“They let me go,” she said.
I hobbled up to standing, disregarding my aching and probably broken nose.
I couldn’t believe it. She was home.
“I was just on my way down there,” I said, letting my messenger bag slide from my shoulder onto the floor.
Emily surveyed the kitchen, the empty pizza boxes and candy wrappers. “I see you’ve been eating your pain,” she said. “Because you missed me.”
That blond-haired, blue-eyed bitch from Connecticut. She was home!
“I did miss you,” I said. “I missed you so much.”
The others, finally, had woken up from all the commotion and were out of the bedroom—Wendi with creases on her face, Ginger with her hair wild as a house fire, and Lily struggling to get her glasses on fast enough.
“You’re all here?” Emily said. “For me?” Her voice cracked and she lapsed, unconsciously perhaps, into her natural lower-class accent. “I thought for sure you all were just going to let me . . .” She broke off, her neck and cheeks reddened, her eyes filled with tears. She covered her face with her hands.
“Never,” I said, going to her. “I was just on my way to turn myself in.” I folded my arms around her, squeezing so hard I thought for sure she’d complain, but she didn’t.
Wendi, Ginger, and Lily huddled around us, clinging, howling, crying. My upstairs neighbors might have thought someone had died, because when you get right down to it, there’s such an indistinguishable line between crying out for dear life and crying out for dear death.
I always wondered what the sensation was like, to win. The lottery, the Super Bowl, a gold medal—to win anything, really. To want something so much, and to get it. Now I knew.
Beneath all the tears, I was saying thank you, thankyouthankyouthankyou, to God, the Universe, Buddha, Oprah, anyone and everyone who’d helped out with this in any way. And then I made a silent promise to pay my good fortune forward, because suddenly I had something to pay forward. I was supposed to be an island, and hell might be other people, but what I had there at that moment in my overfull kitchen—well, it was something.
—
LATER THAT NIGHT, Emily and I drank champagne in our pajamas. Me in my leisurely stripes, she in her lace two-piece. It was just the two of us again, lounging on my bed. Ginger, Wendi, and Lily had gone home; the news that Emily was free had quieted the chatter on the Internet, and we could take a deep breath and relax back into our old selves—or, the newly updated versions of our old selves.
“So, how exactly did you manage to get me out of jail?” Emily asked while uncorking our second bottle of Asti Spumante.
“Long story. I sort of had Robert by the balls.” I held out my glass to be refilled. “The cojones.”
Emily set the bottle onto my nightstand and scrolled through a few new messages on her phone. She was already being bombarded with calls and e-mails. Everyone wanted to know what had happened. Why was she held in custody? Why wasn’t she charged with anything? People wanted answers. Emily didn’t have any of those answers, but she was still enjoying the attention nonetheless.
“You’re going to have to be a little more specific,” she said. “I have to have a good story to tell my fans; that’s what they want from me now.” As she was scrolling, her phone chimed again.
I checked my own phone, not for messages—which was good because there weren’t any—but for the time.
It was only a little after eight p.m. Not so late as to make it entirely insane for me to forgo my champagne flute, lift myself from the bed, throw on some clothes, and make my way uptown. Kevin had to have heard the news by now that Emily and I had come out okay. I liked to imagine that he’d been closely monitoring my situation on the sly since we broke up; I pictured him peeping around Titan corners, eavesdropping on conversations, worrying over Emily’s arrest, and even cheering on the snowballing success of our website from his too-small couch in his too-small apartment.
Of course I understood that in real life Kevin was still angry. And that even now, my being exonerated didn’t un-betray him. I’d still lied to him over the course of many days and nights and hamburgers—and that was unforgivable. But I wanted to go to him, tonight, immediately, unforgivable or not.
“I’m running out of battery.” Emily poked at her phone without looking up. “Have you seen my charger?”
I wheeled around to the side of my bed, put my feet on the floor, and stood up. By the time Emily realized I wasn’t searching the room for her phone charger, I was already pulling my pea coat out of the closet.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked, suddenly aware of me. “Where are you going? Out to sea?”
I buttoned my pea coat closed. “I won’t be gone long.”