CASS WAS CONCERNED when her friend Dahlia insisted on meeting her for lunch ASAP. Their friendship had a steady rhythm and this move—requesting an immediate face-to-face—was disturbingly out of sync. The old college friends normally saw each other every two months, and they had just been together for a theater night shortly after New Year’s Eve. Cass had ranted to Dahlia about how terrible she thought the play’s promo materials were. It was a modern version of Romeo and Juliet where the ill-fated lovers lived on opposite sides of the Green Line. “Look at this Playbill cover,” she’d said over and over, thrusting the dull imagery in Dahlia’s face. “A balcony! Really? Couldn’t they have at least tried to be original?” Cass knew she sounded like a broken record but couldn’t help herself. Dahlia had patted her knee in sympathy.
They’d talked about seeing another show in March, so Cass was surprised to receive a late-night text from her college roommate, asking her to grab a bite the next day. They met less than twelve hours later at Bella Blu, an under-the-radar Italian spot near Cass’s apartment. It was Dahlia’s choice, and a surprising one given that she tended to prefer a more see-and-be-seen ambience when she trained it in from Scarsdale. It was freezing outside, the groundhog intent on showing everyone who was boss, and Cass had to layer a vest, coat and scarf before venturing outdoors. Cass had so few plans of late and yet found herself not particularly motivated to leave the house. If she hadn’t been so worried about Dahlia, she’d have pushed it off.
“What’s up?” Cass asked when she saw Dahlia making mincemeat of a cuticle, already waiting for her at a corner table. There was a half-eaten piece of focaccia on her plate and a thin strand of oregano stuck in her teeth. Cass couldn’t recall seeing Dahlia eat a carb since college. She expected to feel a twinge of satisfaction, watching her most high-strung, type-A friend finally succumb to temptation, but instead it just made Cass feel sad. Things must be dim if Dahlia was turning to gluten.
“Harris and I are getting divorced,” Dahlia announced before Cass even had the chance to kiss her friend on the cheek.
“Are you serious?” Cass asked, settling into the chair opposite Dahlia. This was worse than anything she had been imagining. Her eyes moved from the precarious water glass getting squeezed to the place where Dahlia’s canary diamond used to sit. Now there was just the hint of a tan line, which looked like an albino worm circling her finger. Cass fought the urge to reach out and pinch some color back into the lonely white spot.
“Dead serious. Like we already have lawyers. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. We just told the kids. Brady was sobbing uncontrollably. I don’t think Toby had any clue what it all meant.”
Cass felt like a balloon inside her chest was inflating and making it difficult for her to draw in air. Brady, her godson, was exactly the age she had been when her parents got divorced. Toby, only a preschooler, had a chance of coming away relatively unscathed. But nine. That huge year where double digits lie on the horizon, when social interactions take on a greater significance, and the first signs of puberty rear their ugly heads (at least they had for her). In other words, a year with enough complications. It was an age when a parent forgetting to call on your birthday is incomprehensible, and yet somehow you are forced to comprehend it. A time when the appearance of half siblings is mind-boggling, and jealousy inducing, and your teachers and your friends’ parents ask you too often if you’re “doing okay.”
And poor Brady had looked so damn happy in the latest Bloomstein holiday portrait. Cass had cleared it off the living room mantel only a few days before, tossing it out along with the dozens of other holiday cards they kept displayed long after the New Year’s toasts were a distant memory. She swept most of the cards straight into a trash bag, but had paused to look for an extra moment at Brady in his basketball jersey. He’d gotten so tall and his boyish cuteness was morphing into something different—a chiseled face and actual muscles! Her heart swelled with a surprising shock of tenderness at seeing her godson growing up. It had to be the knowledge that her own “start date” was fast approaching, making her overly sensitive, so quick to succumb to emotion. She’d actually pressed Brady’s smiling face to her own before consigning it to the recycle bin.
The Bloomsteins, under Dahlia’s auspices, sent a religion-neutral holiday card every year, the outside a collage of family pictures, the inside a rhyming update on their lives. This year’s had read as cheerfully as ever:
Happy New Year to all from a family in Bloom
May your holidays be all cheer and no gloom
Brady’s in fourth grade, shooting hoops night and day
Toby’s hit preschool, singing, painting, molding clay
Dahlia and Harris went (sans kids!) to St. Barths
A vacation filled with food, wine and hearts
And so on and so on, for nine more stanzas!
