Angie Polaski stood up from her desk. She closed her office door. Muffled voices bled through, some asshole agent bragging to another asshole agent about money. Her hand stayed wrapped around the doorknob, strangling it. She hated this place with its stupid rich kids. She hated the perfect secretaries. She hated the pictures on the wall. She hated the athletes who’d built this place.
She could go blind listing all the things she hated.
She sat back down at her desk. She stared at the screen on her laptop, feeling like actual fire was coming out of her eyes. If the damn computer hadn’t cost so much, she would’ve thrown it on the floor and crushed it with her heel.
She’s got his past. I’ve got him.
Angie checked the date on the email that Sara had written to her sister. Eight months ago. By Angie’s calculation, Sara had been screwing Will for only four months when she wrote the words. Pretty arrogant for her to think that Will was hers for the taking.
Angie arrowed up to reread the paragraph.
I never thought I could feel this way about another man again.
Sara sounded less like a doctor and more like a stupid teenage girl. It seemed appropriate. Sara Linton was the exact kind of simpering, clueless girl you’d find at the center of a kids’ novel—the one who stared moodily out the rain-streaked window and couldn’t decide whether or not to date the vampire or the werewolf. Meanwhile, the so-called bad girl, the girl who was fun at parties, the one who would give you the best fuck of your life, was relegated to the corner, bound to end up seeing the error of her bad-girl ways just before taking a stake to the heart.
I’ve got him.
Angie slammed the laptop closed.
She shouldn’t have cloned Sara’s laptop. Not because it was wrong—fuck that—but because it was torture reading the slow process of Sara falling in love with Will.
There were literally hundreds of emails from the last year and a half. Sara wrote to her younger sister four or five times a week. Tessa wrote back just as often. They talked about their lives in mind-numbing detail. They complained about their mother. They joked about their absentminded father. Tessa gossiped about the people living in Dirt Town, or wherever the hell she was a missionary. Sara talked about her patients at the hospital and new outfits she had bought for Will and how she had tried a new perfume for Will and that she had to get a doctor friend to write her a prescription because of Will.
If not for anything else, Angie despised Sara because she’d made her have to Google the words ‘honeymoon cystitis’.
Angie hadn’t been able to stomach the gooey, lovestruck bullshit for long. She had skimmed ahead through the emails, looking for clues that the new car smell was wearing off. Will was far from perfect. He had a habit of picking up everything you put down, putting it away before you were finished using it. He had to immediately fix anything that was broken, no matter what time of day it was. He flossed his teeth too much. He would leave one sheet of toilet paper on the roll because he was too cheap to waste it.
Had the most perfect night last night, Sara had written last month. My God, that man.
Angie stood up from her chair. She went to the window. She looked down at Peachtree. Evening rush hour. Cars were shuffling along the clogged roadway. She felt a pain in her hands. She looked down. Her fingernails were digging into her palms.
Was this what it felt like to be jealous?
Angie hadn’t expected Sara to stick around. Women like that didn’t like messy things, and Angie had repeatedly made it clear that Will’s life was messy. What she hadn’t anticipated was that Will would fight for Sara to stay. Angie had assumed the other woman was a trifle, something Will had been coerced into trying but would never enjoy, like the time Angie had talked him into buying a pair of sandals.
Then she had seen them together at Home Depot.
It was early spring, so maybe five months ago. Angie was at the store buying light bulbs. Will and Sara had walked through the entrance, so up each other’s butts that they hadn’t seen Angie standing five feet away. They were holding hands, swinging their arms back and forth in a wide arc. Angie had followed them to the gardening section. She had stood in the adjacent aisle listening to them talk about mulch, because that’s how tedious their lives were.
Sara had offered to get a shopping cart. Will had picked up the bag and thrown it onto his shoulder.
Babe, Sara had said. Look at how strong you are.
Angie waited for Will to tell her to get the fuck out, but he hadn’t. He had laughed. He had hooked his arm around her waist. Sara had nuzzled his neck like a dog. They had shuffled off to look at flowers and Angie had broken every single light bulb she had in her basket.
‘Polaski?’ Dale Harding stood in the doorway. His suit was wrinkled. The buttons of his shirt strained around his gut. She felt the usual disgust she always felt around Dale—not because of his weight or his sloppiness or that he had sold his own daughter to feed his gambling habit, but because Angie could never hate him as much as she wanted to.
He said, ‘Party’s about to start.’
‘Your eyes are yellow.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s what happens.’
Dale was checking out. They both knew this. They didn’t talk about it. ‘How’s Dee?’
‘She’s all right. Out of the closet.’
They both smirked at the double meaning. Delilah had busted out of her last rehab facility, so Dale had decided the quickest way to dry her out was to lock her in his closet.
He said, ‘I gotta line on a doc who’ll give her a legit script for the Suboxone.’
‘Good,’ Angie said. The maintenance drug was the only thing that kept Delilah off heroin. Because of government regulations, it was hard to come by. Angie had been scoring it through a dealer she didn’t quite trust, banking on Dale dying soon so that she could stop aiding and abetting his worthless junkie of a daughter. Wife. Whatever. ‘Did you talk to that lawyer?’
‘Yeah, but I—’
His answer was cut off by loud cheering. Champagne corks popped. Rap music pulsed through every speaker in the office. The party had started.
They both knew that Kip Kilpatrick would be looking for them. Dale stepped aside so that Angie could go first. She smoothed down her skirt as she walked. Her high heels were killing her feet, but she would be damned if she wasn’t going to go toe-to-toe with the young bitches in the office. They were all so clueless, their unlined faces and pouty lips contorting into confusion when Angie had to lean over the sink in the bathroom so she could get close enough to the mirror to reapply her eyeliner. There was no joy in telling them they were going to be forty-three someday, because when that day came, she would already be in a nursing home.
Or dead.
Maybe Dale had it right. Much easier to go out on your own terms. He probably would’ve done it a lot sooner if not for his worthless daughter. There was something to be said about living child-free.
‘There’s my girl.’ Kip Kilpatrick was standing at the top of the floating glass staircase. As usual, he had a basketball in his hands. The guy couldn’t go anywhere without the damn thing. He said, ‘I need you after this. My office.’
‘We’ll see.’ Angie brushed past him. She checked the room, looking for a familiar face. None of the big names had arrived yet. It was mostly twenty-somethings in skinny suits drinking Cristal like it was water.
She saw a large-scale architectural model underneath the LED sign. This was what the party was all about. The last pieces of the All-Star deal had finally come together. They were going to break ground in exactly two weeks. Angie looked down at the glass-enclosed model. Converted warehouses. Open-air shopping. Grocery store. Movie theater. Farmers’ market. Chic restaurants. Marcus Rippy’s abandoned nightclub.