Chapter 2
The sight of Logan Chase is so utterly improbable that there’s a moment when I wonder if I’ve imagined it. But I know I haven’t. Your imagination needs thoughts or images to spark off, and I almost never allow Logan inside my head anymore.
My next thought: Something truly horrible must have happened, and he’s come all this way to break the news in person and spare me the anguish of hearing it over the phone. But no, it can’t be that, either. Because the only horrible thing Logan could share has already happened—eight Octobers ago.
“Hello, Bree,” he says, offering a cautious smile. “I hope I didn’t scare you.”
“It’s more that I’m flabbergasted. What—what are you doing here?”
“It’s a fairly long story. Is it okay if I come in?”
I inhale deeply, absorbing his presence, or at least what I can make out from the light cast by the wrought-iron sconces on either side of the door.
He’s wearing jeans and a blue V-neck sweater—cashmere, I suppose—under an unzipped lightweight jacket.
The tip of a boarding pass pokes out from one of the jacket pockets.
“Of course.” Because what else am I going to say? He’s come for a reason, and I need to hear what in the world it is. Maybe he has health or financial issues he thinks I should know about, or his sister-in-law’s sick again. “You’ve rented a car, I take it?”
“Yeah, and I left it down by the gate. Will I be blocking anyone?”
“No, it’s okay there.”
I open the door even wider and gesture with my hand for him to enter. My pulse is still racing—not from fear anymore but the pure shock of his being here.
He steps inside. Now that he’s in better light, I see that he looks remarkably close to how he did when I last saw him, though his thick brown hair is silvery gray at the temples, and the crease that had begun to form between his blue-green eyes has deepened, like a tiny slice in his forehead.
He’s probably a few pounds heavier, too, but it’s barely noticeable.
“Have you driven all the way from Montevideo?”
“No, from the Punta del Este airport. But it was a forty-minute wait at the car rental counter—the guy was apparently on his dinner break—and then I kept getting lost, even with GPS . . . Where’s your partner—Sebastian?”
“In BA for a few days.”
He sweeps a hand through his hair and advances into the great room. I can see now that he’s tired, even a little frayed around the edges. But he’s doing his best to be chipper. I wouldn’t expect anything less.
“Do you want something to drink?” I ask, and not just to be polite. I need to sit, I realize. The last ten minutes have knocked the wind out of me. “Soda? A beer?”
“I’d love some water right now . . . It’s just good to be out of the car. And it’s good to see you, Bree.”
As I lead him through the house, I sense him swiveling his head behind me, checking out the place. I described it briefly on the phone to him just after I’d moved here, and texted a couple of pictures per his request, but I know the house is far more impressive in person.
When we reach the kitchen, I lift my chin toward the table and tell him to have a seat, but he takes a bit more time to look around.
Though the room wouldn’t be everyone’s favorite—it’s old-fashioned in style, with wooden beams running along the ceiling, white plaster walls, and a terra-cotta-tiled floor—Bas wanted something similar to the original kitchen.
“Very impressive,” Logan says, and I can tell from his tone that he means it. “Sebastian did this himself after his uncle died?”
“No, he’s not that handy, but he provided a lot of input. It’s more Argentine in style than Uruguayan. Spanish Colonial isn’t much of a thing here.”
He slips out of his jacket and finally drops into a chair at the wooden table.
“Have you had anything to eat tonight?” I ask almost instinctively.
Another smile, this one a bit sheepish. “No, unless you count the lovely Aerolíneas Argentinas first-class snack of stale cashews and mineral water.”
“Why don’t I make you a plate,” I say. “There’s some leftover food from dinner.”
So now I’ve both welcomed him inside and invited him to have a meal. But the past seems too past for me not to be considerate. Besides, Logan being Logan, he’ll find it easier to share with a plate of food in front of him.
“That’d be great, thanks.”
I pour him a glass of agua con gas, which I assume he still prefers over still, and then, following a moment’s deliberation, a small glass of red wine for each of us. After I reheat some of the chicken and rice on a plate in the microwave, I set it in front of him and sit in the chair opposite.
This is surreal, I think. And unsettling.
Logan raises his wineglass in salute. The skin on his fifty-nine-year-old hands is crinkly in places, I notice, probably sun damaged. He mentioned in an email a year or so ago that he was still an avid jogger.
“This looks delicious,” he says. “Did you make it?”
