Chapter Twenty-Three #2
“Well, I, for one, just went out for a late dinner with my parents,” said Vienna.
I knew her saying this was a kindness for me; knowing Vienna and her parents, it had probably been a dinner to raise money to save rare birds in Taiwan or music education in the Bronx.
“And then it was so nice to hear from Persimmon this morning. I feel like it’s been so long since I’ve been here. ”
The rest of the circle nodded along, nobody mentioning the fact that she hadn’t been here in so long because they’d all been shunning her.
Nobody ever would either. The social rules said we’d glide right over it as if it had never happened.
Eventually everybody would forget. Everybody except Vienna.
It made me feel protective of her. I turned back to Persimmon, not wanting to focus on how they’d treated my best friend. “How did you like the night market?”
Her smile seemed a little mechanical. “Oh. It was nice. It turns out that yak isn’t too bad.” She toyed with her hair, avoiding my eyes. She hadn’t even gotten to try the yak, had she? “And then Kevin and I went back into the city to see a show.”
She named a beautiful show on Broadway about mothers and daughters that I’d cried at.
Mostly because my own mother would never sing songs about how she’d do anything to protect me, even kill someone (she would totally kill someone, just not to protect me).
When I’d gone backstage to meet the actors afterward, it had taken some serious self-control not to ask the woman playing the mother if she wanted to adopt me.
“You guys are so cute together,” Kitty cooed, taking a sip of her tomato juice. Persimmon smiled back, just a moment too late.
“Yeah. Sure.” Was that sarcasm? Had something gone wrong between when I ran into them last night and now?
Maybe I was thinking that because it was a distraction from the fact that, even though I’d had a major personal epiphany, my boyfriend wasn’t there to know it and might not even care.
Maybe it was because it was nice to think that somebody else was a bigger mess than me.
Maybe it was because I was the best friend anyone could ever have.
Probably that one. But whatever it was, the curiosity grew again.
“Hey, Persimmon,” I said, standing. “Could you come with me to the bathroom? I need help with my… buttons.”
Nobody in the circle looked surprised, which was kind of insulting.
Really, did they think that somebody as experienced in avoiding upskirt photos as I was would wear something I couldn’t get off by myself?
(Unless I was at the Met Gala, of course.
The rules were different for the Met Gala.) Vienna gave me an odd look.
Probably she’d noticed I wasn’t wearing any buttons.
I tried to give her a significant look back, all like, I have a good reason for this, and just had to hope she’d get it and wasn’t insulted I was snubbing her.
Persimmon, to her credit, was game, maybe because this friendship we’d created was so small and new and fragile. She stood. “Sure.”
Our trip to these restrooms was way better than our trip to the Porta Potties.
They were located down a long hallway lined with more art, less grand than the huge canvases in the main space yet somehow more moving (I made a mental note to ask the manager about a small painting of a girl perched on a rock gazing out over the ocean—it would work perfectly in my guest room).
Both single-occupancy rooms were vacant.
I took a quick peek inside the farther one to make sure it was the accessible one and therefore larger before ushering Persimmon inside.
Up close, there were dark smudges under her eyes held in bags the size of dumplings. “You look exhausted,” I said, surprised.
“Thanks,” she said dryly. “Where are your buttons?”
I waved a hand in the air. “Oh, that was just a lie to get you alone,” I told her. She glanced, eyes wide, at the lock on the door. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to murder you. They’d catch me in, like, a second.”
“But you would murder me otherwise?”
“No, of course not.” Sometimes I forgot that most other people didn’t constantly have murder on the mind. Maybe I should open up that detective agency. “Anyway. I wanted to make sure you were okay. You seemed off out there. Did something happen after you left the night market?”
Her eyes widened, as if she were more surprised by me being a good friend than she was about me potentially murdering her, which, honestly, rude. “Wow. Actually. Yes. Yeah, it did.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” I said generously.
She was quiet for a moment, both of us looking around the bathroom. They’d wallpapered it with pages from art books, so that all around us lounged naked women and also horses, a strange combination from the decorator. “Your boyfriend isn’t here.”
If I wanted her to be honest with me, I probably had to be honest, too, as distasteful as that was. “That article wasn’t exactly kind to the two of us. He’s taking a little space.”
“I see. I’m sorry.” She was quiet for another moment, which gave me some time to be sad about that space Gabe was taking.