People with the earnestness and desire—not to mention the time—to compose verse about romantic trips and their children’s hobbies weren’t supposed to get divorced. Her parents, Donna and Dick, they were the ones for whom divorce was preordained. Those two could barely fill out a mortgage application or send in a permission slip, and lord knows they never took a trip anywhere, with or without Cass. But Dahlia and Harris, the prom king and queen of Scarsdale? It felt impossible. They’d known each other since childhood—and despite what the statistics said about marrying a high school sweetheart, what changes could upend a couple who knew each other inside and out? They had everything: beautiful boys, a white-picket-fenced house on a coveted suburban cul-de-sac, extended families that meshed like peanut butter and jelly.
Maybe the rhyming holiday card was a symptom of their problems. After all, the Wentworths sent a simple card with an embossed wreath and the words “Happy Christmas” along with their names printed inside. Mass-produced and ordered online from Minted. That somehow felt more appropriate than Dahlia’s big year-end production, evidence of a couple with nothing to prove. Cass and Jonathan never sent out a holiday greeting; the idea of mailing out a picture of the two of them on a beach with Puddles running between their legs seemed ridiculous. And yet, when the cards started bulging through their rubber-banded mail pile in early December, Jonathan had surprised her by suggesting they send one too.
“Aren’t we a family already, even though we don’t have kids yet?” he’d said.
“No, we’re not,” she answered, though she instantly regretted the harsh response. Puddles was like their baby, and even if there was no Puddles, they were still a unit worthy of showing off. Maybe next year she would do a card. But by then she could have a big belly to show, or even a newborn, so the point would be moot.
Looking at Dahlia, who had just drawn blood picking away at the brittle skin around her nails, Cass wondered how she had missed the signs that her friend was unhappy. Cass and Dahlia always did girls things together, but maybe she and Jonathan should have driven out to Westchester more often instead. Brady was her godson after all, and while she Skyped with the Bloomstein kids every now and then, she was pretty sure Toby wouldn’t know her if she put a fistful of candy right in his face. What the hell else were she and Jonathan doing on weekends? How many brunches does a childless couple need to have? She’d always thought of herself as a fairly decent godparent, but she knew it would no longer be enough to send thoughtful birthday gifts or score backstage passes to kid-friendly musicals. Cass would have to step things up several notches in the future; Brady was going to need her now. She’d been in the trenches before—she knew there was a way out. At least there was no way Harris and Dahlia would botch things quite as badly as her parents did.
After the Romeo and Juliet play, which was rather enjoyable once Cass was able to set aside its dismal logo and signage, Cass had hugged Dahlia and sent her on her way home to the burbs before the two of them had really gotten a chance to talk. Now it seemed laughable, but Cass had come very close that night to confessing her own marital woes and asking for some reassurance. She wanted to tell Dahlia that she sometimes wondered if Jonathan even knew her at all. Was he in love with the real Cass—the girl who once had to bail out her mother from jail for a DUI and whose deadbeat father ditched her like a bad apple at the first opportunity—or was he smitten with a carefully crafted facade? And if Jonathan had somehow managed to mine beneath Cass’s surface to touch the truest parts of his flawed partner, did it excuse the fact that, in the beginning, she thought of him mostly as a golden goose? There was no denying that she’d targeted Jonathan—and manipulated him—because she thought he could provide a one-way ticket out of her old life. Hell, she’d even used Google Earth to look up the house Jonathan grew up in—Greek Revival with a half dozen porches overlooking a verdant lawn that stretched on for acres. It had been easy enough to mentally Photoshop herself into the image, to imagine grasping the wooden banister as she descended the grand staircase, heading to the kitchen where a steaming apple pie sat cooling on the counter.
She’d hoped Dahlia would assuage her fears and remind her that lots of women pulled some marionette strings to maneuver a potential partner into place, that all the Scarsdale housewives fantasized about being single from time to time and worried their spouses were often more like strangers than soul mates. Then Cass could cross Central Park in the back of a taxi knowing her feelings were normal. Damn, there was that word again. Well, she hadn’t broached it anyway, sensing Dahlia was tired. Plus, in the moment, Cass had been torn about whether she should unburden herself. She’d never admitted to anyone else that she had essentially stalked her husband and orchestrated their meet-cute as though she were planning an FBI sting. The part of her that wanted to finally come clean did battle with—and lost out to—the much stronger desire to keep her cards hidden. It was the same wariness that kept her from asking Jemima about motherhood.
