Charlotte hosts a supper club at her restaurant featuring a different up-and-coming female or nonbinary chef every month, so Lilly borrows June’s car and stops by with lattes to help her arrange the flowers. They’ve been best friends since the Benedettos moved into the development when Lilly was a junior in high school; all of them used to carpool, Charlotte climbing cheerfully into the back seat of Junie’s gleaming white Escalade five mornings a week. It was Charlotte who taught them how Saint Ann’s worked, at the beginning, where the good bathroom was and which teachers were hard-asses or perverts and that the truly and effortlessly popular girls didn’t wear their uniform skirts hiked quite so high. She was kind to them back when she had absolutely nothing to gain from it, and even at sixteen and spoiled, Lilly knew enough to grab tight and hang on.
“How did it go last night?” she asks now, perching on a stool at the scarred marble bar while Charlotte frowns intently at a half-finished arrangement of lupine and wild herbs. The restaurant is called Lodge, and Charlotte is deeply and lovingly fanatical about every detail, from the provenance of the salad greens to the hand soap in the bathroom, which is probably why even three years after opening celebrities are still ripping each other’s throats out with claws and teeth vying for a table. “Didn’t you say you had a date?”
“I may have said something like that, yes.” Charlotte makes a face. She’s wearing her uniform of dark denim apron over fitted black button-down, her riot of red hair pulled back with a stretchy cotton headband. “He was wearing a shirt with a dinosaur on it.”
Lilly almost snorts her coffee. “I’m sorry, come again?”
“You heard me.” Charlotte wiggles her fingers for more rosemary.
“I did,” Lilly admits, pulling a fragrant handful from the bucket on the bar and passing it over. “I’m just wondering if he was also carrying a lunch box, or the place you guys went to was, like, the latest food and beverage offering from celebrity chef Charles Entertainment Cheese—”
“It wasn’t Barney the Dinosaur,” Charlotte protests. “It was, like, a cool dinosaur.”
Lilly nods seriously. “So, like, a velociraptor.”
Charlotte rolls her eyes. “Like, a Keith Haring dinosaur!”
“Would you call that a cool dinosaur, though?”
“Can you stop?” Charlotte laughs, tossing a purple flower in Lilly’s direction. “I’m trying to talk myself into him, clearly.”
“I can see that,” Lilly agrees, tucking the bloom into her hair for safekeeping. “Did he have, like, an amazing personality or washboard abs or a gajillion dollars to invest in exciting new culinary ventures?”
“He—” Charlotte sighs, sitting down hard in one of the vintage bentwood chairs. “No, not really.”
“So then what’s the point?”
“You know what the point is!”
“I mean, sure,” Lilly says, although the truth is she doesn’t, not entirely. Charlotte has been preternaturally boy crazy since they were teenagers; she’s on about a dozen apps, her phone buzzing with potential matches like a coin-operated bed at all hours of the day and night. Frankly Lilly would rather spend the rest of her life rattling around Pemberly Grove, listening to her mother perseverate on her skin tags, than subject herself to an endless parade of men who come recommended mainly by the fact that their opening salvo was anything other than a picture of their own crooked genitalia.
Charlotte sighs loudly, standing up and plucking the flowers from their vases before starting again. “I saw Junie and Charlie Bingley on the Sinclair,” she announces.
Lilly lifts an eyebrow at the sudden change of subject. “Since when do you read the Sinclair?”
“I don’t,” Charlotte says immediately. “I mean, I do, clearly, I started looking at it when all that stuff was happening with Jamie Hartley going to jail and now I can’t stop, but. I don’t.” She turns back to the flowers. “And speaking of romantic encounters that people in your family had at Rebecca Barnes’s house that I had to read about on a morally gray gossip website: let’s talk about Will Darcy.”
“I hate Will Darcy,” Lilly says immediately.
“Well, my darling,” Charlotte tells her, “in that case, you’re really going to hate that I invited him and Charlie Bingley to dinner tonight.”
“Are you kidding me?” Lilly snaps to attention. “When did you even meet him and Charlie Bingley?”
