The Dollhouse(9)

Not the response she was expecting. And the use of we was troubling. Not we as in Rose and Griff, but the prior we.

He continued, one jean-clad leg jiggling furiously. “I do want to get married. I do.”

The sentence should have been a simple declaration. But the two words tagged on at the end changed everything, acted as a hinge, a doorway to a different meaning entirely. She waited for the next part of the phrase, the one that would turn it on its head.

“I think I have to go back to them.”

Her head swarmed with confusion, her thoughts like bees whose hive has been destroyed. “Go back to Connie?”

“Not Connie, exactly. The girls. I realize what I’ve done to you is a terrible, terrible thing. I love you and I always will.”

She held perfectly still and scrutinized his face. His eyes were wide, innocent, an open book. But his pupils dilated with fear, dark wheels barely encircled with green.

“And I love you.” She continued to play by the script, waiting until she had surer footing.

“But my family needs me right now. The girls are a mess. Miranda’s been suspended from school again. Connie can’t handle her alone. “

“I’m so sorry, but maybe you shouldn’t make any impulsive decisions right now. Let’s furnish this apartment so you can spend more time with the kids here. I’ll help. You don’t have to go there every weekend.”

Every weekend. He’d told Rose that Connie stayed with friends when he went to the house in Litchfield to spend time with the girls. But maybe she’d been there as well, luring him back, sleeping with him, making him miss the comforts of home and hearth. While Rose had been left sitting in a half-empty, three-bedroom condo, playing the patient girlfriend when she wasn’t putting in ten-hour workdays.

She’d taken a huge cut in salary to join WordMerge. How was she going to pay for her father’s care now? Her despair simmered into a dull anger.

The smell of burning rice snapped her to attention.

In the kitchen, she yanked the pot off the burner and turned off the gas. The bottom of the risotto was burned, and the pot would have to be tossed. How would she be able to buy a new one, never mind an entirely new set of cutlery, dishes, furniture? The list went on and on.

Griff came up behind her and rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. The pressure was soothing. Maybe this was temporary insanity.

She turned around and his hands slid to her hips.

“Do you think that maybe you’re panicking here?” she asked. He dropped his head and pressed his forehead to hers. Her heartbeat slowed ever so slightly, more like R & B than speed metal for the moment. “Miranda will be fine; you need to give her time. Think of everything we have together.”

“That’s just it. We do have so much, such an amazing connection. But I have to do this for my daughter.”

“But you’re divorced. Who goes back to their ex-wife? It’s insane.”

“You can stay here for as long as you need to, while I work the details out. I’m as confused as you right now.”

Fuck the risotto. Fuck his sad-dog face and soft words that covered up the fact that he was dumping her. Fuck him.

On her way out the door, Rose picked up the vase of peonies from the foyer table and threw it down the hall, sending shards of glass skittering across the rosewood floor.




“He’s an asshole.”

Maddy tossed back the last of her bourbon and followed it with a defiant shake of her blond head.

Rose nodded but couldn’t speak. She kept waiting for a flood of tears to come, now that she was safe in a Hell’s Kitchen bar with her best friend, away from Griff and his lies and betrayal. Her mind was working like some kind of supercomputer, circling around her father, her finances, her future, then back again to Griff, but she was in a daze, perhaps still recovering from the shock. They made quite a pair in the dive bar, Rose dressed in the casual uniform of an Upper East Side power wife, the part she thought she’d been auditioning for, and Maddy in a strapless lilac gown, looking as if she’d just descended from a horse-drawn carriage.

“Looking back now, he has been sort of withdrawing the past few weeks. I just didn’t know why.” Rose took a sip of her bourbon, and for a fleeting moment the liquid’s slow burn provided a distraction. “Thanks for meeting me. I know this was supposed to be a fun night for you, not a sob fest.”

Maddy yanked up the bodice of her dress. “I lost, anyway. To Missy Lake. Her fake boobs were bigger than mine. Typical. I knew I should have gone up a size.”

“Stop. You don’t want to look like a Real Housewife.” Maddy and Rose had bonded the first day of speech class at college, when the professor had encouraged the students to open their throats wide, as if “you’re swallowing the Empire State Building.” Maddy, a beauty queen with champagne-blond tresses, had burst out laughing, as had Rose, and they’d been tight ever since. Even now, if they passed the landmark building in the backseat of a cab, they’d lose it, unable to speak for several minutes.

“So tell me what the clues were.”

Rose sighed. “He called less and less, just to check in. At one point, he said he had a conference call and went into another room, but his tone wasn’t right; it wasn’t work. He was talking to Connie.” Anger and confusion welled up in her stomach, and she thought she might be sick.