18-MAY
“Thank God, y’all are here.” Sloane foisted her heavy purse onto the empty chair. This restaurant had a thing and that thing was plants. Vines cascaded from terra-cotta pots; succulents topped reclaimed wood shelves; miniature white orchids sprouted from handmade ceramic mugs centered on the tables. It was where Pinterest came to vomit, trading in the sort of motif that seemed so effortless and natural that it had to be attainable, only it absolutely was not and Sloane lived for it. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages.” She leaned over to hug Ardie and Grace, in turn, before dumping herself into an artisanal Wishbone Chair. “I’m jonesing. Physically. Look at my hands.” She held out her hand, which was trembling slightly, though it might have been low blood sugar.
“It’s been four days.” Ardie looked up from a concise paper menu that had been nailed to a small plank.
“Which has been the longest since…” Sloane waved her arm.
“Since my maternity leave,” offered Grace.
“Exactly.” Sloane nodded solemnly, picking up her own plank menu and scanning down for the wine list. Something cold, white, and crisp was in order. “And we all know I barely survived that.” Sloane flagged the waitress, a woman dressed in all white with forest green suspenders. “I’ll have a glass of the Starmont Chardonnay, please. Anyone else?”
“Same, please,” said Grace.
“Me, too.”
Sloane raised her eyebrows. She had an appointment with her dermatologist to fix that next week, but for now … “A round, then. Thanks.” Sloane took a sip of room temperature water served in a squatty mason jar. “Gracie, look at you. Have we freed the nipple after all?”
Grace wore a floral shirtdress with a primly creased collar. “If you must know, yes.” Well, of course, Sloane always had to know. “I’m even letting Emma Kate use a pacifier.”
“Scandal.” Ardie trailed her finger down the list of appetizers.
“Hey.” Grace flapped a white napkin over her lap. “It was a hard decision.”
“Of course it was.” Sloane leaned down to stow her oversized sunglasses in her purse. “So. Tell us.” She leaned in on her elbow. “Was she still there when you went back to get the last of your things?”
“Not sure.” Grace’s glance flitted toward the open kitchen and then back. “To be honest, I couldn’t bring myself to check.”
So. No one had spoken to Katherine since. Sloane might think that she’d never existed, so completely had she been excised from their lives, except for the fact that everything had begun to change the moment she arrived. Three days ago, Sloane had called Grace and Ardie with the news that Ames’s death had officially been ruled a suicide. There wasn’t enough evidence of foul play apparently. Detective Martin had called her personally, bless her. This was the news that Sloane had been hoping for and yet it carried with it a mixed legacy, because there would always be people that agreed with Cosette, believed that they’d gone too far. That they’d been unfair. That they were at least partly responsible for Ames dying. This despite the settlement agreement and large lump sum check currently making its way through the bowels of the law offices of Helen Yeh, who, by the way, was now happily collecting her 40 percent (eye roll).
“Derek’s back,” Sloane announced when the wine arrived to keep her mind from racing down closed paths.
“From the mountains?” Ardie laid her menu over her plate.
“The Appalachians. He has a beard.”
“And?” Grace prompted.
“And, a week hiking and eating beans in a can later—I don’t want to jinx it but—he says he’s ready to move on.” She did hope that he meant it. She felt sorry for Derek. Since the lawsuit had settled and Rosalita’s story had made papers, there’d been requests for interviews, talk show spots, podcasts, even a few literary agents sniffing around. People loved their adjectives right now: harrowing, heroic, painful, courageous. And here Derek was just trying to be mad at his cheating wife in peace. “Oh,” she said, just remembering. “And Abigail made a friend at school. Lottie Silverman. She’s come over to play exactly three times, so I’m pretty sure it’s serious. Even her name sounds nice. Lottie. She reminds me of you, actually,” she told Ardie. Ardie was wearing all black, which was completely not in line with the fresh décor, but that was Ardie for you.
“I’m not going to even ask what that means.” Ardie angled in the chair.
“Oh, I know.” Grace took a long sip of the wine.
It was delicious. Sloane knew her wines. “Well, guys.” Sloane lifted her own misty glass. “Cheers. To our first official working lunch.” They clinked, even Ardie who hated toasts. “First things first. What kind of office should we have? Like Southern chic? Mid-century? Is that still cool?”
Ardie pulled a pocket calendar from her bag. This made Sloane feel safe and smart, to have a partner who ran around with little leather-bound pocket calendars. “I looked at the spaces in Uptown that our realtor sent over,” said Ardie. “I liked them, but are we sure we feel okay about Uptown?” Sloane opened her mouth to speak, but Ardie pointed the business end of the pen at her. “Do not start singing ‘Uptown Girl.’”
Then, honestly, what was even the point?
“Fine. Do we offer Rosalita a job? I don’t know the proper etiquette. Or whether she’d even take a job. Or…”
“Yes.” Ardie straightened the cutlery around her plate. “We offer her a job. Not necessarily as a cleaner. But we offer her something. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether she takes it.”
The settlement money would be split four ways, not three. Rosalita was the only one of them remaining at Truviv so far. She wanted to see the money in her account before she considered jumping ship. From the beginning, Sloane had insisted to herself that she was doing all of this—the list, suing Truviv—so that she could have a future there. But after all was said and done, she found that she couldn’t work for the company that had tried to ruin her with an unlawful death claim, that had tried to destroy them all.
Grace chewed on her lower lip. Her thumb and pointer finger twirled the stem of her glass.
“Ok, what?” Sloane asked her. “Why so silent over there? You hate mid-century, don’t you.”
Grace took a breath. “Okay.” She folded her hands in her lap. Sloane felt a chill run up the back of her neck. “I don’t want to be the buzzkill here. I just—I know we’re all excited about starting our own practice and I just … I don’t know if I can. Right now, anyway.” She delicately pressed two of her fingers on the spot between her eyebrows.
