“I know, dear girl, and he thinks the same about you. I want to hear everything, but first let’s get onto the road. There shouldn’t be too much traffic once we’re out of town. How much do you love this convertible? We’re like Thelma and Louise, except no one will die in the end,” Stella said in her low, gravelly voice.
Janey pulled in a breath of fresh island air and fiddled with the radio stations, trying to find something other than American pop from ten years ago. She finally settled on Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry,” which felt fitting for the occasion and the setting. She took off her sunglasses and closed her eyes. The sun felt nice on her eyelids.
“You’re like a whole new person from when I first met you.” Stella smiled. “You’re living a life filled with abundance and purpose. You’re becoming very wellthy.”
Janey had only recently discovered the concept of “wellth.” They used it on all of the health and fitness blogs. It meant something along the lines of forgetting about money and embracing wellness as a life path. From what she could gather on Instagram the hash tag #wellth was mainly attached to photographs of very fit people doing headstands in places like Mount Kilimanjaro and Machu Picchu or eating organic gluten-free croissants in a tangle of white sheets in a fancy hotel in Provence.
“So Beau is trying to oust me from my own company. Did I tell you that? He’s telling everyone that I quit B and that I’m not coming back.”
Stella put a warm hand on her leg. “Oh honey, that’s awful. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Half the time I’m crazy with rage and I want to sue him for everything he’s worth and take the company back. Then sometimes I want to give the whole thing up and try something new. But I don’t know what I want to do next. I thought I was supposed to have all this figured out by now.”
Stella nodded serenely.
“We’re never meant to finish our journey. There’s no such thing as ‘grown up.’ You’ll figure it out. Maybe you’ll figure it out this week. Try to just relax into this. Don’t worry too much about Sara and about the other women. Worry about you. You’ll go back home with some clarity.”
It took less than a half hour to escape the bumper-to-bumper traffic of downtown and to reach a highway that ran parallel to the turquoise sea. The temperature was comfortable, in the high seventies, and the beach was crowded on this Sunday morning with young women spread out on blankets, reading glossy magazines, teenagers playing Frisbee close to the water’s edge, and entire families gathered around grills near the parking lots.
“I could live here,” Janey said.
“Why don’t you?”
“Why don’t I?” Why didn’t she? Nothing was keeping her in New York. The questions made her uncomfortable. She changed the subject.
“When is Sara getting in?”
“She’s been here for a week. I’m worried about her, to be honest. Her energy is off. You could talk to her, you know. About making a life change. Talk about someone who has reinvented herself. She made a complete transformation in less than a year.”
Janey remembered Ivy asking her questions the other night about Sara Strong’s backstory.
“What exactly happened with Sara and Kate Wells?” Janey said in a voice she hoped was light and breezy.
Stella didn’t seem put off. “I know Sara’s side of it. But you never know anything listening to just one side. She said Kate was jealous of her, competitive. The two of them were going to open a studio together but she said Kate wanted total control, demanded to be the sole owner of the company, refused a fifty-fifty split.”
Janey nodded. That sounded familiar.
“Sara couldn’t take it anymore. She told Kate she didn’t want her money and they broke up. Friend breakups are always worse than love breakups. But enough about Sara Strong. I want to talk about Hugh. What do you think of him?” They drove past rolling green hills covered in lush tropical plants. Roosters and street dogs trotted together on the gravel shoulder of the narrow highway.
“He’s divine. Everything about him is perfect and wonderful.”
“And the juice boy?”
“Also great.” Janey stretched her bare toes onto the dashboard, making fuzzy toe prints on the windshield. “They’re different. If you’d have told me dating would be so fun I would have gotten divorced years ago.”
“But maybe you wouldn’t have appreciated it so much then! My first husband was terrible. Emotionally and physically abusive. I don’t think I could appreciate having such a wonderful husband now, if I hadn’t gone through a very, very bad marriage the first time around.”
Janey stayed quiet. It was rare to get private details about Stella’s life.
“My first husband was really possessive. He once cut off my hair, right down to the roots, while I slept and burned me in the side with his cigarette. He was a brute and a weak, weak man. I stayed for a year after that. We all have to hit rock bottom in order to appreciate the good bits in life.”
Janey reached over to touch Stella’s milky white arm. Her thoughts turned to Beau, who was abusive in his own way, and she wondered if this was her rock bottom. If so, she knew she should count herself incredibly lucky.
“No one deserves that. How long were you married?” Janey asked. “The first time?”
“Five years.” Stella appeared lost in thought. She was silent for a couple of minutes. “You’ll have to meet my new husband when we get back. He’s wonderful. You’ll like him a lot.” The two women lost themselves in quiet for the remaining fifteen minutes of the drive.
Before she knew it they’d arrived at the jungle sanctuary, a small peninsula that jutted into the crystalline waters. “This place is like heaven,” Janey said in awe. “We’ve just driven into the best screen saver of all time.”
“Right? You’ll love it here.”
The retreat occupied most of the property, a giant eight-bedroom house with five freestanding luxury yurts. At fifteen thousand dollars for the week Janey thought she would have gotten her own yurt, but part of the experience, Stella promised her, was sharing space with another one of the women.
Jungle encroached on nearly every corner of the property. Vines crawled like narrow snakes along the fa?ade of the main house, which was built in a delicate French Colonial style, with large white columns and a pale green tiled roof—Palm Beach and Lilly Pulitzer meet Heart of Darkness. Janey counted no fewer than eight gardeners clipping already perfectly pruned flowering plants and trees. The manicured lawns were dotted with sculptures of Hindu deities. Ganesha with his large foot balanced on the back of a mouse had been turned into a birdbath. To his left was Parvati, sitting serenely in the lotus pose with a fern growing out of her head, and down the way a fierce Hanuman, the monkey god, had been converted into a free-flowing fountain with water spilling out of his limbs. Inside her yurt, the walls were painted robin’s-egg blue and covered over in tiny gold stars; mud cloth tribal tapestries hung from the door. The space’s overstuffed couch and poufs were upholstered in Muriel Brandolini floral cottons. “Talk about glamping!” Janey cried.