Good for You: A Novel (19)

His eyes landed on the microwave behind her. “Gotta go.”

“What? Where are you going?” she said.

“Out,” he said, grabbing his keys from the hook beside the door. “Later.”

Neanderthal, she thought angrily. Did he even know how to use more than two words at a time?

He left the door open—again—as he left the house, and Aly stuck her head outside as he was climbing into his SUV.

“You are so exasperating!” she yelled.

Wyatt didn’t turn around, but once again, he paused—just for a moment, but still—before pulling the car door closed and starting the engine, then peeling out of the driveway.

Aly knew she shouldn’t have hollered at him, as it was counterproductive. But this time, she didn’t really feel ashamed or even guilty. Because Wyatt was asking for it. Practically begging, really.

And if he wasn’t willing to work with her on selling the house, she’d simply have to find a way to work around him.

Now what? she wondered as she wandered around the rooms. She didn’t have her computer. While she had planned to use good old-fashioned pen and paper to brainstorm a new strategy for the magazine, it seemed like an exercise in futility, with her head still so fuzzy. Harry was at work, and she didn’t feel like reaching out to anyone at the magazine—not yet. And as filthy as Luke’s place still was, it would probably only take another two to three hours to clean it.

Which meant that most of this day, and the nine more that would follow it, stretched endlessly before her.

But through the double doors on the far side of the living room, the water glittered in the morning sun. And although she hated the water—she really did—somehow it seemed to her that Luke would’ve wanted her to at least go say hello.

Tall grasses flanked the wood stairs leading from the end of Luke’s yard to the sandy, dune-like hill that let out onto the flat beachfront. The sand was warm beneath Aly’s feet, but it was still early enough that it didn’t burn her soles. In fact, she was surprised to realize that it felt . . . not unpleasant, really.

The water was clear, and waves lapped at the shore. She could see a lone boat in the distance, but it was a big one, the kind with a motor rather than a sail, and maybe that’s why the sight of it didn’t tug at Aly’s heart.

She’d intended to walk down to the shore and turn right back around. Instead, she sat at the dry spot just beyond the water’s reach, as Wyatt had done the day before, and stared out at the lake. It was so vast that she could not see the other side.

Luke had been with her the last time she’d been in this spot. And though she knew it was just her mind playing tricks on her, it was almost like he was sitting right there next to her.

Once upon a time, a boy and a girl got on a boat and sailed far away, she heard him say. This was how he’d started all the sailing stories he’d spun for her. She couldn’t have been more than two or three years old when he’d begun telling her these tales—they hadn’t had many books, and library trips were few and far between, so Luke had simply begun making up adventures for her. In some, they sailed all the way to India or the Arctic; in others, they fought off pirates or found treasure or rescued talking dolphins. No matter what misery awaited them at home the rest of the day, Aly felt like everything was going to be okay while Luke told her a story.

But that voice—Luke’s voice—did not keep speaking. Instead, she heard the rush of the water and gulls crying overhead; and after a moment, the sound of her own crying, too.

“Why, Luke?” she whispered, wiping her eyes.

Maybe if he’d picked a different sort of story—about princes and princesses, perhaps, or fairies and trolls, or anything other than a boat and a great big body of water—he wouldn’t have become infatuated with sailing and ended up on that foolish, fateful trip.

And then Aly would not be sitting by herself on Luke’s beach, wishing for a voice in her head to help her forget—if only for a moment—that she would have to go through the rest of her life alone.





ELEVEN


A watched phone never buzzed: Aly knew that, even as she couldn’t resist her compulsion. And each of the dozens of times she flipped her phone over, she was greeted by the photo of her and Luke as children that she used as wallpaper . . . and not a single message or missed call. It had been four days since the Incident, as she and Harry had begun referring to it. She wasn’t expecting to hear from Seth so soon; before she left, she texted him to say she was going to see Harry, and he had said he was glad to hear that and to let him know when she wanted to get the rest of her things. But why hadn’t anyone from All Good reached out to her?

Well, it was early Friday afternoon. Everyone was probably checked out mentally, although probably not literally. Summer Fridays, the seasonal publishing tradition of letting employees leave early to extend their weekend, hadn’t been officially discontinued—but more often than not, staffers simply had too much work to do to take off before the afternoon. Maybe Helena, the production manager, would call on her way out to the Hamptons to check in. Or perhaps she’d get a text from Jada, the senior recipe editor. No, Aly decided. Jada had looked upset when the salary cuts were announced, and anyway, she’d been kind of quiet since Aly’s promotion.

Even a short while ago, Aly would’ve expected to hear from Meagan at least once or twice while she was out of the office. But that was before she’d found out what Meagan really thought of her. Eventually the memory of what Meagan had said—or at least the part that hadn’t been wiped from Aly’s mental hard drive—wouldn’t sting quite so much. But for now, Aly cringed every time she thought of it. How long had Meagan felt that way about her? Had she been faking their friendship all along? Aly couldn’t help but feel like her fifth-grade self, sitting alone at lunch because her classmates said she was too stupid and stinky to join them. Except now Aly was nearly eight hundred miles from the cool kids’ table (which was to say Manhattan).