Chapter 14
Ilena
Friday Afternoon
One Day After the Outing
Ilena refuses to feel guilt. Aubrey saying Ethan was alive ignited deep pangs for not seeking out her husband. Jonah could
be someone else’s husband. Someone’s father, the impossibility in her world not the same here. Or maybe there is no Jonah
here. If Ethan is alive here, but not in their world, the opposite could be true of Jonah.
She places her hand on the back of the wheelchair, the bulge of the wedding band from Felix that she couldn’t get off judging
her from beneath the plastic glove. It doesn’t have the right. She’s not the one who asked for a divorce.
Aubrey snaps the elastic around her wrist a third time. Ilena bites her tongue. She knows that the last dead body they all
saw makes this harder, not easier.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Ilena says as Mallory’s and Aubrey’s arms lower into the chest, their hands reaching for the edges of the blanket they wrapped Grayson in what already feels like a lifetime ago.
“Morally, ethically, legally, it doesn’t matter where we are, this is wrong.
And it’s only going to make things worse because we won’t get away with this. ”
Mallory bends her legs to bear more of Grayson’s weight.
Ilena presses, “You can’t expect to keep lying without consequences.”
“Yes, I can.” Mallory grimaces as she heaves Grayson onto the edge of the chest.
Aubrey looks like she’s going to be sick, but still she hoists his legs out. She tests letting go, one hand, then the other.
The rigidity holds him in place. “I need a minute.”
Mallory adjusts her end of Grayson more firmly. “Go.”
Aubrey rushes into the powder room in the hall, closing the door behind her.
“She’s going to break,” Ilena says.
“We’ll take care of her,” Mallory says. “We always do.”
“Do we? Because Ethan—”
“Fucking Ethan. We can’t let her get sucked in by him again.”
“He’s her fiancé,” Ilena says. “Who died.”
“Unfortunately, not here.”
“You didn’t just say that.”
“We have to protect her,” Mallory says, and it’s déjà vu.
“And ourselves?” Ilena says. “Yourself? AIM’s all-important reputation?”
“Yes. What’s wrong with that?”
That Mallory could even ask the question at this very moment, with her hands on a dead Grayson, makes Ilena want to scream.
But then Mallory shifts the positions of those hands, revealing how much they’re shaking. She bites down hard on her lower
lip. It’s her tell, the one only Ilena is attuned to. Mallory is scared.
And all the resistance in Ilena dissolves. Despite their differences, this is the same: Ilena would do anything to protect
her best friends too.
Mallory leans against the chest and winces. She gestures to her pocket. “Can you . . . ? Texas is a pointy state.”
Ilena reluctantly steps into the cold air wafting from the open chest. She slides her hand into Mallory’s front pocket and
pulls out a key chain. Dangling from it are a dozen charms all in the shape of Texas. One silver with the single word home at the bottom, another with the bright blue bonnet state flower, one covered with a fuzzy black-and-white cow print. Their
Noreen wasn’t the kitschy type. “Did you get anything from Noreen other than her car?”
“You mean, did I ask her if she had ‘killing Grayson’ as an appointment on my calendar?”
“Okay, yes, that.”
“No,” Mallory says.
“But there was an outing, at the same place as ours, at least according to the receipt on my desk.”
“I know,” Mallory says. “It was in my calendar with about a thousand alerts not to forget. Oh, and Noreen asked for the strawberry
mule recipe. She wants to make them for us when we go back the night before we go public. For luck.”
“That too, then? Same bizarre family tradition?” Ilena drops the keys on the seat of the wheelchair. “That makes Noreen, Ella,
the outing, the direct listing, the valuation, all the same.” Ilena glances toward the bathroom. “I wonder then if—?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t it? If the error’s here too, we need to know. We have the same obligations. Maybe they were in the middle of dealing
with it themselves.” And maybe this Mallory’s way of dealing with it was to kill Grayson. Maybe that’s what her Mallory is
afraid to find out.
“Then we let them deal with it,” Mallory says. “We don’t belong here.”
But we are here is all Ilena can think. And that comes with certain responsibilities.
As she wraps her hands around the arms of the wheelchair they’re about to put Grayson in, she stares at the outline of the ring on her finger, grateful she left the emerald one at Felix’s.
She wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.
It’s how she felt about the opal from Jonah.
It had been a family piece. For the first few years of their marriage, the only way she’d wear it was with tape on the back.
She’d meant to take the opal off after they agreed to the divorce, to tuck it away in the box where Jonah kept his cuff links
and the old credit cards he was meaning to cut up but never got around to, but she hadn’t. It had been on her finger, just
like it had been for the past thirteen years, before she woke up here.
From the purse at her feet comes the same sound that woke her that morning. She pulls out her phone. “Felix,” she says.
“You have to answer it,” Mallory says.
Ilena takes a deep breath and offers a generic “Hello,” not knowing if she and Felix share a special greeting like “hey, babe”
or “hi, sweetie” or “hello, you.” She and Jonah don’t. In fact, she can’t remember the last time Jonah called instead of texted
her.
“How’s the singleton doing?” Felix uses the term for a single fetus that must be their nickname for the baby.
“Good.”
“Just good?” The excitement in Felix’s voice strains her. Jonah had the same, at the start. “Usually you’ve got some clever
euphemism for how he or she’s using you as a punching bag.”
That this Ilena makes jokes is strange enough, but that she makes jokes about the baby irks her. Must be nice.
“Well,” Ilena says, “today’s been somewhat overshadowed by other things.”