“No, our housekeeper did.”
He sighs contentedly, grabs his fork, and takes a bite with still-familiar gusto. For someone who owns and runs a restaurant-management company, Logan was never what you’d call a total foodie, but he likes to cook and relishes eating even more.
“Wait, is this chicken stroganoff?” he asks once he’s swallowed.
“Not a favorite anymore?”
“Still a favorite. But I was thinking you’d be knee-deep here in empanadas and cordero with chimichurri sauce.”
“Oh, there’s plenty of that, too.”
He chuckles and takes another bite. I’ve now done all the waiting I can stand.
“So,” I say, “why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here, over five thousand miles from home?”
He dabs at his mouth with a napkin, then levels his eyes on mine.
“I could ask the same of you, Bree,” he says.
“Very funny, but we’ve already been over that ground.”
And we have. After I decided to move in with Sebastian, putting an end to the crazy, once-a-month-and-never-enough-time-together commute we’d been doing between Manhattan and Buenos Aires, I informed Logan immediately of my plan.
In the years since our divorce, we’ve loosely stayed in touch, communicating a couple of times a year, by email or phone, about things like his sister-in-law’s cancer treatment and a few investments we still hold together.
And though it might have been secretly satisfying to catch him off guard and announce months after the move, “Oh, I’m actually not on the Upper West Side anymore; I live on a small farm called El Bosquecillo in the Uruguayan countryside,” that seemed too heartless to do.
“Believe it or not, I had business in Buenos Aires this week,” he says. “Curt and I are looking at a steak restaurant there that we might bring to the States, to various locations. And since I was so close, I thought I’d come to see you.”
He takes another bite of the stroganoff, sets the fork down, and rests his elbows on the table, cupping one hand over the other.
Maybe it’s that gesture, still so familiar, or being in a kitchen together after all this time—or both—but I’m swept back almost instantly to the night we met, sitting at someone’s long wooden dining table in Tribeca.
I was twenty-four at the time and a guest at a dinner party given by friends of a guy I’d been seeing casually for a month or two.
The hosts had a messy but charming loft-style apartment with a huge kitchen/dining area.
Logan had come alone, and for the first half of the evening, he’d mostly listened, keeping his eyes focused intently on people as they spoke.
When the conversation shifted from politics to food—including food as foreplay—he suddenly seemed in the mood to engage, and announced, “Well, food can be a total anti-aphrodisiac as well.” He proceeded to tell a story about trying to dazzle a woman by making shrimp étouffée, a type of stew, but he’d done the roux sauce all wrong so that the flour and wine hardened like plaster of paris around each piece of shrimp.
It made a crunching sound when they chewed, and the woman had ended up chipping a tooth.
People laughed, in part because of how he’d told the story, pausing in places for dramatic effect and chuckling at his own incompetence.
At one point he’d glanced down the table and held my gaze so tightly that my date turned to look at me, obviously wondering if Logan and I were already acquainted.
So I wasn’t all that shocked when he called a few days later, having wormed my number out of my date’s friends. He reintroduced himself and then got right to the point.
“Why don’t you let me cook you dinner one night,” he said.
“Shrimp in body casts?” I asked.
I heard him laugh softly.
“Only if that’s your preference.”
“No, something less crunchy, I think. I’d like to keep all my teeth.”
Though he had a bad-boy vibe, a trait I’d vowed to steer clear of going forward, I was in the mood for a short summer fling, and he seemed like the perfect candidate. Three nights later he made me the best spaghetti alle vongole I’d ever tasted, and I went to bed with him hours later.
“And you decided to show up without even calling?” I ask him now.
“I was afraid if I called from BA, you’d discourage me from coming—though as soon as I was in Punta, I did try, but the call wouldn’t go through on my phone.”
The story sounds completely lame, but that’s beside the point now.
Maybe . . . maybe he’s marrying Lisa, his girlfriend of the past year or so, and he’s decent enough to want to tell me to my face.
To my surprise, the thought roils me. Lisa isn’t the coworker he was screwing during the last months of our marriage, but she was once a colleague of his, and in my mind, I’ve let her become a vague icon of his infidelity.
My ex’s betrayal doesn’t hold a candle to what had happened to us the year before, but it hurt indescribably, creating a pile-on of pain that often took my breath away.
No, he’s smart enough not to show up at my door to talk about Lisa.