Saina knew that twenty-eight was still young. In New York she had friends in their early forties, holding on easily to beauty, who met talented men ten years their junior or rich men twenty years their senior—all the ones who were their age seemed to be too preoccupied getting divorced to fall into marriage—met them, married them, and made families with them as if their lives weren’t decades out of step. But up here in Helios, anyone in their late twenties was obstinately coupled. It was as if they’d all stepped out of some home ec manual left over from the 1930s, the women with their vintage flowered aprons and pots of small-batch preserves, the men with their beekeeping ventures and T-shirt-design companies. It wasn’t that Saina didn’t like the idea of growing her own heirloom tomatoes, it was just, well, it was lonely to make a fetish of domesticity on her own.
Back at home, she opened the door of her new Smeg refrigerator, specially powder coated in a bright yellow, and pushed aside containers of truffled Israeli couscous and goat’s milk yogurt to make room for a farmers market bounty of summer fruit, knobby cucumbers, ears of white corn, fresh mozzarella wrapped in asphodel leaves, and two overflowing bags of Fatboy Farm greens that Leo had handed her before they parted.
Outside, a car door slammed shut.
Her first thought: Grayson came back!
Her next: Leo really forgives me!
Who was this girl, yo-yoing between boyfriends, heart expanding and contracting based on how well she was loved? Not Saina. Certainly not. She was an artist; she was autonomous. Could someone’s base impulses usurp their better nature, making them forever into someone they didn’t recognize?
Footsteps sounded down the slate path and headed towards the side door. In a second the person would pass by the open kitchen window. Now was the time to duck down and slip out to the unfinished studio, where she should have been working all along, trying to recast the double-barreled disgrace of her betrayal and fall.
Curiosity kept her upright.
She watched as an asymmetrical haircut strode purposefully past her window, perched on top of a gangly body dressed in a hipster riot of neon-pink skinny jeans and a loose V-neck so deep that a nipple threatened to peek through. Billy Al-Alani. He spotted her through the window.
“The queen in exile!”
Saina sighed. “Friend or foe?”
“Knight-in-waiting and biggest fan.” He spread out his arms and dropped out of sight. Reluctantly, she stepped outside where he grabbed her up in a sweaty hug and kissed at her cheek. She pushed away from him, forcing a smile.
“What are you doing here? How did you even know where I live?”
“How can you live all the way up here? Don’t you miss Manhattan? Here, I brought you something.” He thrust a paper sack at her.
Saina opened it and looked inside. “There are bagels in the Catskills, Billy.”
“New York water, baby, there’s nothing like it!” He looked past her into the open door. “This place is pretty rad, though. I bet you’re really getting shit done here, right?”
Instinctively, she blocked his view. “If by shit you mean going to every estate sale on the Hudson, then totally.”
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
The hostess in her reared its well-bred head and she swept Billy into her refuge, putting a white wine spritzer on the weathered handcart turned coffee table in front of him—“My love of wine spritzers is fully un-ironic,” he declared—and settling herself on a Moroccan pouf underneath a pair of Marilyn Minter lips. He was the first visitor she’d had besides Grayson. All of her New York friends seemed to be locked in some perpetual work/party circuit that ran from Sundance to TED to Spring Fashion Week to Fire Island weekends to Burning Man to Fall Fashion Week to Art Basel Miami, with interludes of detox in Tulum or Marrakesh. When she first arrived in Helios, she’d been too wounded to speak to anyone, then she’d been too wrapped up in Leo, and after that, she had to hide Grayson’s return from all those loyal friends who had vowed to excommunicate him but, Saina suspected, continued to put out their faces to be kissed whenever they happened to meet.
“Okay, Billy, seriously, what are you doing here?”
“Can’t I just come visit an old friend?”
She tilted her head and took him in. He played with the piece of bone that hung from a leather cord looped around his neck and tipped one canvas shoe against the coffee table.
“Am I an old friend?”
“Of course. Absolutely. You’re actually one of the first people I met in New York.”
“I remember. At that group show I was in. You were, like, brand-new. Straight out of—”