4 Marley
Marley
“Finally!”
Marley tipped her head back to see Suzy and Juliet standing on the balcony overlooking the driveway, beckoning to her to come upstairs while Wintour barked in the background.
Juliet wore a long, flowy sundress made up of about a thousand swirling colors, and Suzy sported white linen pants and a black cotton sleeveless blouse that showed off her sick arm muscles gorgeously.
As predicted, her hair was up in a bun, and diamonds sparkled from her earlobes.
God, it was good to see them. The only thing that could make that sight better would be if Lily was lounging there as well.
“Get your ass up here! We’ve got that rosé you like on ice!” Juliet shouted.
They were both smiling, but there was something not quite natural in their expressions.
Everything about the two of them felt a tad too rigid for the beginning of their favorite and most relaxing week of the year.
Were they as freaked out by Lily’s absence as she was?
Of course they were. Marley looked at the bags, then over at Marshall.
“Just go. I got this,” he said.
“Thanks,” she replied flatly. They’d barely spoken the entire trip out, and her voice actually sounded hoarse.
“Just send my good-for-nothing brother out, will ya!” he shouted after her as she jogged across the driveway.
She knew he was putting on a jovial act for her friends, and she couldn’t say she didn’t appreciate it.
As she went through the front door, she clocked the fact that the hydrangea that used to flank it and run all the way down the front of the house in either direction had been removed, replaced by a row of potted lemon trees that had been pruned into perfect spheres, and a long bed full of tiny white stones. Lily would have hated it.
“Okay!” she shouted back.
Inside, she greeted Candice at the door, and a young man in the house uniform slipped past her outside to help Marshall, surveying her from the corner of his eye as he went.
She spotted Lincoln and Sean all the way on the other side of the ginormous living space, looking out the floor-to-ceiling sliders at the pool and the yard beyond.
Behind them, in the distance, a huge tent had been erected, and a dozen worker bees were busy assembling tables and flicking white tablecloths in the air.
There was another man with Lincoln and Sean—someone Marley didn’t recognize, who looked like a retired linebacker—but she was not in the mood for introductions.
Their hearty male laughter seemed to fill the lofty space.
She was glad Hazel was nowhere in sight. Marley wasn’t sure she could deal with their hostess’s in-your-face communication style just yet.
“Guys! Help Marshall with the bags!” she called out before turning and taking the winding stairs two at a time.
“Hello to you too, Marls!” Lincoln shouted back.
“Asshole,” she muttered under her breath. By the time she got to the top of the steps, she was winded and hit with another wave of nausea. She kept forgetting she hadn’t eaten anything. She paused and gripped the railing, taking in air before turning the corner to join her friends in the sunroom.
“Hey, girl!” Juliet cried out, throwing her arms over her head before tossing them around Marley’s neck. Her hair reeked of pot smoke, and Marley had to hold her breath to keep from vomiting right on her bare feet.
“Hi! What’re you two doing in here?” Marley asked, turning to hug Suzy next.
She then bent to pet Wintour, who already had her tiny paws up on Marley’s leg.
Usually, her friends went straight to the beach upon arrival and started the party there.
Lincoln had four community-approved golf carts that easily handled the three-block trek, even loaded down with all their paraphernalia.
Today, though, there was an open and half-empty bottle of rosé on ice on the glass coffee table and three glasses, only one of which had yet to be touched.
She noticed that while the coffee table was the same, the once-bright cushions on the white couches had been replaced by black-and-gray-striped pillows and the knickknacks on the shelves had been removed.
Suzy leaned over and poured Marley a healthy portion of wine.
“Whoa, whoa. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you two were trying to get me drunk,” Marley said, holding the stem carefully.
She took a slug of the wine. It hit her empty stomach almost instantly, and she found herself wishing someone had thought to bring crackers up here.
She dug through her bag and came out with the granola bar Marshall had forced on her earlier.
“We wanted to make sure we nabbed you the second you arrived,” Suzy said as Wintour skipped around their feet, waiting for someone to pick her up. “Because look.”
Marley was just crunching into her snack when Suzy yanked a small blue envelope out of the pocket of her wide-legged pants and held it out. Marley almost spit out her food.
“Where did you get that?” she asked, putting her wine down and taking the envelope. Her name was spelled out in familiar loopy cursive across the front.
“It was on. Your. Pillow!” Suzy said in that dramatic voice she always adopted when gossiping or sharing good news or bad news or anything slightly out of the norm. She finally bent to pick up the dog. “We got them too.”