Then again, if he’d been with me last night, I probably wouldn’t have gone clubbing with Millicent and Coriander, and I probably wouldn’t have had my life-changing epiphany, and maybe that epiphany would be key to making sure the two of us wouldn’t want to take space from each other in the future, so it could be that the article had saved us all.
Millicent and Coriander: casually mean saviors of humanity.
Persimmon went on. “Kevin’s being really shady lately. He’s definitely hiding something, and I think it might be an affair. Last night he got a call right in front of me and I couldn’t avoid thinking about it any longer.”
My instinct was to go in for a hug, and she didn’t stiffen when I leaned in, so I let it happen. “I’m sorry,” I said into her hair. It smelled like tangerines. Or maybe persimmons. What did persimmons smell like anyway? “He’d be insane to be having an affair when he’s got you.”
“I know, right?” She pulled back, eyes flashing. “Men are supposed to cheat on their old wives with young women, not cheat on their young girlfriends.”
“Right,” I said firmly, then realized what she’d actually said. “Wait, what?”
“It’s just the way of the world,” she said, which was depressing but also, I supposed, expected, considering what she’d seen from her father.
Last I’d heard, he was on his third wife.
Or fourth? The wife couldn’t be that much older than Persimmon, if she was indeed older at all.
“I thought that, by being the younger woman with the older man, I’d be…
safe.” She sank down onto the toilet seat, which was, thankfully, closed. “Now I don’t know what to do.”
There was nowhere else for me to sit down, so I hovered uncomfortably above her. “What happened with the call?”
Somebody knocked on the door. We both ignored it.
“He’s been taking frequent phone calls in the other room.
He changed the password on his phone. And he’s been coming home with marks on him he can’t explain.
But yesterday I saw the name on his phone before he snatched it away and went outside with it.
Why would he be hiding a call with a Jessica if it wasn’t because of an affair?
” She wrinkled her nose. “The name ‘Jessica’ just sounds whorish, honestly.”
Jessica. I laughed, which made Persimmon’s eyes widen, as if she thought I was mocking her.
“I think I know what’s going on,” I said.
“Jessica is my brother’s fiancée. I learned from my parents earlier that my brother and Kevin have been colluding to try and take over the Afton family business.
My brother’s probably been using her phone so that his calls don’t show up on the family phone bill. ”
“Oh my God. Are you serious?” Persimmon rubbed her head. The person at the door knocked again, more insistently this time. Persimmon glanced at the door, then back at me. “Oh. You know, that actually makes a lot of sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I asked about it, he told me that he’d made a bargain with the caller,” she said.
“That he was helping out the caller so that the caller would help him with something. He wouldn’t tell me details, which is why I figured he was lying.
” She let out a breezy laugh. “You know, I suspected Denise Ryan. They had a very cozy lunch the other day. But she’s way too old, right?
He would never cheat on me with someone who’s so much older. Oh my God, I feel way better now.”
I wished I could say the same. The pieces were slowly slotting together on multiple fronts, slipping and sliding in a way that made me queasy.
“Nobody is quite who they claim to be,” I said slowly.
Before I could say anything else, the knocking on the door turned into a thunderstorm. “Please!” someone called desperately from the hallway.
“We should probably let them in,” said Persimmon, and opened the door before I could ask her for one more moment in the quiet.
Somebody shoved past us in a blur. Together, we headed back to the dining room, where half the circle was standing, bags thrown over shoulders or fastened over waists, brushing goodbye kisses over cheeks.
I was too deep in thought to be insulted that everybody was leaving so soon after I’d arrived.
After all, so what? I was sick of trying to pretend to be somebody I wasn’t.
That only worked for so long, could only make you so happy.
As I was beginning to understand.
I swooped in on Vienna for a quick hug. “I’m really glad I came,” I said, grabbing my own bag. My stomach lurched with the movement.
“I’m glad you came too,” Vienna said. She squinted at me, cocked her head. “Did you just figure something out?”
I gave her an enigmatic smile in response. The answer was, of course, yes. I’d cracked it again, or, at least, I was pretty sure I had. I had a few calls to make. To Nicholas. To Jessica. To Jack Wohl. To whomever those calls would lead to.
Into the car. “To the bakery,” I directed. If I was going to have to rock the foundation of my entire world, I wanted to do it from the safety of my favorite place.