Scarlett lifts her hands as if she’s “raising the roof”—a sarcastic move if I’ve ever seen one.
I let it go, disappearing into my room to peel out of my work clothes and change into jeans and a T-shirt.
When I get back, Scarlett’s dining chair is vacant.
Once again, she’s nowhere to be found.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ELLE
“I didn’t realize where we were . . .” Indie bites her lip and offers an apologetic wince as we approach Matt’s apartment building on Sutton Place.
An hour ago, I was standing outside having one of the strangest conversations of my life with West Maxwell. I was so worked up when I got back to my place that Indie insisted on a walk-and-talk. Only now we’ve been walking and talking for an hour, only to wind up mere yards from the place where my life almost came to a permanent end.
“It’s fine.” I nudge her along and motion for her to keep going. “I doubt he lives here anymore anyway.”
“Unless his wife kicked him out and he has no choice but to live here . . .”
“This is true.” I think about her again. Claudia is her name—a detail I only learned recently after a late-night deep dive into Matt’s real identity. Even the last name he gave me when we were together was fake—which makes sense in retrospect given that I could never find anything about him online. Early in our relationship, he told me he hated social media and that he preferred to live his life away from all that “nonsense.” Like a fool, I adored that about him. “It’s okay. I’m bound to run into him sooner or later. This city’s like a giant small town.”
“What would you even say?” Indie asks. “Have you thought about that?”
As soon as I stopped taking Matt’s calls and had my mother change my phone number, he sent me letters for weeks, detailing his marital problems and professing his love for me. He claimed he only stayed with Claudia because of the kids but that his heart would forever be mine.
I shredded each and every letter he sent after the first one without so much as opening them.
“Oh, I have fictional confrontations with him in my head all the time,” I say. “Or I used to. I’m starting not to care as much lately. I think about his wife more than I think of him now . . . can you imagine? Marrying him and having his babies, and that’s how he repays you? By spending your trust fund money on a city apartment so he can screw some younger woman?”
“So cliché.” Indie shakes her head.
“And revolting.” I grip my throat as it burns with bile. “It makes me sick that I was even a part of that equation.”
“Babe, you had no idea.”
“Yeah, but I should’ve known. Instead I was following him blindly all around town and believing every word that came out of his mouth without a second thought.”
“Love makes people do stupid things. It’s science. There’s a chemical involved or something.”
“Is it even love if you can flip it off like a switch?” I glance up at a fourth-floor window I know to be his, and my stomach drops when I find the light is on.
We’d been together a whirlwind three months when he dropped the L-word, and I was so inspired by his bravery and conviction (because in my experience, most men would rather take a dull butter knife to their genitalia than utter that word so soon) that I even wrote an article called “The Dirty Truth about Saying I Love You.”
Without naming his name, I sang his praises like a lovesick puppy.
“Feels like a lifetime since I’ve been up there.” I sigh, stopping by the doors I used to traipse through with a million-dollar smile on my face and my finest perfume wafting behind me. Ernie, the doorman, would greet me with his usual “How you doin’ tonight, Miss Napier?” And I’d stop to catch up with him for a minute or two, letting him fill me in on his baby grandson’s latest milestone. “Can’t believe it’s only been a couple of months.”
“A lot has changed since then.”
“Everything has changed.”
“Why are we stopping?” Indie eyes the front door, pointing. “You’re not going up there, are you?”
“Hell no.” I laugh at the notion. “I was just thinking about that day.”
Funny how a single moment in time will live forever in my memory as simply that day.
My mother once referred to my aneurysm as an earthquake, reminding me that sometimes you survive the damage and sometimes you don’t, but once you’ve been hit, things are never the same. You have to rebuild. And she went on to say that no earthquake is without aftershocks—little waves that affect everyone in your vicinity in some capacity.
Clips of that fateful morning play in a loop in my memory, some more vivid than others.