Chapter XI
XI
We pause on the landing of my stoop as I dig around my bag for my keys. Behind me, I sense Reid’s gaze sweep over me. I can’t seem to get my hands to work. Or my eyes.
“You sure you want more alcohol?” Reid jokes.
“This is not an alcohol problem,” I say. I tear open my bag and stick my face halfway into it, attempting to decode the shapeless mass of objects inside. “This is a reading-glasses problem. They seem to be the one object I didn’t put in here.”
Reid laughs, low in his chest. “Oh, there are glasses now? Hot.”
I turn and raise an eyebrow at him. “Noted.”
I finally find the keys and open the door.
Reid follows me into the foyer, where I put my bag down on the vintage oak console.
I sense him silently taking in the space: the celadon walls, the layered rugs in the living room, the black-and-white-checkered floors in the kitchen, and the antique, fluted green-glass chandelier hanging above us.
“This is a special place,” he says. “It’s very Lili.”
“There’s a lot of history here. And not all of it strictly mine. So I’ll take that as a win.”
I give him the CliffsNotes version of how I came to own this place: With immense foresight, my parents bought the Greek Revival townhouse in 1983, when it was worth about one-sixtieth of what it is now.
They let it sit in its partially dilapidated state until fifteen years later, when they offered it to James and me as a wedding gift. We moved in and fixed it up.
Over the past twenty years, I’ve been nudged to sell by plenty of piratical realtors, but I’m never going to do it.
This is where I created my first home, even if that was with James.
This is where we brought Emme home from the hospital, where we experienced all her firsts together.
And after James moved out, this is where Emme and I made another home together, just the two of us. This is my family’s legacy.
Now I lead Reid toward the back of the house into the kitchen, which looks out onto the small garden.
I’m proud of this place, but with Reid here, I can’t help but notice all the things I keep meaning to take care of and putting off—weeding, finally Googling how to remove the stain Emme’s blue nail polish left on the marble counter a year ago.
I wonder what Reid’s house looks like; I can’t imagine it isn’t orderly and calm, like him.
He grabs a stool at the island while I pull out a bottle of champagne from the fridge. It’s probably too expensive for the occasion, left over from the small New Year’s Eve party I hosted months ago, but if not now, when?
There’s a catalog for an outdoor clothing company sitting on the counter. Reid drags it toward him and starts absentmindedly flipping through it.
“Flute or coupe?” I move to the cabinet above the sink.
“Either.” In the catalog, Reid points at a complicated-looking jacket with about ten thousand pockets and a utility belt hanging off the hem. “You’d look good in this.”
“Reading glasses and performance wear, huh? I see your tastes have evolved.”
“My taste is for the woman wearing the reading glasses and performance wear.”
Our gazes lock. A current hums between us, low and steady, but ready to crest with the barest friction. His eyes are darker now, looking at me like I’m something he’s been thinking about for days. Years.
My body responds before my mind can intervene—a buzz in my chest that flutters down to my hands. They itch to feel the fine layer of stubble on his jaw, the softness of his hair.
I should say something to acknowledge this frisson between us.
Instead, I break eye contact and turn toward the sink, busying myself with rinsing out the flute glasses, which have collected a shimmer of dust. The water runs too hot, but I don’t adjust it, letting the sting of it ground me back into my body, tug me away from the fantasy.
Still, I feel him watching, his gaze landing between my shoulder blades.
“I don’t know how this place got my address, but they’ve been shaming me with these catalogs for years.” I force my voice into an even tenor and turn back to the island, drying off the glasses. “I’ve never gone camping in my life.”
Reid looks at me in mock horror. “Never? Not even a cabin in the woods?”
“That sounds like my personal nightmare.”
“I hate to add to the shaming, but I think you’re missing out. The quiet, the calm . . . it’s really special. I started taking Gracie out to Big Bear from the time she was three. By six, she was catching fish and starting fires herself.”
I let that sit for a minute, waiting for him to go on. I notice that he said I, not we. I know I won’t be able to focus until he shares the rest of this story.
“Just the two of you?”
He nods. “Just us.”
Reid flips through the catalog while I pour the wine, wondering how best to broach this subject.
