I tried to stay out of his way most of those nights, even though he came over every few seconds to ask why more people were leaving them behind. I shook my head, trying to look equally disgusted. And I was—though about something else. I was disgusted at myself. At how exactly Danny had accomplished what he had. At how I had missed it.
I couldn’t stop going over it, each new detail like salt in the wound. And I remembered the strangest details. The oak floors in Danny’s Upper West Side apartment project. He had obviously been working on that project longer than a few days—had it afforded him a way to buy me out of the loft? The morning it had all started “Moonlight Mile” had come on the radio alarm clock. What was that doing on the radio? Had Danny managed to plan that part too? Was it not the alarm clock, but his iPhone connected to the charger, scheduled to go off and play that song? My favorite song playing, like a chance, to remind me of who I was. Whom I’d been.
He had given me other chances that night. He had asked me not to go to the party. I remembered clearly. He had brought Gerber daisies home with him and said he would call the whole thing off if I wanted. Was the whole thing, which I thought was the party, really the unraveling of our life together?
Why hadn’t I taken him up on that offer? Where would I be now if I had?
Chef Z would come over to my station, and it would be like looking in the mirror. Utter and total despair. For him, it was his underappreciated vegetable. For me, it was the reminder—as if repeated on playback—that I was completely and utterly alone. Career-less, husband-less.
It was almost enough to make me confide in him. It seemed to be enough to make him confide in me.
“The chanterelle is a tricky beast,” he said, on night eight, his eyes on a gorgeous plate of pasta. “They need to be picked at precisely the right time to reach their full potential.”
Was it happening? A connection? “For what it’s worth, Chef,” I said, “I think they’re delicious.”
He banged the plate on the table. “Not much,” he said.
Then he walked away.
I seriously considered hiding them for the rest of the night. Just to see a different look on his face. Just to do something proactive, as opposed to sitting here, stewing in it.
Adding insult to injury, Amber’s cookbook was a raving success. One week in, and she had already gone into another printing. I was yesterday’s news. Literally.
Perhaps this was what I got for lying so publicly. Now everything I had was private. My life was so private that I was about to have a baby with someone who didn’t even know about it.
Another plate of the pasta with chanterelle mushrooms was returned to the kitchen. Chef Z’s homemade and quite exquisite bucatini was absent from the plate. Several mushrooms remained.
I looked around the kitchen to see if anyone was watching. No one seemed to be, so I scooped up a mushroom and dropped it into my mouth.
It was delicious, rich and meaty, with a perfect amount of spice.
I reached for another when I heard a voice behind me.
“No, you didn’t,” he said.
I turned around to see Ethan standing there, a stainless-steel thermos in his hands.
He shook his head, disgusted. “That’s a new low.”
Then he reached down and took a bite himself.
“So you’ve been keeping a low profile,” Ethan said. “One day you’re staying over, the next you disappear.”
We sat on the bench outside the restaurant, after hours, Ethan pouring us each hot cocoa from his thermos.
He handed me a cup. “Are you all right? Thomas told me you’re sleeping on the couch.”
“I’m surprised he even noticed. I stay in the car until late at night after they’ve all gone to sleep. And I sneak out before they get up. We’ve avoided saying more than two words to each other.”
“That sounds comfortable. And sustainable.”
“It’s great.”
“Why don’t you just stay with me?”
“You have the celebrity friend. And I can’t impose like that.”
He put up his hand to stop me. “First of all, it’s not an imposition. And second of all, she’s in Paris for the week. Doing her fall shopping.”
I looked at his outfit, the same hoodie he seemed to live in whenever he wasn’t fishing.
“You guys have so much in common,” I said.
“It is our hobbies that bring us together.”
I laughed, took a sip of the cocoa.
“So the party didn’t end up going so well?” he said.
I paused. “It was Danny,” I said.
“What was?”
I looked at him, waiting for him to figure it out.
“Holy shit. The husband was the one who hacked you?”
I nodded, afraid to speak—afraid if I said another word, I’d burst into tears. Fourteen years. The tears hadn’t seemed to stop. Danny had been my person. I’d trusted him so much it hadn’t even occurred to me he would have done this, regardless of his reasoning. What did that say about me? What did that say about how little I’d been paying attention to him?
Ethan folded his arms over his chest. “Why would he . . . just . . . why?”
“He said he did it because he loves me,” I said, my voice cracking.
“There are other ways to love someone.”
I met Ethan’s eyes, desperate for a lifeline. “You think so?”
“I know so,” he said, trying to process. “How do you think the girlfriend plays in?”
I wrapped my hands around the cocoa, held it to me. “She doesn’t. There is no girlfriend.”
He looked confused. “What about the showering?”
“She was redesigning our apartment, Danny’s apartment now. I guess the guilt I heard in her voice was about that, about her choosing him in the breakup or something . . .”
“You believe him?”
I did. Would I sound like a fool if I admitted it? I’d looked up Simon Callahan when I got back to Montauk, and he was who Danny said he was. But I hadn’t found any photographs of him and Maggie. Not on Wireimage, not on her Facebook page. I didn’t find any proof. Danny’s word was my proof. And it was really the only proof I needed. What did that say about where I was now?
“So if we take him at his word, what exactly did he think he’d accomplish?”
I shrugged. “He was hoping that I’d remember who I used to be. You know, before the world was watching, and I lost it.”
“It?”
“Me.”
Ethan nodded, considered. “Well, he’s not wrong about that part,” he said. “The husband.”
I turned and looked at him. “What did you just say, traitor?”
He smiled. “I’m not justifying what he did. I’m just saying, he’s not wrong. We do lose ourselves that way. It’s almost impossible not to,” he said. “The other night, I was with my friend when she instagrammed a photograph of herself hanging out with a couple of other women drinking wine on the deck, the ocean in front of them. No, correction: She sent out a photograph of their very newly manicured feet. #girlsnight. #thebestnights.”
He refilled his cocoa, took a long sip of it.
“Only problem was that the other women were her assistant and her assistant’s new girlfriend. And they were over for approximately five minutes to go over her schedule in Paris and pick up her dry cleaning. And, obviously, take the photo.”