“Well . . . aren’t you going to ask me why?” Dahlia asked, sounding faintly bewildered. Cass shook herself back to the present moment with a large gulp of ice water. Whatever it was had to be something big. Bigger than anything she could imagine—definitely bigger than the secret she was holding on to, and drastically more significant than her childish quibbles with Jonathan.
“Yes, of course. Please tell me what happened. Weren’t you two just in the Caribbean?” Dahlia’s social media feeds trickled through Cass’s brain—pictures of Dahlia and Harris clinking glasses, upright toes with the aquamarine sea in the background. The image had made Cass think about how she and Jonathan had let their five-year anniversary come and go without even a celebratory dinner, just some cards exchanged. In some ways she took it as a sign of strength—they were good every day, didn’t need a calendar to reinforce it. But in other ways, she saw it as weakness. Had they already given up on milestones? She wondered what Jonathan thought about the lack of fanfare. That’s if he’d noticed at all.
“Okay,” Dahlia said, leaning in closer to Cass. She took up her stalk of bread again for reinforcement. “It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid. That’s what my therapist said. The sooner you do it, the sooner the pain is over. So here goes: I fell in love with someone else. She’s . . . she’s . . . she’s a she. And she’s the assistant principal at Brady’s school.”
Cass’s jaw went into instant battle with gravity. All it wanted to do was drop—badly. No. Fucking. Way. That’s what she desperately wanted to blurt out, but instead she mustered, “That’s great,” as though Dahlia had told her that Harris was being promoted. It was a “regional manager” to “East Coast manager” kind of response, but what could Cass do? The shock was so huge that her reaction was inversely related.
Cass flashed back to the night she and Dahlia made out junior year. Wasn’t that just to get the attention of the swimmer boys too busy playing beer pong to notice them? Who had even suggested the kiss? Cass could never remember. Now she sized up her friend anew, looking for outward changes. But there was nothing except the bread consumption and a less-than-perfect hairstyle. In any event, it was fruitless to search Dahlia’s face and body for insights. Cass’s own appearance was unchanged since Percy had died, since her sex life deteriorated, since her brain wouldn’t let her sleep. She still tugged on her skinny jeans, slicked on mascara and brushed through her hair enough times to ward off any questions about her well-being.
Besides the shock, there was something else that Cass was feeling upon hearing the revelation. The feeling was relief. The thing breaking down the Bloomstein marriage was monumentally bigger than anything that could fracture her and Jonathan. It was sexual orientation, for crying out loud, not some fib about a chance meeting! She felt her pulse decelerate.
“Just wow,” Cass added, reaching for the breadbasket. Now she needed a blood-sugar fix. “I did not see that coming.”
“Neither did Harris. But I’ve known forever. And I feel so lame doing this now. Coming out feels very fifteen years ago. I mean we went to freaking Brown. If there was ever a place to leave the closet behind . . .”
“Well, you’ve got nothing to apologize for. You did it when you were ready. So how do you feel? And who is this assistant principal?”
“Oh gosh, where do I start? I feel really, really good. I mean, I know I look like hell, but that was mostly over telling the kids. I didn’t sleep for weeks. We wanted to wait until Brady’s weeklong tennis camp in Orlando was over. I couldn’t imagine sending him away with a portable fan, an economy-sized Purell and a note that said, P.S. Your mom’s gay. I’ll tell you what’s weird about the whole thing, though. As much as I’m happy to be with Roxanna—that’s her name—I know I won’t get married again. More kids—maybe. I know Roxanna wants at least one; she’s already done a bunch of fertility-slash-Franken-science research on how to make it happen.”
Cass nodded. How would that work? she wondered. She made a mental note not to take it for granted how easy she and Jonathan had it, relatively speaking.
“But marriage? Not a chance in hell. I’m telling you, this situation has turned Harris into the biggest asshole. Never divorce a lawyer. We’re looking at a minimum of two years for everything to get finalized, probably longer. We have to work out custody, divide the assets—Harris wants to sell the house. And he doesn’t want to see me, so we have to have all of the parent-teacher conferences twice so we can both go alone. A divorce without kids is a breakup with paperwork. With kids, it’s a nightmare.”
Cass shook her head in vigorous agreement. She’d never heard her own deepest fears articulated so succinctly. In college, she’d heard stories from fellow students about parents who’d had amicable divorces, dividing custody easily and putting pettiness aside for the sake of their children. These anecdotes, shared late at night over beer and pizza and sometimes weed, felt like fables to her. She couldn’t help but wonder if these kids had just blocked out the bad stuff or forced themselves to wear rose-colored glasses. Didn’t their parents summon the police to demand months of owed child support, send nasty letters to the place of employment of their ex’s new spouse (Donna did that twice) and viciously malign the other right in front of their children? Didn’t they fight over some shitty piece of furniture that neither of them could remember buying until one of them took a match to it one night in frustration?