“My parents are at a silent retreat in San Luis Obispo and their dog walker has bursitis,” Charlotte explains with the exaggerated casualness of a person who has purposely buried the lede. “I came over to take him for a stroll, Will and Charlie were out for a run, et cetera.” She grins. “You know how Arthur is with handsome men.”
“I do,” Lilly says grimly. Arthur is the Lucases’ cranky old schnauzer, who’s deaf in both ears and always smells like tempura batter. Most days Charlotte’s mother can barely drag him out the door for a shuffle around the neighborhood, but last summer he slipped his collar and took off at a dead sprint upon spotting Channing Tatum at the Hollywood Bowl.
“Anyway,” Charlotte continues, “I told you Charlie used to come in for brunch sometimes, back when he was still getting cast as like, Shirtless Bro in the direct-to-streaming production of Cock and Balls 2.”
“So weird how they haven’t added that one to the Criterion Collection.”
“Well, it just wasn’t as good as the original Cock and Balls,” Charlotte deadpans. “Sequels never are. Anyway, he recognized me from here, so he stopped to say hi. It felt rude not to invite him.”
“Oh, right,” Lilly says, looking at her pointedly. “You were just minding your manners.”
Charlotte ignores her. “Your pal Will runs shirtless, PS,” she announces, fussing daintily with a handful of flowering thyme. “He’s got that kind of happy trail, you know, when the hair goes from his belly button right down into his—”
“I know what a happy trail is, Charlotte, Jesus.” She knows about Will’s, too, remembers the feeling of her knuckles rasping against it in the hedge maze at Rebecca Barnes’s ridiculous faux Edwardian estate. Remembers the hard press of his body, the surprising wiriness of him. The heat of his hands through her dress.
Also, she remembers the way the ground momentarily tilted underneath her when she overheard him talking about her to his snotty, elitist friends.
“I’m just saying,” Charlotte tells her now, “if you wanted to wear something extra cute tonight, this is your advance notice.”
“It’s Halloween,” Lilly reminds her. “I’m going to come in costume.”
“Sexy nurse?”
“Sexy Chester Cheetah.”
Charlotte nods approvingly. “Now that,” she says, turning the finished arrangement for Lilly’s inspection, “would kill on Tinder.”
* * *
Lilly leaves Charlotte to her prep work and heads back to Pemberly Grove, rolling down the windows of June’s Audi so it’s too loud to think. She feels pissed off and set up, though it’s not like she doesn’t understand why Charlotte did what she did: as far as free publicity for the restaurant goes, Charlie Bingley at Monday Night Supper Club pretty much guarantees they’ll be booked solid right through next spring.
She could just skip the whole thing, Lilly guesses, though the thought of it fills her with an immediate, visceral contrariness. She’s been going to Charlotte’s pop-ups since before Lodge even opened; she’s certainly not about to get chased out of the dining room by some so-called serious actor who probably only owns one pair of shoes. Let him feel awkward about it, if he even has human emotions under that brittle veneer of smug superiority. She didn’t do anything wrong.
Back at the house she opens her closet and stares frowning at its contents for a moment: the rows of jeans and heels and athleisure, the going-out clothes she hardly ever wears since Joe. Finally she sighs, then turns and pads barefoot down the long hallway to the guest room—or at least, it used to be the guest room. Now it’s stuffed close and claustrophobic with unopened cardboard boxes, half a dozen rolling racks, and enough felt hats for some haunted creature with ten thousand heads. In the center of it all Kit sits pretzel-legged on the carpet in her underwear, daintily embroidering what appears to be a curse word onto a vintage silk handkerchief. She’s the craftiest and most fashion-minded out of all of them, cares about things like color theory and diffusion lines and not just how her ass is going to look in a pair of pants; back when she and Olivia had their clothing line, Kit did most of the design work herself.
“Will Darcy is going to be at Supper Club tonight,” Lilly announces, crossing her arms and leaning against the doorjamb.
Kit looks up and raises one thick eyebrow, then sets the hanky down on the carpet and grins. “Step into my office,” she replies.