Charlie howls. “You can’t give up on me!” he says. “I’ll have nothing left. I got fired today.”
Fired? Brooke thinks. Despite his reprehensible behavior, Charlie has always been a professional success. He’s wildly popular with his clients because he’s liberal with deductions and has masterful knowledge of every corporate tax loophole. And he’s a favorite among his coworkers, all of them former fraternity boys; there’s a Pike contingency (which Charlie is part of) and a TKE group. They’ve created a clubby, locker-room atmosphere in their office. Landover is all fantasy football, Friday Beers, Barstool Sports, and Pornhub, guys’ trips to Vegas and the Kentucky Derby, men complaining about wives who don’t put out and kids who treat them like ATMs. During high tax season—from February to April—they pull all-nighters with the Bon Me food truck stationed outside, cases of Red Bull, prescriptions for Adderall, and masseuses from the Happy Orchid.
Brooke has a hard time believing that the bros Charlie works with were morally outraged enough to fire him. Irish probably threatened to take the whole company down, and Charlie was sacrificed. Brooke imagines Charlie’s coworkers apologizing on his behalf, saying he “definitely crossed a line,” then privately whispering that Irish did him dirty.
Brooke resists the urge to swill directly from the bottle of Tito’s and dump the almonds over Charlie’s head (she would have to clean them up). She marches down the hall, Charlie following behind, to their bedroom, which is always its most delightful at this hour, suffused with the late-afternoon sunlight. Everything looks gilded—but that’s just the surface of things.
Brooke points to her suitcase. “I’ve already packed.”
Charlie throws himself facedown on the bed the way Whitney used to when she was an adolescent in the throes of a tantrum. Brooke feels sorry for the kids, and for Whitney especially. She will soon learn that her father groped a female colleague who’s only a couple years older than Whitney herself. And what kind of ghastly example is Charlie setting for Will?
As Charlie sobs, his strong back rising and falling, Brooke looks at him and feels… nothing. Even anger eludes her, although she sees clearly now that the reason they no longer have any friends isn’t Brooke’s social awkwardness (which is what Charlie has led her to believe) but Charlie himself.
Brooke takes her suitcase and her hatbox and decamps to the guest bedroom, where she will remain until she drives to the ferry the next day.
She checks her phone. Her post has fifty Likes and sixteen comments. It’s her most popular post ever. Brooke wipes a tear from her cheek.
8. The Third Margarita
There’s a domestic dispute in coach that delays the takeoff from Cancun. Kristen, the flight attendant in first class, pokes her head into the cockpit and tells Gigi, “This happens all the time. People always think the third margarita is a good idea, and they’re always wrong.”
“What’s going on?” Gigi asks.
“The marshal is escorting them off.”
Gigi twists in her seat and sees a cross-looking (and very sunburned) couple being shepherded down the aisle. This is your captain speaking, Gigi thinks. Bye-bye. She never had anything like this happen on her Atlanta-to-Rome or Atlanta-to-Madrid routes. But after Matthew died, Gigi gave those routes up. It was just too painful to land at FCO or MAD and not find Matthew waiting for her.
So now here she is—wasting away in Margaritaville.
She doesn’t get back to her home in Buckhead until nearly nine o’clock. Melba greets her at the door with an angry meow, and Gigi scoops her up and peppers her face with kisses. There’s a note on the kitchen table: We’re making paella tonight, come over!
All Gigi wants to do is have a glass of wine and go to sleep, but Tim and Santi did cat-sit, and paella does sound good. She drops Melba to the floor and heads down the street.
It turns out, paella comes at a much higher price than the six-pack of Mexican Coca-Cola she brought Tim and Santi as a thank-you gift. They want to talk about tomorrow’s trip. Oh, do they.
“I can’t believe you’re going,” Tim says as he scoops a huge serving of fragrant saffron rice with shrimp, mussels, and sausage onto Gigi’s plate. “Girl, what are you thinking?”
“Hollis knows about you,” Santi says. “I mean, come on, Geej. Out of two million followers, she picks you? She definitely knows.”
“That’s what I thought too,” Gigi says. “I figured Matthew left some kind of incriminating evidence behind and Hollis wanted to, you know, hash it out. But I think she’s inviting me in earnest. She… likes me, and I like her too.”
“I have a theory,” Santi says. “I think texting with Matthew’s wife is your way of hanging on to him.”
Gigi blinks rapidly. This whole thing is so confusing. “I want to meet her in person,” she says. “I want to hear her talk about him, I want to get a sense of what their marriage was like. He told me only certain things, and I’m not sure if any of it was true.”
“He lied to you for how long about not being married?” Tim says.
“Seven months,” Gigi says—which, as it turns out, was long enough to fall in love. When Matthew finally did come clean about being married—and not only married, but married to Hollis Shaw—Gigi hadn’t been able to break things off. She’d tried and failed. She cared too much about him.
Gigi meets Dr. Matthew Madden in the Delta lounge during a rogue hailstorm at Hartsfield. Gigi is supposed to fly to Buenos Aires for vacation and Matthew is “heading home” to Boston. Gigi asks the bartender to change the channel on the TV; she wants to watch college football.
Matthew turns to her. “I wouldn’t have picked you for a football fan,” he says. “With your British accent.”
“I’m Bulldogs all the way,” Gigi says with a wink.
“Ah, lucky you. I root for UNC, which is only satisfying during basketball season,” Matthew says.
“Did you go there?” Gigi asks.
“My ex-wife did,” Matthew says without so much as a blink. “One of the habits I can’t seem to shake now that we’re apart is cheering for the Tar Heels. What about you? Did you go to Georgia?”
“For two years,” Gigi says. “Then I transferred to Embry-Riddle. I’m a pilot for Delta, though I’m here tonight because I’m supposed to be flying to Buenos Aires for a little Malbec and tango.”
From that point on, they’re off to the races, asking each other questions, seeing if they have anything in common other than a love of college sports. Why, yes—they both like classical music as well as Dave Matthews, they both travel all the time, they’re both addicted to their work. When their flights are canceled, they decide to order a bottle of champagne. That’s when the flirting starts, subtle at first, then more overt. Gigi is no stranger to airport romances—it comes with the job—so when Matthew says he’s booking a room at the Marriott Gateway there at the airport, Gigi says she’ll get a room as well rather than drive home after she’s been drinking. When they approach the hotel desk, they’re holding hands, and the idea of two rooms is absurd. Matthew doesn’t call anyone, doesn’t text, doesn’t disappear into the bathroom for a suspicious amount of time. He wears no ring, and there’s no mark suggesting he’s worn a ring recently.
The following May, when Gigi and Matthew are spending a romantic weekend in Santorini, Matthew tells her he won’t see her much over the summer because he’ll be on Nantucket with his family.
Gigi looks out the white arched window of their hotel room in Oia at the sparkling blue Mediterranean and thinks, Something is up.
“You mean your daughter?” Gigi says. Matthew has told her about his twenty-year-old, Caroline, who goes to school in New York.
“Yes,” Matthew says. “And my wife.” Matthew, who is the definition of low drama, pauses dramatically. “Gigi, I’m married.”
It’s cute of him to tell her when they’re on a Greek island and Gigi can’t leave. Well, scratch that, she can leave, and she threatens to, of course—How could you, you’re a liar, from the minute I met you, you lied, what is wrong with you? But in the end, she lets him comfort her with what are certainly more lies or, at best, half-truths: Hollis and I have separate lives, we lost that loving feeling a couple years ago, I stay in the house because I want to avoid the mess of a divorce, plus Caroline. Please, Gigi, please understand just how happy you make me. You make me so damn happy.