The house is empty when she finally gets home, which is surprising—the house is never empty; there’s always someone rummaging through the refrigerator or beaming TikTok videos to the TV or loudly scheduling an appointment with their gynecologist—and the quiet feels almost luxurious, the only sounds the echo of her footsteps on the tile and the beat of her own heart. She changes into shorts and a hoodie, then cobbles together a dinner of cold roasted veg and some almost-stale focaccia left over from one of the restaurants before dutifully carting her laptop out into the backyard, trying to tamp down the bright flicker of dread at the idea of opening the screenplay again. It’s felt like this lately, every time she sits down to try and get some work done: the underwater sensation of getting absolutely nowhere, the dull knowledge that she’s wasting her time. Famous for being famous, she thinks grimly. Lacking a single marketable skill.
She’s not sure how long she’s been staring at the cursor when her phone chirps on the table beside her, a text from a New York number she doesn’t recognize.
You make it home okay?
It takes Lilly a moment to realize she’s smiling, the gesture so sudden and sincere and involuntary that she reaches up and touches her own mouth to feel the curve of it underneath her fingers.
Still in the tow truck with Lorraine, actually, she replies. We’re considering hitting the road like in Travels with Charley.
Don’t take any wooden nickels, Will fires back immediately. Write if you find work.
Lilly ducks her head even though nobody is watching, her entire body warming with a goofy, middle-school blush. She’d be lying if she said her stomach hadn’t thrilled a little bit at the sight of him climbing out of his car earlier, his dark jeans and V-neck T-shirt and wry, half-bashful expression. She thinks of the long, architectural lines of his body, like possibly he was designed and assembled using the golden ratio. She remembers the knowing rasp of his tongue against her skin.
For one insane second she nearly picks up the phone and texts him again: I’m alone here, she imagines typing, her fingers aching faintly with longing. What are you doing right now?
Instead she looks back at her screenplay for another long beat before closing out the window. Then she grits her teeth, opens a brand-new document, and gets the hell to work.
* * *
Junie FaceTimes from New York, where she has not in fact taken in any theater but has ruined a $400 pair of suede booties by stepping off a curb into a six-inch-deep puddle of slush. “I ran into Caroline at Bloomingdale’s yesterday,” she reports miserably, curled up on the couch at Lou and Veronica’s; there’s a Hockney half-visible on the living room wall behind her, Miles Davis wailing away on the sound system in the background. “So Charlie definitely knows I’m in town now, if he didn’t already.”
“Assuming your super-chill and low-key Instagram posts hadn’t already tipped him off, you mean?” Kit leans over Lilly’s shoulder, her long hair migrating up Lilly’s nose as she squeezes into the frame.
“What, like the one of me wearing my I Heart NY shirt while riding on the Circle Line and eating a soft pretzel?” June asks, grinning ruefully. “Or the one of me outside the stage door of Hamilton that I captioned ‘The Room Where It Happens’?”
“She actually meant the one you geotagged ‘New York City’ in case he couldn’t put it together himself from the context clues,” Lilly teases, “but we do admire the way you’ve covered all your bases.” She smiles. “I mean, who knows, right? He might turn up yet.”
“Or not,” Mari mumbles from her perch in the armchair across the living room. Lilly shoots her a murderous look in reply.
“What did I even think I was going to accomplish by coming out here?” June asks, leaning her head back against Lou and Veronica’s green velvet sofa. “You were right about Caroline, PS, if you want to take this well-earned opportunity to say ‘I told you so.’ From the look on her face when she saw me you would have thought I caught her pawing through the clearance rack at Express.”
“I don’t want to say ‘I told you so,’” Lilly promises, which is true. Mostly she just wants to knock on the door of whatever elegant, minimalist hotel room Caroline is staying in and punch her directly in the vagina. “I never want to say ‘I told you so.’”
June waves a hand in front of her face, like her own heartbreak is a cloud of smelly subway steam she can bat away. “How are things with Nick?” she wants to know.
“Wait,” Kit says, turning to look at Lilly a little strangely, “are you still hanging out with Nick? Because—” She breaks off.
Lilly frowns. “Because what?”
“No, nothing.” Kit shakes her head, goes back to her embroidery. “Just wondering. You hadn’t mentioned him, so.”
“I had not,” Lilly agrees, turning back to Junie. “Honestly, I think that whole thing kind of ran its course pretty quick.”
June wrinkles her nose. “That sucks,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Lilly promises, and she’s surprised to discover she’s telling the truth. She’s been busy since June’s been gone, working almost nonstop on the novel she started the night her car broke down: staying up late and getting up early, fingers flying over the keyboard and eyes gone sandy from staring at the screen.
Also, as much as she hates to admit it, she’s been having a lot of fun texting with Will.
It started a couple of days after he waited with her for the tow truck, her phone buzzing on the counter as she was putting together a weird lunch from a couple of meal kits that hadn’t gone bad yet: How’s the open highway? he wanted to know.
Lilly bit her lip, even though there was nobody around to see her smile. Not bad, she wrote back, thumbs moving slowly over the keys. Really making the most of the all-you-can-eat breakfasts at the Hilton Garden Inn.
Lining your pockets with mini croissants?
Stuffing my purse full of Danishes.
Since then they’ve been volleying back and forth a dozen times a day, talking about all kinds of random things: an editorial in the Times and their favorite movies from when they were teenagers, where to get a decent bagel in LA. She’s found herself listening for the sound of her phone vibrating, an illicit little thrill zinging through her every time she sees his name on the screen.
It doesn’t mean anything, obviously.
But she’s not sure if it means nothing, either.
“Come home soon,” she says now, blowing a kiss in Junie’s direction. June blows one back, says goodbye.