“Anyway,” Dahlia continued, “what would I get married again for?”
“Because—” Cass started to say, but stomped on the rest of the sentence. For the kidney, she continued the thought in her head.
Sometimes, when Cass was up in the middle of the night and looked over at her sleeping, snoring husband, she would think: No matter what, at least he has to give me his kidney. Because they were married, and the willingness to part with a vital organ for a spouse was one of the unwritten rules. Being married without kids placed the Coynes in an odd position. Not for the first two years, or even three. But after a while, when the Sunday strolls got old and they’d been invited to more brises and sip ’n’ sees than weddings lately, the childless married state had started to feel off. Questions arose in her head, like: What are we doing this for? Why did Jonathan’s parents plunk down a few hundred grand for a legal distinction? For the promise of grandchildren, Cass supposed. That justified their expense, but what about her own commitment? Was it, in fact, for the promise of an organ if she were ever in dire straits? Or to have someone other than her parents to write down in the space on forms that require an emergency contact? If the answer was yes, she wasn’t even sure that was something to be ashamed of. She didn’t know if that made her an outlier or just like everyone else.
This limbo state was temporary for them, of course. Once she got pregnant, their union would make all the sense in the world. Little Coynes would dot the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard. Their weekends would be jam-packed with birthday parties; their apartment a receptacle for Diapers.com boxes. And Jonathan wouldn’t just be the guy obligated to give her a kidney or some of his bone marrow, if, God forbid, she ever needed it.
“You’re right,” Cass said, because it was always easiest to stand in solidarity with a friend. This didn’t feel like the right time to play devil’s advocate. “So have you told anyone else?”
“You’re the first friend I’ve voluntarily told. But I can assure you all the moms at Scarsdale elementary and Beth Israel Preschool are buzzing. I’m going to call Alexi and fill her in sometime in the next few days.”
Alexi was Dahlia’s other best friend from college, godmother to Dahlia’s younger son, and someone Cass knew pretty well from theater classes. She was a working actress in Los Angeles, having come a long way from the musical version of The Vagina Monologues in which she’d made her theatrical debut at Brown. Alexi was really good in it, actually. The director deserved all the blame—and lots of scorn—for that failed production.
“How are you and Jonathan doing?” Dahlia asked. “I’ve just been going on and on about myself.”
“Really good, thanks,” Cass answered, hoping her straightforward and quick answer sounded convincing. It was the truth, but for some reason when she said it, it had the ring of a cover-up. They were really good. About-to-start-a-family good. So what if she felt light-headed and sweaty because she couldn’t stop thinking about how and why she first pursued her husband? Everyone had secrets, and anyway, didn’t the deep and genuine love she now felt for her husband override the artificial nature of their courtship?
The lie wasn’t something she was proud of, but in the grand scheme of falsehoods, she didn’t think it was completely unforgivable. The problem, as Cass saw it, was that she had waited far too long to confess. Secrets had a funny habit of snowballing, and what may have been a minor infraction on Day One had morphed into something monumental as time ticked on. Maybe that’s why she let their five-year anniversary pass without any fanfare. She couldn’t bear to acknowledge just how long she’d held her tongue about their origin story. She sank her teeth into the sourdough again.
“Well, that’s great. Let’s get some wine. We need to toast my divorce and your marriage,” Dahlia said. “Plus I need some alcohol before I have to face the bitches at Toby’s pickup.”
“I’m on it,” Cass said, signaling to the waitress. “And D, I’m here for you. Anytime you need me. Text me and I will get my ass to Scarsdale stat. And, of course, anything the boys need, I’ll be there in a flash.”
“DAHLIA’S A LESBIAN,” Cass whispered, almost as though if she said it louder her cell phone would explode in her hand. She’d had a weird pit in her stomach since lunch with Dahlia, the source of which she couldn’t quite comprehend. She hoped calling Alexi to discuss the shocking news would settle her. This was news that needed to be picked over with someone else who knew Dahlia as well as she did.
“No way,” Alexi said, over the crackle of the Bluetooth. “That’s insane.” Cass heard a few honks and the zoom of a motorcycle in the background.
“I know. I can’t get over it. She’s planning to tell you herself soon, but I just couldn’t wait.”
