It’s not a comfortable comparison, but it lodges there in my brain and I can’t stop touching it, like a sore tooth.
I’m settled by the pool when Chess finally comes out of the house. I’m pretending to read Lilith Rising again even though, at this point, I practically have it memorized.
“There you are!” she says brightly. “I’ve missed you!”
I look at her smiling face and think, You lying bitch.
But I smile back. “Same. But I’m feeling better now, so I’m trying to soak up these last few days.”
“Ugh, I know. Can you believe we only have a week left?”
“Fastest summer of my life.”
“That’s what happens when you spend it with your bestie,” she says, and I grit my teeth and nod.
“Yup. So, who was on the phone?”
Chess had been turning to go back inside, but she pauses now, facing me. “What?”
“Earlier I came down, and you were on the phone.”
Tell me it was some guy you’re seeing. Tell me it was some guy who’d like to be seeing you. Just don’t lie to me. If you lie to me, I’ll have to ask myself why.
“Oh.” She waves that off. “Just my mom. You know Nanci, doesn’t want a thing from me until suddenly she wants everything from me. I guess Beau is late on condo payments, so it’s Chess to the rescue again!”
I watch as she walks back inside, the pages of Lilith Rising squeezed tight in my hand.
* * *
WE’RE IN THE drawing room that night, the room I’ve started thinking of as our room, sitting on the sofas opposite each other. Music is playing again, Aestas, of course, but Chess is typing away on her laptop while I’m flipping through my phone. We’ve got wine on the table, but neither of us is really drinking it, and I keep stealing glances at her.
Rose’s email came in this afternoon. Just a short couple of lines, telling me she hasn’t heard anything from Matt’s lawyers, so no, of course she hadn’t mentioned the new book idea to them.
I read it three times before deleting it.
It can’t be Chess. It can’t be Chess and Matt. That doesn’t make any fucking sense. The guy she dated before Nigel had been a hedge-fund guy who drove a McLaren and owned a yacht. Matt got seasick on a cruise to Cabo San Lucas.
It’s Mari’s pages, getting in my head, that mess with her and Pierce and Lara. That’s what’s making me suspect Chess.
Or maybe I’m just looking for another reason to be angry at Chess. Something solid and valid, something that feels a little less petty than, You were mean about me in your book!
But this is the last thing I should want, because I’m not sure I could survive it. Matt’s betrayal hurt, but Chess doing that to me …
That would be fatal.
It’s stormy tonight, the first really proper storm we’ve had up here, and while we’ve got every lamp in the room on, we’ve also lit the candles again. It should feel cozy, tucked away in here while the rain falls outside, but it’s anything but.
I sit up now, putting my phone down. “Can I ask you something?”
Chess closes her laptop, eyebrows raised. “Anything, Em.”
“If you make ‘Don’t Be an Emma’ shirts, do I get a cut?”
To Chess’s credit, she doesn’t pretend not to know what I’m talking about, or deflect it with some witty banter.
She just sighs and crosses her arms, her bangle bracelets clacking together under a cardigan that appears to be made of scarves.
“Was this an evening the score kind of thing? I read yours, so you read mine?”
“Kind of,” I admit, and one corner of her mouth kicks up.
“For what it’s worth, I wrote that the night after we had that fight. When you told me you didn’t want to write with me. My feelings were hurt, and I was feeling cunty, so I wrote that. I was going to delete it.”
“But do you think it?” I press, and Chess tips her head back, sucking a breath in through her nose.
“Sometimes?” she admits. “Yeah, Em, sometimes I do think you let yourself give up too easily. So what if Matt left? So what if you don’t like writing about murder at the fucking cakewalk or whatever anymore? It shouldn’t derail your whole life. Your sense of self.”
“It’s about a lot more—” I start, but then Chess shifts on the couch, putting her feet up on the coffee table, and the light catches that anklet I’d noticed the other night.
Then, the lights had been dim, and I’d just caught the barest glimpse of it. Now, the chandelier is on, the hem of Chess’s pants is looser, and I can see the jewelry clearly.
But then again, I’ve seen it before.
A delicate gold chain, a tiny charm, a curling M, not unlike the M carved in the glass upstairs, but not M for Mari this time.
M for Matt.
Chess sees the moment I understand and stands up. “Emmy,” she says, and now I know what people mean when they say they see red because it’s like there’s nothing in my vision but bright, bright crimson, and my heart is in my ears, my throat, my stomach.
I don’t think.
I lunge at her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Chess dodges me faster than I would’ve thought.
All that Pilates must pay off in unexpected ways.
But if she has agility on her side, I have blind rage on mine, and when she goes for the door, I catch her by all those floaty fucking layers, yanking hard, and she stumbles, crashing back into me.
“You’re insane!” she shrieks, batting at me, and honestly, I do feel insane right now.
I think of Mari, bringing that statue down on Pierce’s head, and I understand how she did it. How you can love someone, but be so angry at them that only their blood on your hands will quiet the screaming inside you.
We fall to the floor, my elbow cracking the coffee table, and I hear both our wineglasses topple over, red liquid spilling into the carpet, but Chess manages to pull away from me, shedding one or three of those layers in the process.
She reaches for her phone, but I get to it before she does, throwing it as hard as I can against the wall, and then Chess whirls on me, her eyes wide.
We both sit there on the floor, panting, and then she lurches to her feet, her heel coming down hard on the hem of her palazzo pants. “If you will chill the fuck out for five seconds, I’ll explain,” she says, and I almost laugh because there isn’t an explanation for this, but of course Chess would think there was. Of course, the great Chess Chandler can talk herself out of anything.
“When?” I bark, and she flutters her hands.
“Right now, if you’ll sit down and—”
“No, when did it start?”
I’m already racing back through the last few years, trying to find the moment. There was that visit Chess made to us two years ago. There was the trip we took to see her in Charleston, then the week in Kiawah. But other than that, she and Matt hardly ever saw each other. How the fuck did this happen?
“There was no start, Em, Jesus. It wasn’t an affair, it was a one-time thing. That week you two came to Kiawah. When I took him golfing.”
After I’d gotten sick. Four months before Matt had walked out. Chess had just learned that Nigel was engaged and she was devastated. She called me, begging me to visit. She’d known about the baby stuff, but the rest of it—the doctors, the brain fog, the nights curled up on the floor of the bathroom—I’d kept a secret. The time never seemed right to tell her, and there was something about it that felt embarrassing.