinner…”
Phil filled her wineglass a little too full. “Just drink the wine, and I’ll order a pizza. We can decide if Kyle is going to become a vegetarian tomorrow.”
She wandered out to the living room, tossed a blanket over the blue smudges on the couch, and settled herself into the inviting embrace of an overstuffed and much-abused sectional. It may have been vomited on, spilled on, and covered in blue paw prints—but it was her mess. Sort of like the marriage she was currently revisiting.
“Lucas. Kyle! We’re getting a pizza,” she called. Getting a pizza—it was admitting defeat, calling a truce. “Come pick out a show with me!”
She never allowed TV on school nights.
Lucas plopped down next to her with a “Sorry, Mom.”
“Lucas, you know better than to mess around with paints on the carpet.” She gave him a stern look. “You are getting to be a big boy.”
“I cleaned it up.”
Ragged wet paper towels tinged with blue were in a pile on the carpet, evidence that he’d tried to clean. It looked quite a bit worse.
“Thanks, sweetie. That’s a good start. Go throw the paper towels away, and we’ll start a show.”
After they’d booted up an episode of Nailed It! , something they could all agree on, Kyle slunk into the room as if she hadn’t just fought her dad about a chicken. After enough time had passed and her angst mixed with the regular air in the room (kind of like introducing a goldfish to a tank), Kyle looked up and said, “You should be on this show, Mom.”
Gabby laughed. “You’re right.” She was a walking Pinterest fail. She’d tried to make Kyle a Frozen cake when she was little, including a hand-drawn picture of Elsa. At the party, everyone had asked why Shrek was blue.
Kyle said, “Remember when you volunteered in Ms. Mendoza’s class, and you were supposed to make Easter bunnies out of cotton balls?”
Gabby chuckled at the memory. Ms. Mendoza had held Gabby’s project up as an example of what not to do, not realizing an adult had made it.
Her kids were fine. Pizza was good. Everything was okay, except what had she been thinking with Phil?
Looking far too comfortable, he settled into his favorite La-Z-Boy. Just like old times, he pulled out his phone and started scrolling. Lucas yelled, “Dad,” and Phil didn’t look up. Relying on Phil to watch the kids at night was not going to work, at least until he got his own place. His hotel room had one bed and a mini-fridge. Sure, he had a pool, but it just didn’t feel stable. There was literally no place for the kids.
Three episodes of Nailed It! later, Gabby sent Lucas to brush his teeth. “Kyle, did you get your homework done?” She should have asked a couple of hours ago, but better late than never. Phil, meanwhile, reclined his chair even more.
Gabby cleared her throat. “Thanks for the pizza, Phil, but I think we should wrap this up.”
“You sure?” he asked, clearly angling to stay the night. While it had been nice that someone knew her pizza order, she did not need to finish the night faking an orgasm, not that she had ever owed him that courtesy. She should have been honest with him and herself from the beginning.
In her chapter on truth, Sloane had said that a relationship built on fake orgasms is a house of cards, ready to go down. Maybe you thought you were being polite. You were also lying—to him and to yourself.