“Well, I’m glad you called because I could use the preparation. And you caught me at the perfect time. I just left an audition. Speaking of auditions, what happened to the LA-PAC interview? Weren’t you supposed to be out here by now?”
“It didn’t work out,” Cass said quickly, without elaborating further. Her interview with the Los Angeles Performing Arts Center was originally scheduled to take place a week earlier, but she’d called to cancel last minute. On a whim after leaving PZA, Cass had circulated her résumé to a few theater friends, asking that they keep her in mind if good opportunities came up. She wasn’t planning to pursue any leads in the near term. It would be a classically bad move to start a new job at the same time as getting pregnant. There’d be too many long hours at the office, maybe even international trips if her shows went on tour—things that weren’t compatible with morning sickness and the first few months of motherhood. And she didn’t think it would be an issue anyway. It would probably take a very long time to find something worthwhile in her small and highly competitive field. So she was totally shocked when, out of the blue and almost immediately, she received a call from the biggest performing arts theater in Los Angeles. They wanted to know if she would fly out to interview for the head of marketing and sales position. It was definitely a bigger job than she’d had at PZA, and she’d called Alexi to ask her what she knew about the theater. They’d agreed to get together when Cass was out west meeting with the LA-PAC board. One person she never told about the opportunity was Jonathan. His life was in New York City. He’d built a burgeoning career outside of the shadow of his family’s success and making equity partner at Winstar was on the near horizon for him. Not the time to discuss a cross-country move. Which meant she should never have spoken with anyone at LA-PAC at all, except to say, “I’m flattered, but no thank you.” So why Cass had bothered to set up an in-person interview was a mystery, even to herself.
“What was the audition for? Jonathan told me he saw you on Law & Order again.”
“Everyone’s on L&O. You know that. This was for a budget Halloween horror movie, and my next stop is a commercial for a herpes medication. How terrible is it that I’m going to be the face of Abreva? Actually, what’s worse is that I’m only just hoping to become the face of Abreva. No choice, though, it’s a national commercial, and I need money for new headshots. Can we go back to Dahlia, though? How does she seem? What about Harris?”
“They’ve already started divorce proceedings. She seems happy, but also anxious. Very worried about the kids, of course, and Harris is being a prick. She thinks he’s hiding assets. Aah, and I didn’t even mention the clincher. Her girlfriend is Brady’s assistant principal. Scarsdale hasn’t had a scandal like this in decades and Dahlia said it’s been like one constant orgasm for the soccer moms since this happened.”
“Jesus. Good for Dahlia, though. It’s really brave of her.”
“It is brave of her, isn’t it?” Cass said, and it was like a lightbulb switched on in her brain. Dahlia’s courage was making Cass feel less than. She didn’t want a divorce from Jonathan—of course not. But somehow Dahlia’s bid for freedom and self-fulfillment made Cass green with envy. Her friend was finally coming clean, and her life would be better off for it. Since lunch started, Cass’s emotions had gone from nervousness to shock to relief and now jealousy—the worst feeling of all.
“Well, I’m sorry to hear about the job not working out. Maybe you should think about coming for a visit anyway.”
“I’d love to. I haven’t been to L.A. since Percy and I flew out to film those promos for the Grammys a couple of years ago.”
“Well, it’s settled then. You’ll take a vacation out here before you and Jonathan have some gorgeous baby that exhausts the hell out of you and precludes any travel for at least a year.”
Maybe Alexi was right—maybe she should go to California and relax for a few days. It would be a bit strange to hang with Alexi without Dahlia for any meaningful amount of time—she was definitely the link between them—but it could be fun to have a little getaway, especially to a warm climate. And there was no reason Cass and Alexi weren’t closer. No good one, anyway.
Alexi Williams was physical perfection packed into a five-foot-three frame, defying the logic of her petite stature with her swan neck and longish limbs. She had that ballerina quality that made it seem like at any moment she’d get en pointe and pirouette around the room. Add in some white-blond hair, flawless skin and wide-set doe eyes, and Alexi was the rare person who could make Cass feel insecure about her looks. Cass had been dealt many disadvantages in life, so she didn’t feel the least bit guilty trading on the one advantage she’d not been spared. So being around Alexi, feeling the power of her prettiness slip through her fingers like sand, well, it made her uneasy.
But there was something else too—a deeper jealousy that made Cass want to keep Alexi at a distance.
