Marc bites his lip, checking our surroundings again. This time, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out his phone, and opens up the Notes app. I am practically in his lap, watching as he taps out the answer: She is starting to think you and Stephanie had a thing while you were living with her and it ended badly.
The words on my tombstone blur and come into focus, blur and come into focus. This is bad. This is really, really bad. I’m engaged. Steph and Vince might have the sort of marriage where they trade hall passes every other week, but Arch thinks more highly of herself than that. She will leave me if she gets wind of this.
Marc is opening the camera icon on his phone now, thumbing through pictures of his niece at the beach and expertly captured sunsets, arriving finally on a grab of what appears to be a page in a book. He offers me his phone, and I spring my thumb and index finger apart, zooming in.
It’s the title page from Stephanie’s third novel. The one I thought I had trashed in the clean-out of my old apartment. To the love of my life, she had written to me. Sorry, Vince!
“Where did you get this?” I ask Marc, my ears roaring.
“Lisa sent it to me. It was on the bookshelf at your old place. Where Kelly and”—he signals Layla with his chin—“are living. We were there to film and Lisa noticed it. She thought it was weird it was there, and she opened it, and then, well, she read that, and it just got her thinking and then—”
I hold up a finger to Marc—press pause on that thought. I motion for Layla to remove her headphones.
“Layla?” I ask, in a quiet, stern voice. “Remember that copy of Stephanie’s book that I put in the recycling bin?”
Layla swallows.
I nod. “Tell me the truth.”
Layla looks like she wishes she could disappear. “I was curious,” she whispers, her cheeks blazing. Curious about sex, she means.
I return her headphones to her ears, cursing my sister under my breath for banning Layla from watching Game of Thrones. Jon Snow could have sated that curiosity. This could have been avoided.
“Go on,” I tell Marc, digging my fingers into my armrests.
“Lisa started to think about it more, and she asked me to show her the film I took of you and Steph meeting up in Barneys.” Marc waits for me to remember. “And she noticed that Steph brought up your new tattoo on your foot.”
I feel my face contort into a confused scowl. “So?”
“So it had been a month since you and Steph quote unquote made up in the bathroom at Lauren’s event, and you got that tattoo just a few days later. We filmed it, remember? That means when you and Steph saw each other in Barneys you hadn’t seen each other in a month—but why? If you had really patched things up, and if it had been over something as insignificant as what you said it was about, why wouldn’t you two have been hanging out all the time again? But the nail in the coffin is that she bailed on your engagement party.”
“She was traveling.”
“No,” Marc says to my surprise. “Lisa checked her flight info. She was in New York that night. She chose not to come. Maybe because she’s in love with you and it would have been too painful for her to attend?”
I tip my head back, resting it on the seat, wishing I was asleep and this was all just a bad dream. “Has Lisa told anyone else about this yet? Other than you?” I hold my breath.
“I don’t think so,” Marc says, and I exhale, audibly. “I think she’s waiting to see if her theory has legs before she brings the others into it.”
I sigh, feeling unjustifiably sorry for myself. I’ve waited four years to take everyone to Morocco and a secret lesbian affair storyline is going to overshadow all the good we’ve come here to do.
“I will say,” Marc adds, “that it’s definitely another post to the pile that she saw Steph and Vince arguing like that. She thinks Vince knows and is pissed. Which is hypocrisy of the highest order given the way he’s been sniffing around your sister.”
“Oh, great.” I laugh, helplessly. “So I’m not the only one who’s noticed that.”
After my engagement party, I had to have a serious sit-down with Kelly. Did something happen with Vince? I asked, my throat tight, because I really was afraid to hear her answer. Kelly doesn’t date. She won’t allow herself to devote that much of her time and energy to anyone other than Layla and the business. Occasionally, she uses Tinder to screw. I’ve babysat for her on those nights. Have a good orgasm! I call after her as she heads out the door in a tight dress. Vince would have happily provided her such a service and saved her the effort of dragging her thumb across the screen. Kelly is all about efficiency.
She had responded to my question with hostile disdain. “You have problems,” she scoffed, and walked out of the room. No yes. No no.
“Jesse can call this episode ‘Incest Is Best,’?” I mutter to Marc.
Marc raises his eyebrows. He’s never heard me take a jab at Jesse before, but I’m not so googly-eyed that I haven’t noticed her sense of humor, which all too often tries to appeal to the youths and all too often falls abysmally short. And her pun-y captions on Instagram—cringe.
Suddenly, the plane gets caught in a nasty ripple of turbulence. Layla, first-time flyer, seizes up in fear. I put an arm around her, tucking her into my side and assuring her this is normal, even though it feels like a shark has the pilot’s cabin in its mouth, like we are being shaken to death. I promise her that this is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing I haven’t seen before. I’m talking to her but I’m talking to myself, and I’m lying to both of us.
It’s early afternoon by the time we land in Marrakesh and taxi to the hotel, Marc swallowing yawns while trying to hold his handheld steady in the front seat. I’m in the first row of the van, squeezed between my sister and Layla. Steph and Jen are behind me and Lauren shares the third row with an arm looped over her luggage, which she insisted come in our van. Something about her grandmother’s silk scarves. Something none of us believed. I’m assuming she did her research and knows that in certain establishments in Morocco, women are barred from drinking alcohol, and took her own precautions.
I warn everyone against napping. The best thing to do is power through the day and let sleep snatch you only when you can’t run any further. I suggest that once we get to the hotel, we freshen up and meet in the lobby for a ride through the Jewish quarter on the SPOKE electric bikes, which have been shipped to the riad in anticipation of tomorrow’s field trip to the village of Aguergour in the lower Atlas Mountains. I do think this would make for a nice outing and my investors will be pleased with the prime product placement, but a part of me wants to keep the group together, under my paranoid eye. I don’t know who has heard what—about me and Steph, about Kelly and Vince. The last thing I need is the women splitting up, saying God knows what about God knows who on camera.
“Actually, there’s this spice shop I wanted to check out,” Jen says.
I close my eyes, briefly. Of course there is.
“The Mella Spice Souk,” Jen reads off her phone. Kelly twists in her seat, ears perked.
“Très bon,” the driver chimes in. “Est célèbre.”
We all turn to Lauren, who says to him, “Est-il?”
He rattles off something else in French, and Lauren raises her eyebrows, nodding, making it clear she understands. “He said that market is like a famous market. Where the locals go. Tourists too, but not a tourist trap.”
Jen gets this smug smile on her face, as though she has bested my plans. “My yoga instructor told me about it,” she says. “There’s a Moroccan blend that’s supposed to increase the restfulness and renewability of sleep. I may integrate it into a new tonic.” She beams. “Rest is the new hustle!”
Oh.
My.
God.
“I think Steph agrees.” Lauren laughs, and Steph’s eyes pop open at the mention of her name. She had been dozing next to Jen, her forehead suctioned to the window.
“Sorry.” She wipes away some drool with the back of her hand, “What?”