“The ultrasound, of course.” Felix’s tone sobers.
Ultrasound? She’d meant this place, Grayson in a blanket in front of her, Aubrey likely throwing up in the powder room. But
ultrasound? For the singleton?
“It’ll be fine,” Felix says. “Though I’m not supposed to say that. This happens before every appointment, and I understand. You need to feel your feelings, and worry is a perfectly fine feeling. Though how about you let me take that off your shoulders for today? I’ll worry for the both of us.”
A warmth wraps around her, an unfamiliar feeling as Felix takes on the role she’s used to filling. “Okay,” she says simply.
“I’ll swing by your office in an hour?” Felix says.
Her heart trips. “No, don’t. It’s just, I’m out lunching with Mallory.”
“Ah, of course she’d want to celebrate. Keep her to one old-fashioned, would you? The contract for the appearance requires
actual brainpower. I’m leaving it on her desk as we speak.”
“Appearance?”
“That’s what they call it, apparently.”
Ilena goes silent. Being here is like sprinting through a minefield.
“Ilena,” Felix says, “I know how scatterbrained Mallory can be, so it’s terrifying to have her as the sole AIM founder on
national television.”
Bombs throughout that entire sentence.
Felix continues, “But let her have The Shandy Shane Show herself. You have so much more already.”
Ilena narrows her eyes at Mallory. “You’re right. Just a momentary lapse. Call it a bit of Mom brain from the singleton.”
Felix laughs before describing the lemon-cumin chicken he’s making for dinner, and Ilena quickly lowers her phone, checking
her calendar to make sure the ob-gyn’s name and address is in it. Ilena says “Sounds delicious” and “See you soon” and doesn’t
wait to see if she and Felix have a special sign-off. She simply hangs up.
Ilena drops the keys onto the seat of the wheelchair. “And when were you going to tell me you’re doing Shandy Shane alone?”
Mallory, with a sheepish smile, says, “After it aired?”
A bubble of laughter floats up Ilena’s throat. This is what drew her to Mallory—that Mallory was blunt and irreverent and
used it to get what she wanted. For a long time, what Ilena wanted too.
“AIM on morning television,” Ilena said. “Do you think it’s happening at home?”
“And there’s the Ilena who doubled our ad revenue twice in the past five years.”
She had, she’d made AIM a success as much as Mallory and Aubrey had. Jonah by her side, as invested as she was. Their careers
had come first, and by the time Ilena had begun to question if they should, it seemed too late for anything else to find its
way into that top position.
“Jonah asked for a divorce,” Ilena says suddenly.
“I’m sorry, what? A divorce? I’ll kill him.”
They both look at Grayson, and terror darkens Mallory’s eyes, and Ilena loses her grip on the wheelchair. It rolls, and the
keys that were resting on the seat slide off, disappearing beneath the coffee table. Ilena starts to reach for them just as
Aubrey exits the bathroom.
“Let me,” Aubrey says. “You shouldn’t be bending.”
Aubrey’s eyes are red, her face pale. Being in the presence of a dead body surely makes her think of Ethan. Ilena lost Jonah
too, not in the same way of course, but she had. And she hadn’t cried once. Ilena begs her heart to beat harder or faster
or even explode because she’s suddenly afraid it’s truly as glacial as her mother’s. Is this the kind of mother Ilena will
be? One who hides dead bodies?
Aubrey returns to the chest, and Ilena silently rolls the wheelchair toward it.
She holds it steady as Mallory and Aubrey heft Grayson into it, straightens the blanket to cover him, and releases it to Mallory to push to the elevator.
There, she waits beside Aubrey as Mallory searches the penthouse for the things a last-minute traveling Grayson would have taken with him: wallet, passport, keys.
Ilena wraps her arm around Aubrey’s shoulder to try to quell her tremble as Mallory packs an overnight bag.
They leave the penthouse with enough evidence of the brunch they were supposed to have had: empty bottle of champagne that Mallory drank a quarter of before pouring down the drain on the counter beside three freshly washed flutes, a fourth juice glass in the dishwasher stacked with the dirty cheese board and set to run, and the floor cleaned of crumbs, dumped in the trash bag they’ll dispose of along the way.
In the service elevator, Grayson in the wheelchair between them, Ilena reaches for Mallory’s hand. Mallory meets her halfway,
anticipating Ilena’s need, perhaps having the same need herself.
“We’ll have to move quickly,” Mallory says, gripping a tote bag of Harley’s frozen dog food. “So that means—”
“You take him out the back exit ahead of us,” Ilena says, because the honeydew slows her down. And after Ethan, even before
Ethan, neither of them would have let Aubrey do it. “Aubrey and I will follow. If anyone’s around, I can handle it.”
Mallory squeezes Ilena’s hand. “Of course you can. The Ilena Cohen I know is capable of anything.”
Mallory is the most loyal and fierce friend Ilena has ever had, but she doesn’t let her sentimentality show. That she does
now, when they are all at their most vulnerable, is as strong a display of friendship as tattooing Ilena’s name on her forehead.
Still, for the first time, Ilena wonders where her life would have taken her if she’d never walked into that hardware store
in Harvard Square and bought a roll of duct tape.
When the elevator opens, Mallory grips the handles of the wheelchair and elongates her spine, forging ahead, no matter the turmoil—inner or outer. Because Mallory is a walking contradiction with a singular belief that the ends always justify the means.
This is a slippery slope, and Ilena’s footing is already off. The lies have to stop. Ilena needs to go have an ultrasound,
make sure this honeydew’s on track, and then tell Felix the truth.