Cass had always been tempted by the theater, and she loved the big biannual shows sponsored by the drama club at her massive public high school. Still, she never bothered to try out for anything because there was no one to pick her up from rehearsals or chip in with the other parents for cast parties and costumes. Then she got to Brown, where she didn’t have to worry anymore about what Donna and Dick might fail to do. From the moment she stepped foot on campus, Cass secretly hoped that theater would become her “thing,” and she auditioned for the first production she saw advertised. The play was Death of a Salesman, her favorite, and it felt like a sign when she won the small part of Letta. But, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find a way to get comfortable in the role. The problem was that Cass was already playing a part in her real life: the girl who belongs at Brown. She stepped into character each morning before greeting her roommate or even brushing her teeth, and she didn’t step out until she closed her eyes each night. It was too difficult, too confusing, to add another layer of artifice on top of the mask she already wore during all her waking hours. She was a good actress, but not that good.
In contrast, Alexi had no such hurdles to overcome in the fitting-in department at school. She was a double legacy at Brown—her parents lived in a rambling mansion in a suburb of Providence that Cass had once been invited to during college. It had a wraparound porch with swinging benches and the inside featured a double-height library with towers of books that looked like they’d actually been read. And while Alexi struggled financially in California, it was only because her parents, both medical doctors, were withholding funds until she “came to her senses” about a career in entertainment. Alexi was cast as Linda Loman in the same Salesman production, where she glided seamlessly in and out of character without a hitch.
Over time, Cass found her own place in the theater behind the scenes, working as a stage manager, lighting designer, director and de facto marketer. She had a particular genius for the promotional side, and since that was the job that eventually led her to Percy, she tried not to look back.
“I just might come,” Cass said finally to Alexi, realizing a trip to California might be just what the doctor ordered. Vitamin D in noncapsule form. Plus, immersion in a city of shiny, happy people who didn’t waste hours each day thinking in what-ifs like neurotic New Yorkers.
Her thoughts returned to what Alexi had said earlier . . . a gorgeous baby. Jonathan had a lot of strong, enviable WASP genes to pass on to their hybrid offspring. She’d made sure of that. A well-proportioned jaw, a six-foot-one stature that would hopefully average out her own modest contribution (height was such an easy way to establish gravitas) and a head of hair that was hanging around him longer than many other men his age who were forced into comb-overs or premature head shaves. Cass certainly didn’t go weak at the knees at the sight of him anymore, but she appreciated his good looks in a more enduring way. She especially liked walking into a room and seeing the approving glances.
She was a year older than Jonathan. Eight months actually, but it translated into them being a school year apart. It bothered her. She had planned to be a few years younger than her spouse, as much as one can “plan” these things—and if anyone could, it was her—but instead she and Jonathan were growing up together. All things being equal, it’d be better to have your spouse grow up first and then tell you all the mistakes to avoid—unlike her parents, who were both young and dumb about everything, the blind leading the blind. She tried to focus on the positives of growing old with her husband, instead of playing catch-up. They could go together for his and her colonoscopies, share a subscription to AARP. Still, the matter of Jonathan’s age was made even more irritating by the fact that Cass was starting to show hers and he was not. It was just the normal course of female deterioration outpacing male, but it worried her. Glycolic acid peels could only do so much and she wasn’t ready to take any steps that involved needles or “recovery time,” cough cough. She wasn’t a spring chicken anymore—it wasn’t the time to risk what she had. Maybe back when her face was still line-free, before cellulite formed those gelatinous blobs that dimpled her thighs. Now she had to play it safe. If she ever were to seek out a new partner—like if Jonathan were to get hit by a bus or discover he had glioblastoma—she’d make sure it was someone comfortably older than her who would appreciate her youth simply as a relative matter. What was wrong with her for even thinking such thoughts? She wondered if Jonathan ever imagined what his life would be like if she were suddenly wiped off the earth.
“Are you still seeing that director, by the way?” Cass asked. “Dahlia mentioned something about that at lunch.”
“No, no. He was way too intense. On to the next. Not all of us are as lucky as you—literally bumping into Mr. Perfect. So I’m waiting for my Jonathan and trying to have a good time until he shows up.”
“Make a left turn on La Brea Boulevard.” Cass heard Arnold Schwarzenegger suddenly in the background.
“What the hell was that?”
“Oh, that’s just Waze. See the things you’re missing out on in New York?”
“We have traffic here too. You’ve been to the Hamptons. I didn’t realize the Terminator was doing voice-overs. What’s next, cold sore commercials?”
“Very funny. I have to go. Arnold just told me there’s an accident ahead. I need to detour.”
“Drive safely. You just may be picking me up from the airport soon. Stay tuned.”