“What?” Ardie asked, scooting her chair back so that it made a loud screech in the serene restaurant. Ladies-who-lunch turned.
Grace looked skittish for a split-second, then calmed. “I want to come with you, I do, but maybe part-time? And after some time away. But”—she took a gulp now of wine—“I understand if you guys need to move forward without a spot for me. I’m just on a new medication and I have some health stuff I need to sort through.” She spoke too quickly, using her hands like a traffic cop.
Sloane’s jaw dropped. “You’re dying, aren’t you? Is it breast cancer?” Sloane asked, steeling herself. “It’s breast cancer, isn’t it?”
“No, no, god. It’s not. I have … I have postpartum depression.” She said this low, like she might have said “leprosy” instead.
“Oh, honey,” Sloane said, sharing a look with Ardie. She didn’t usually call her friends pet names, but perhaps there were moments that warranted it and this was one. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Though would Sloane have known, deep down, if she weren’t so distracted?
“It just didn’t sound like me. So I figured it wasn’t. Ames actually pointed it out.”
Ames. That hit hard. The fact that Sloane had been too distracted, but Ames Garrett had been able to spot it.
“Anyway, I’m sorry. I just—”
“Please.” Sloane butted in. “Please, you come when you’re ready and not a minute sooner.”
They relaxed. Sloane could feel it. The way everything was click-click-click-ing into place. Sloane actively despised the notion that the universe might be telling her something, that everything happened for a reason, as if the universe gave a fuck about the comings and goings of middle-aged blonde women, but she would say this much: things felt right.
“While we’re making confessions…” Ardie shifted in her seat.
Sloane looked up sharply. “Are you dating someone? I knew it. I could feel it.”
Ardie squinted one eye shut. “No. What? Actually, I do have a date. Tonight, in fact.”
“See?”
“Oh, is he nice?” Grace asked.
“I don’t—I don’t know. I met him online. I—no, it’s about something else.” She looked suddenly flustered, then, just as quickly, centered herself. Sloane had about a dozen more questions. Still, she knew better than to pepper Ardie with them now. “I need to tell you both something. Okay?” Grace and Sloane waited, expectantly. “I think you both deserve to know, after all that we’ve been through, that—I mean, I think you realized that Ames and I actively didn’t like each other, but, see, there was more to it than that. Ames sexually assaulted me.” She sat back. Let the information land.
“I’m sorry. What?” Grace’s pretty blue eyes narrowed.
“Ames Garrett sexually—he raped me. I’m embarrassed it’s taken me this long to admit, but I thought you should know, so there it is. And I’m sorry, Sloane. I’m not great at saying that. I should have tried harder to warn you.”
“Wh—when? What?” Sloane felt that blind, unseeing look take over her eyes, confusion and anger, searching for a place to settle. But that place was, unfortunately, dead.
“I was drunk,” Ardie said, out loud. “Really drunk. Do you remember I’d come back from L.A. right before you started? From closing that sort of hellish Fiter deal that everyone was talking about? We stayed in the same hotel that you and I stayed in when we worked on Matrix Band a couple years ago actually.”
“The one with the ivy on the ceiling?”
“Yes, that one.”
Sloane did not like this factoid. She felt a sudden onset of nausea. Like the room was spinning.
“Anyway, I can’t remember all of it. I just wanted to put it behind me and forget that it happened. My dad used to tell me the best way to keep a secret is to pretend that you don’t have one, so…”
“So then I slept with him?” Sloane nearly shouted.
Ardie’s glance skirted the room. “Sloane. I know. I’m—”
“But—but—Ardie, you must have hated me,” Sloane interjected.
At this, Ardie let out a genuine laugh. “I did try,” she admitted.
“No, really.” Sloane’s hands gripped the edge of the table and she leaned her chest in, hissing at Ardie. “You must have absolutely hated me.”
Sloane felt her face flush, as if she were coming down with something. She needed another mason jar of water. In fact, Ardie slid hers over to Sloane and she drank.
Once quenched, Sloane sat heavily, weighed down by the effort spent on those words—Ardie’s words—and felt exhausted down to her bones, this despite the fact that they weren’t even hers.
“It was complicated,” Ardie said. “I’d hoped you would hate him right off the bat. At that point, he was so hatable to me, I figured it’d be obvious to everyone else, too. Then, for a few months there, I thought maybe I really was just a one-off. Maybe it was a misunderstanding. And you were so persistent in trying to be my friend.”
“I wasn’t.” Sloane dabbed her mouth with the napkin, accidentally staining it pink. “Okay, I was. That does sound like me.” She smiled, shakily. “Why didn’t you say anything later? Like with Katherine?”
“It felt too late. Like it would appear convenient more than helpful, I think. Among other things.”
Ardie hesitated, her eyebrows folding in. “Grace, are you all right?”
Oh god. Poor Grace. She was crying. Of course she was. This was too much for her. Hormones. Postpartum. She shouldn’t be hearing this. PG-13! They needed to keep the conversation PG-13 for Grace.
“I’m fine,” Ardie assured her. “Really.” How would Sloane ever know now whether or not that was true? “Why are you so upset?”
“Because he did that to you. And because I feel so guilty. And then I feel guilty for feeling guilty.” Grace stifled a sob. It looked physically painful. “He’s dead and, after hearing that, I should be glad. Right?” She pressed the back of her knuckles to her nose. Of the three of them, Grace clearly had the hardest time getting on board with hating Ames, with believing Katherine, but the point was that she had. She’d chosen to believe them. She was being too hard on herself. “The thing is,” she said. When she swallowed, it looked as though her throat hurt. She closed her eyes. “I killed Ames.”