* * *
“I’m going to need an advance on my allowance,” Olivia announces that night, sliding pertly into her seat in the dining room. Cinta put a huge dinner together, meaning she ordered $150 worth of food from an Indian place in Agoura Hills and harangued them loudly into sending extra naan. “A friend of mine has VIP passes to Moon Landing, so.” Olivia tilts her head to the side like, You all know how it is. “I need bikinis.”
Lilly winces. “Seriously?” Moon Landing is a three-day music festival out in the desert, the cursed love child of Coachella and Burning Man. She went herself once, a few months before Joe died; in her memory it’s a blur of champagne cocktails and MDMA, everything in her suitcase caked with a fine pale layer of grit. She and Joe got into a screaming argument in the lobby of the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs that showed up on social media before they were even finished having it, the two of them hurling accusations at each other across the glittering terrazzo tile. The thought of it makes Lilly’s chest ache, like her lungs are full of sand. “That shit makes Revolve Fest look fun.”
“I mean, it’s no postmodern feminist Quebecois paleo dinner at Lodge that’s over by nine p.m., I’ll grant you,” Olivia replies sweetly, “but you gotta take your excitement where you can get it, I always say.”
“Didn’t, like, four different people get roofied there last year?” Lilly presses, looking around the table for assistance and wishing uselessly for June. It’s coming back to her now in queasy neon flashes: Joe strung out and mean and sweaty, the unceasing shriek of synth. She hasn’t let herself think about it in a long time. “And there was that thing with the porta-potties—”
“None of that happened in the VIP section, Lilly!” Olivia’s voice is shrill. “On top of which, I don’t actually remember asking for your opinion.” She turns back to their father. “Anyway! The bikinis. You can just Venmo me if you want.”
“Of course we will,” Cinta agrees immediately, even as Dominic is shoving his chair back and marching off in the direction of his rowing machine. “Do you need cover-ups, too?”
Lilly bites her tongue, reaching across the table for the korma and trying to ignore the weird, amorphous dread blooming like cactus blossoms in her chest. Her relationship with Olivia has always been like this—smooth and then prickly, hot and then cold. She thinks it’s possible Olivia reminds her too much of the person she was before Joe died—too sure of herself, too confident in the notion that nothing truly bad could ever happen. She thinks about that person sometimes and wants to shake her. Wants to say, You idiot. Take better care of what you already have.
* * *
After dinner she finds her dad in the gym on the second floor of the pool house just like always, the clank of dumbbells and the wail of the classic rock station echoing out across the backyard. Lilly climbs the steps and watches him for a minute before he notices her: tufts of gray chest hair poking out of his tank top, the veins in his biceps bulging as he lifts. He’s in fantastic shape—of course he’s in fantastic shape, he literally spends four and a half hours a day pumping iron—but still he’s starting to look a little bit older to her lately, though she’d never say that to him in a million years. He’d prefer to be stabbed in the heart. “Brought you a protein shake,” she says, holding up the plastic tumbler.
Her dad smiles at her in the mirror without breaking his rhythm. “You’re a sweetheart, Elisabetta,” he tells her, motioning with his chin toward the bookshelf. “You know you’ve always been my favorite daughter.”
Lilly smiles back as she sets the shaker down beside his impressive home library of workout DVDs, ignoring a tiny pang of something uneasy behind her ribs. She used to love it when her dad singled her out as special—the smartest, the most talented, the one with the best head on her shoulders—and if she’s being honest with herself there’s a part of her that can’t help but want to be his #1 girl. Still, lately something about it reminds her of what Will said that night at the premiere of Charlie’s movie. I am exactly like my sisters, she thinks again.
“Listen,” she says, sitting down on the edge of the weight bench. “About Olivia and this festival. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to let her—”
Right away her dad shakes his head. “Have you met your sister?” he asks pointedly. “If I tell her she can’t go she’ll just make my life a living hell until finally I give in. Better to save myself the effort.”
Lilly doesn’t know that Better to save myself the effort is a parenting motto to which one should necessarily aspire, but she doesn’t say that out loud. “Oh, she’ll have us all longing for the sweet embrace of death, absolutely,” she agrees. “But—”
“Besides,” her father interrupts, setting down his thirty-fives and reaching for his fifties, “Olivia is twenty-one. My role is strictly ceremonial, same as with the rest of you girls. I’m like Stanley Tucci in The Hunger Games.”
“And just as nattily dressed,” Lilly promises; her father is nothing if not susceptible to flattery. She thinks of Caroline inviting June over to Charlie’s hoping she’d somehow embarrass herself. She thinks of Isobel DesRoche in the bathroom at the club. She thinks of the money they don’t have, the house they’re about to lose, and thinks she’ll be damned if she’s not going to try her hardest to protect Olivia and all the rest of her sisters from everything she can, up to and including their own bad decisions, whether they like it or not. “Your opinion still matters, though. She listens to you more than you think. I mean, we all do.”
“That’s very sweet of you to say, Elisabetta,” Lilly’s father tells her cheerfully, “though I think we both know it’s bullshit.” He grins at her then, winking like they’re in on something together before gesturing with a dumbbell in the direction of the stairs. “Get the hell out of my gym, would you? I’ve got thirty-eight more reps.”
Lilly hesitates. Back when they were kids they all used to clamber out of bed and run to the front door in their pajamas when he got home from the restaurant late at night; he’d swing them up in the air one by one like something out of the opening credits of a vintage TV show, all of them barefoot and giggling. I need you to remember you care about us for a second, she almost tells him. I need you to be our dad.
“Sure thing,” she says instead, then offers him a crooked smile. “Don’t hurt yourself, all right?”
“Brat,” he says, turning back to the mirror. Lilly can hear him laughing all the way back down the stairs.