Chapter 2
Ilena
Friday Morning
One Day After the Outing
blackout shades is definitely a passive-aggressive reaction to their last conversation.
Though technically, their last conversation wasn’t a conversation at all. It was a request. One she said yes to, easily, more
easily than she expected considering the request was to end their marriage.
She sits up, feeling groggy, like when she takes a sleeping pill too late and doesn’t log enough hours. She tries to open
her eyes, but the light’s so bright, she can’t focus. She aches everywhere. She had that one strawberry mule, just the one.
She didn’t drink enough to warrant feeling like this. It’s Mallory’s fault. Somehow. Everything is Mallory’s fault lately.
Ilena searches for her silk eye mask. Finding nothing, she pulls the covers higher.
The sheets slip through her fingers, the surface slicker than usual.
She opens her eyes fully, the sheen of what should be her normally soft bamboo sheets registering behind the fact that they’re a light blue, not white.
The xylophone tone of her cell precedes its buzzing against the nightstand. She shakes her head, trying to reconcile that
Jonah not only changed the sheets but changed the sheets as she checks the clock beside the bed. The bright red numbers of 8:08 glare at her. What the hell is Jonah up
to? They bought her round analog clock together in that store in Newburyport that smelled like Earl Grey tea and old wood.
Neither had known what the rose compass inside was called, and it leaned more heavily on the kitsch side than Ilena’s sophisticated
tendencies. But Jonah had been the one to suggest it, a memento of the weekend spent on Plum Island, the weekend they were
sure they exceeded the world record for number of orgasms in a single day. They rolled in ocean waves and cotton sheets and
promised they’d return every year. That was four years ago. They’ve never been back. All they had to show for it was the clock,
which Jonah apparently passive-aggressively moved, and a straw beach bag that came with the hotel room. They use it to hold
guest towels, though they haven’t had any guests in a long time. Still, she’ll take the tote. And the clock. Is this her life
now? Tagging twenty-one years of knickknacks and plates like they were at an estate sale?
Her phone continues its escalating ringtone, and she reaches for it. Aubrey’s name scrolls across the lock screen, and Ilena
hesitates. As much as she understands and sympathizes with her friend’s fear of making choices, not having a belief of her
own is costing them all. It may even cost them AIM.
Except Ilena can’t honestly expect Aubrey to weigh in on canceling the direct listing when she doesn’t have all the facts—let alone the key fact: that AIM’s explosive success isn’t real.
AIM’s exponential growth in users and subsequent high valuation is partly due to a computer error replicating accounts instead of actual humans signing up in droves. And only Ilena and Mallory know.
Pushing AIM into the spotlight now, without reconciling the fake accounts, isn’t a risk, it’s an unpinned grenade. It will
go off. It will ruin AIM and everyone who gave up ski weekends and Cabo vacations and having kids when they were young to
help build it.
But Mallory keeps on shoving, no matter what Ilena says.
Entwined as rope and as disparate as oil and water. That’s been her relationship with Mallory since the beginning. Ilena’s
self-aware enough to realize that her judgmental nature, the thing she can’t seem to fully unlearn from her mother, can be
as detrimental as Mallory’s no-holds-barred approach. Their long friendship has been a system of checks and balances for them
both.
But the system has broken. The weight of their secrets has shattered it.
When Mallory came to Ilena a little over a month ago with the discovery of the duplicate accounts, they mourned together.
The AIM they’d built was a success. Just not at the level they thought it was.
Still, it was theirs, the manifestation of twenty-one years of friendship and partnership. It had been incredible and fulfilling
and hard, and this would be the hardest. But they wouldn’t let a software malfunction be their end. They’d fix it together.
They agreed on that. What they couldn’t agree on was how. Aubrey’s fragile state after Ethan meant keeping the truth from
her, which meant keeping the truth from everyone, a decision that united Ilena and Mallory, that justified Ilena giving Mallory
the time she’d asked for to try to make it right—part of Ilena perhaps truly believing that Mallory could fix it because Mallory’s determination made her capable of anything. They are now a week out from going public. Nothing is
fixed. And this, this is wrong.
Except not to Mallory, who isn’t bound by rules or guilt or right or wrong. It’s who she’s always been. Ilena loves her because of and in spite of it.
But that’s not Ilena, and she won’t let it become her. Ilena has every choice in the world, but yesterday, before the outing,
she gave just one to Mallory: Either we cancel the direct listing or I’m leaving AIM.