“Is Lily . . . here?” she asked, knowing there was no possible way. But how else would this envelope have gotten here? She felt a sudden chill down her back and glanced over her shoulder, as if Lily was going to be standing there staring at them.
“Um . . . not that I’ve seen! Didn’t you just talk to her yesterday?” Juliet asked. “Isn’t she in lockdown or something?”
“They don’t do lockdown in those shishi facilities,” Suzy said and took a sip of her wine. “Do they?”
“No. And I mean, yeah, we FaceTimed,” Marley said.
Lily had looked haggard, her straight white-blond hair greasy and pulled back in a haphazard ponytail, her eyes tired with gray circles beneath them.
She’d been wearing zero makeup—formerly a crime in her mind—and a gray hoodie.
She’d cried when Marley had told her that tomorrow—today—was the first day of their Hamptons week.
Marley felt like crap every time she thought about it, so she shoved the image to the back of her mind.
She put down the granola bar and flipped the envelope over.
Still sealed. “What did yours say?” she asked.
“Is it just a welcome note? You don’t think Hazel heard about these and made them herself. ”
If that was the case, she was getting in the car and driving back to Jersey right now. Then she’d fly out to Nevada and prostrate herself at Lily’s feet, begging for forgiveness. These notes were Lily’s thing. Hazel couldn’t have done something so entirely inappropriate.
Two years ago—was it possible it was only two years?—Marley had opened her welcome note to find that Lily’s normally beautiful, confident script was shaky—working its way crookedly across the card.
Welcome to the Hamptons! It had read. Please do everything you can this week to keep me from shoving Lincoln down the stairs!
The memory of it made Marley feel off kilter.
Lily had recently figured out Lincoln was cheating—with Hazel—and was trying to decide whether to forgive him or divorce his ass.
Two weeks after their Hamptons trip, Lincoln had been the one to file for divorce.
Lily had been so devastated she’d cried on the phone with Marley for five hours straight.
It was clear that in the interim, she had decided to forgive him, but Lincoln had made other plans.
For the first time ever in their lives, Marley had regretted introducing Lily to her brother-in-law.
She and Lily had first become friends when Marley was in her twenties and Lily in her early thirties, when she and Marshall had been living in Brooklyn and she’d landed her first teaching job at the Greene School in Park Slope.
She’d started taking yoga at the YMCA nearby, and Lily had plopped down on the mat next to hers on the first day, confessing her down dog was atrocious and to please forgive her if she fell on top of Marley—which she had. They’d been friends ever since.
It was after Lincoln’s fifth dramatic breakup in three years that Marley had had the epiphany of Lincoln and Lily.
She was the antithesis of the women he usually went for.
Down to earth, funny, self-deprecating, but still put together, posh, and connected, which were must-haves for Lincoln.
Maybe she’d be the palette cleanser Lincoln needed.
And she’d been right. The two had immediately hit it off at the dinner party Marley had thrown for that exact purpose and had gotten engaged a year later.
During his speech at the wedding, Lincoln had said Lily was everything he never knew he always wanted and that he’d spend the rest of his life thanking Marley for introducing them.
Instead, seven years later, he’d cheated and ignominiously dumped Lily for a woman who was just like all the others who had flamed out before her.
“We don’t know. And we haven’t opened ours yet. We were waiting for you,” Juliet said, producing another envelope out of her flowy skirt with a clicking of her half-dozen wooden bracelets. Suzy now had hers in her hand as well.
Marley’s heart was pounding, whether from the run up the stairs, the wine, or the intrigue, she had no idea. But she was dying to know what was in this envelope. Her palms itched with sweat. Suzy placed Wintour on a chair, and Wintour sat down to watch the proceedings.
“So we open on the count of three?” Suzy said, never one to miss the opportunity to make an already dramatic moment more dramatic.
Marley nodded.
“One,” Juliet said, then bit her lip.
“Two,” Marley said, then held her breath.
“Three!” Suzy shouted.
Marley opened the envelope and tugged out the card with shaking fingers. She looked down at the one line written across the expensive card stock, and her heart went from sixty to zero with a slam.
Lincoln is the reason Marshall no longer wants to adopt.
What? her brain screamed. What???
She opened her mouth, but before she could even formulate a coherent sentence, Juliet shrieked.
“What the hell? This is a joke, right?” She looked up at Suzy. “This better be some kind of sick joke.”