But then I’m just as quickly distracted by the way he concentrates on each page, how his eyes scan each word, a hand pressed over his mouth.
How he offers even the most inconsequential things the dignity of his attention.
“Lili,” he says casually, his gaze still fixed on a high-end portable fire pit. “I can hear you thinking.”
I slide a glass toward him, then take a sip from my own, the bubbles bursting in my mouth. I lean against the island.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t mean to pry. I know this was supposed to be our having-fun time.”
“Yeah. I can see how the dead wife gets in the way of that.” He says it jokingly, but I can still hear the strain in his voice.
“It can’t be easy to share that with people you barely know. Or maybe—maybe sometimes it’s easier to share with someone you barely know.”
Reid nods, then looks out the sliding glass doors to the backyard. “It’ll be ten years in September. Gracie was seven.”
When he turns back to me, I see a slackness in his face, a dullness in his eyes. It doesn’t look right on him. I want to put him back the way he was.
He tilts his flute toward me. “Might need something stronger than this.”
I hold up a finger and duck into the locked butler’s pantry, where I stashed all the hard alcohol once Emme started middle school.
I come back with a bottle of whiskey and pull out two coffee mugs from our prolific collection of flea market finds: “I’m Too Sexy for 40,” reads one with a Sex and the City–era black-and-pink color theme; the other is a classic diner mug, half an inch thick with a proud blue stripe running around the rim.
I pour a healthy glug into each and slide him the sexy mug. He looks at it and raises an eyebrow at me.
“It’s true,” I say, innocently.
“You think it’s true now, you should’ve seen me when I was actually forty.”
I gesture toward the mug. “Better?”
He takes a sip and nods. “That’s good shit.”
“Got me through my divorce.”
I watch him readjust in the stool. He has another sip, bolstering himself, and takes a breath.
Exhales. “Thea was one of the most charismatic people I have ever known. When she walked into a room, the energy shifted. I never understood what people meant when they talked about ‘star quality’ until I met her.”
“Where did you two meet?”
“On a movie. A little indie my writing partner and I did in 2003. Our main character was an escort who witnesses an accidental homicide. This was at a time when sex workers were portrayed pretty one-dimensionally in movies, so we had our work cut out for us. We were confident in where our writing ended up, but I honestly wasn’t sure we had the budget to get an actor who could play her the right way.
But when I watched Thea on set, I just .
. . I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
She was magic. She completely disappeared into the part.
And when she reemerged, she was still so luminous.
” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. You’d think I’d be able to describe her better after knowing her for so many years, but I just always struggle to do her justice. ”
I nod, maybe too emphatically. Not being able to describe people with words—it’s why I take photos.
“And I loved her, I really did. But I also loved that she loved me, you know? I loved that this otherworldly person somehow thought that I was important enough to be loved.”
I’m distracted by the idea that Reid—Reid—would ever think himself unworthy of love. But I nod. “I think I understand that.”
“Yeah?” Reid looks up at me from underneath a heavy brow, his voice hoarse. Seeking validation. To know that he’s not alone.
“I promise I’ll stop talking about him, but it’s a bit how I felt about James.
When I met him, I was twenty-three, directionless, still living with Nisha in Alphabet City.
And here was this twenty-eight-year-old doctor, clean-shaven and well-dressed.
He thought my lifestyle was romantic and interesting, even though the bohemian thing was entirely unintentional.
He made me feel like I was worth something, and I thought that maybe, with his influence, I could get myself together—be worthy of him. ”
“Funny,” he says. “We both married people we thought we didn’t deserve.”
“Funny is one word,” I say.
Reid clears his throat. “Thea had a troubled childhood, was in and out of rehab throughout her teens and into her early twenties. She’d been in recovery for almost five years when I met her, but I think our relationship gave her an extra boost of stability she could never quite find on her own.
For the first few years of our relationship, she was holding down jobs, maintaining her friendships, taking good care of her health.
But when we had Gracie . . . it’s like we tripped a wire.
She started using again soon after Gracie was born.
When Gracie was three, Cat and I got Thea to go back into rehab, found her a therapist she liked.
She was working the program again. She was good again, for a while. ”
Reid looks out the window, like he’s lost to the memory.