And with the issuing of that ultimatum, Ilena erased decades of sophisticated decorating and baking her own rugelach and loving
the man she’s married to, all things done partly to ensure she is nothing like her mother.
Ilena refuses to be a woman on the cusp of forty, divorced, with a grenade of a company in her pocket.
The barrage comes like an assault.
The red spreading across his shirt. The smell of alcohol. The shattering of glass.
Ilena shoves the ensuing nausea away. She crushes the still-ringing phone in her hand, and guilt makes her answer Aubrey’s
call.
“Ilena! Is that you? Do I have you? Please tell me it’s you. I have no idea what to do, and I must have really messed up and—”
“Aubrey.” Ilena tries to cut her off, but the nonstop rambling continues, intensifying the throbbing in Ilena’s head. She
tries to sit up, but her lower back screams at her.
“But I’m naked, and I can’t find my clothes, and—”
Naked?
“Aubrey!” Ilena propels herself into a seated position. She bangs her head against a panel of hard wood behind her where the
upholstered linen should be and a wetness spreads beneath her. She thinks she may have just peed herself a little. Which makes
her snap, “Aubrey, slow down, just slow down.”
Ilena breathes deeply, but each inhale somehow squeezes her lungs.
“Okay, okay,” Aubrey says. “It’s just . . . I have no idea what to do. I mean, I think, I must have slept with him. Oh, Ilena, how could I have slept with him? With . . . with anyone?”
“Who, Aubrey, who?” Ilena blinks as her eyes finally begin to adjust to the brightness of the room—a brightness whose intensity
she begins to understand as she takes in the gleaming white walls and shiny metal sconces and reflective glass dresser all
where her Coventry Gray walls and blue porcelain lamps and driftwood chest should be. Either Jonah completely redecorated
overnight or she spent the night somewhere else.
“Kai, didn’t I say that? My new employee? My maybe-college-aged new employee. Oh god, please tell me he’s eighteen. Employees
have to at least be eighteen, right?”
“Are you sure?”
“That’s what I’m asking you!”
“I meant are you sure you slept with him.”
“I think so? I don’t remember.” Aubrey scoffs. “I’m a thirty-two-year-old cliché. Blackout drunk at a summer outing. I had
those mules, two of them, and I guess I haven’t really been drinking much since Ethan, but I don’t even remember getting home
last night.”
“Neither do I,” Ilena realizes, starting to wonder if someone slipped something into their drinks just as she’s seized by
a desperate urge to pee—that bit of wetness a warning. She presses her hand against her bladder. It’s hard and full, so full,
so . . . huge, actually. She looks down and can no longer hear Aubrey, just a buzzing in her ears, and her head swims and
dark spots float before her eyes, and the phone falls from her hand.
She gently swings one leg, then the other off the mattress, her feet landing on an ebony hardwood floor instead of a crisp,
white rug. She lifts her tent of a nightshirt. Sets a hand on her bare skin, a too-tight, diamond-crusted emerald the size
of a kidney bean on her ring finger where her opal should be and the swollen belly of a pregnant woman in place of her Pilates-toned
stomach.
Circled dates on calendars and endless data input into apps and contradicting trackers and choreographed sex and a diet of bee pollen and no caffeine and piles of peed-on sticks blaring one line, never two, and hope and sorrow and heartache and fights and fights and fights and this can’t be . . . can’t be . . .
Be what?
She skims her palm along her stretched skin, barely touching, as if the weight of her hand will make what’s underneath disappear.
She lowers a pinkie. Hard. Her ring finger.
Like a soccer ball. Her middle and index fingers.
Warm, so warm. Then her thumb and the flat of her palm, and this thing that can’t be real insists on proving the opposite because it moves.
A flutter of bubbles grazing her skin. She stills.
She wants it to happen again, she needs it to, because this isn’t real.
She’s dreaming a dream that she can only make reality in the confines of her mind. Her mind is cruel.
She calls out, “Aubrey, you’re dreaming. Go back to sleep. I’ll see you at work.”
Ilena finds her phone and presses the red button to end the call. She sets the phone on the nightstand and curls herself back
under the sheets she’d never have purchased that actually feel glorious against her skin. Jonah would relish stealing these,
rolling them to his side of the bed like always while simultaneously knocking one of his sci-fi novels onto the floor, waking
her, but not himself. She’s settling in to savor whatever is left of this dream when she hears the tapping of footsteps. If