Eliza Starts a Rumor(74)
“Look. Look right here.” He paused the video and held it up for them both to see. “See, he goes to reach for her hand, and she pulls it away.”
They look. They disagree.
“I’m not sure I see that, man. She’s standing right next to him, with their kid.”
“But if she loved him, she would have taken his hand. There is still hope!”
Lee had had enough. “How is there still hope? Have you heard back from her yet? At all?”
“No.”
Skip put his hand to his forehead in frustration. “Dude. She’s not into you. She thinks you’re a big fraud. And she’s a big fraud, too, because she’s with this mayor guy. Find another girl, an available one.”
Lee had known his friend long enough to see he wasn’t listening.
“OK, promise me you will run this whole thing by my very smart, very female wife at Thanksgiving tomorrow, and see what she has to say about it before doing anything else.”
“OK, fine. I can do that.”
Jackie took out his own phone, watched the video again. He smiled his smile of relief. Skip and Lee both shook their heads at what they deemed a lost cause and went back to wasting time on their own devices.
CHAPTER 41
Olivia
Olivia pulled a tape measure along the floor of what was formerly Spencer’s side of their walk-in closet, measuring out space for a standing desk and wall unit. She was excited to have a designated space to do her design work. Eliza had already hired her to create a new logo for the bulletin board.
She had just put two homemade apple pies in the oven, her first-ever attempt. She and Alison had gone on a little field trip to the local cider mill the day before. Apparently apples were a local industry that neither city girl knew much about. They returned home with cider and donuts and a bushel each of apples, way too many for two women with toothless babies. Alison decided to make sauce, and Olivia, pie, to bring to Eliza’s for Thanksgiving. One thing was for sure: She knew she was thankful for her kick-ass new friends.
When Mandy and Alison had returned with the video of Spencer in the car on that awful day, Olivia watched it in silence. They all stared at her, waiting for her to implode, but she didn’t say a word. She didn’t even cry. It felt as if fear were gripping her throat as she sat back on Eliza’s couch, watching the different paths of her uncertain future roll out in front of her eyes.
How would she survive this? She would have to tell her parents, have to tell her friends. The thought of their faces when she did mortified her. She was so ashamed. Why was this embarrassment hers? She’d done nothing wrong. Spencer was the one that should be embarrassed and pitied, not her, but she knew that wasn’t the way it worked.
She’d been overcome by a feeling of loss. What would happen to her and Lily? Where would they go? Her parents would tell her to come home, and a big part of her wanted to do just that. She could move herself and Lily into her childhood bedroom and take comfort in sentimental things like the mac and cheese her mother used to make when Olivia wasn’t feeling well. This was surely a mac-and-cheese-worthy situation.
She went through it all in her head: The doormen she’d grown up with smiling at her when they opened the door but shooting each other “poor Olivia” looks behind her back. She pictured walking into the local coffee place and bumping into Heidi Siegel, pushing her baby, too. “You’re back in the city? I knew the suburbs weren’t for you! Let’s have dinner with the guys!” followed by Olivia’s dramatic explanation, followed by that pathetic look again, the one that rightfully belonged to Spencer.
The thought of going back to the city a failure made her physically ill. She hadn’t even had the chance to set up her old easel and break out her new watercolors. She could tell that at any moment the leaves would drop off the trees, and she wanted to capture how, when the morning sun hit just right, it was hard to tell where the rocks ended and their reflection began. Now she felt that way about the truth and the lies.
It was Eliza who had broken the silence.
“What are you thinking, honey? What do you want to do?” she said in her most motherly tone.
Olivia just shook her head. Mandy stood in front of her and took her face in her hands; she looked right into her eyes. “I watch you, and I wonder, what would my life have been like if I had confronted my fears at your age? You have so much ahead of you. There is plenty of time for a do-over.”
Olivia appreciated Mandy’s words. They gave her hope, and at a time like this, hope was the best thing she had to cling to.
As usual, Alison wasn’t wasting time with emotions. “Can I send the video to Andie and let her take care of it?”
“She could do that?”
“Absolutely. I’ll talk to her after she watches it and see what she thinks is best.”
Olivia nodded in agreement, and Alison took Mandy’s phone from her to proceed.
Olivia thought of the pictures on her own phone. The slideshow of sunsets captured from her deck, each one a close tie to the beauty of Lily’s smiles. Oranges and reds and yellows and pinks painting the sky, the river, and the bridge in the distance, before fading to black. She did not want her life here to fade to black. To see the sunset in Manhattan, you needed to climb on the roof or stand on the exact cross streets for the slivers of light to funnel through the buildings and grace you with their presence. A lump formed in her throat that felt too big to swallow. She held on to Alison’s arm.