Nina’s eyes brighten. “Maybe Sabrina will show up at your class?”
“I’m not counting on it.” Molly sighs.
“Don’t panic,” Ev says. “It’s great you’re still teaching so much, by the way.”
Molly gives a strained smile, thinking suddenly of Bella’s voicemail, the one she still hasn’t deleted from her phone. Molly has the sharp urge to mention this to her friends—she never told them Bella tried to get in touch; she never told anyone—but Nina is already opening the door to Everly’s Lexus. Their time is up.
“We’ll see you in two weeks,” Ev calls with a wave.
Nina gives a little shimmy. “Can’t wait to party with the six-year-olds!”
Fifteen minutes later, Molly sits behind the front desk at Yoga Tree, signing students in to class. After her heart-to-heart with Nina and Everly, she feels calmer, her confidence partially restored. It’s amazing, the healing powers of best friends. And she knows they’re right about Sabrina. People are busy, people forget to respond to texts all the time—Molly is overreacting.
Before she goes into the studio, where her students wait in child’s pose, Molly takes out her phone.
She has one new text—Jake. I can’t stop thinking about you …
Fuck. Molly breathes slowly, tries to ignore the heavy, buzzy feeling in her body. The electricity in her stomach, like she’s a magnet being pulled.
She deletes his text. Then, she crafts a new message to Sabrina.
Hi, stranger! Missed you in class this week. How are you? Want to walk this weekend? Or grab lunch? Let me know!
Molly tries not to cringe at her own desperation, her hypocrisy. She hits Send before she has the chance to change her mind.
Chapter Thirty-one
Sabrina
You’ve been texting me, Molly. You kissed my husband on the beach—you probably fucked him in his car—and now you’re texting me as if everything is normal. You’d like to know if I want to go on a walk with you. A fucking stroll. Well, the answer is no—I don’t want to go on a walk with you, and I don’t want to grab lunch. What I want is to destroy you.
And if you don’t believe I have the power to do just that, listen to this. Listen to what happened the last time I saw your old pal Liz Esposito.
Throughout the remainder of my twenties in New York, Liz and I maintained a casual friendship. We were mainly just gym buddies, but every now and then—usually after one of Erin’s Pilates classes—we went out for drinks and a bite.
Liz and I had a lot in common, actually, and I genuinely enjoyed her company. For starters, we both came from moneyed families and from parents who possessed little to no interest in monitoring their children. In turn, we’d adopted a similarly unfettered approach to many aspects of our lives.
I tried not to ask Liz about you and Jake too often, if I could help it. But she was under the impression that I was a Danner Lane fangirl, and so it was a subject I could afford to bring up semi-regularly during our get-togethers, though she never offered many specific updates.
“Jake’s just so self-involved,” she’d sometimes mutter in response to my questions, never really elaborating when I pressed her for the reason.
As the months passed, Jake’s Instagram revealed that the two of you were fully back together. Epic summer with the love of my life, he captioned a September 2014 selfie of your sun-kissed faces on an unspecified beach. Meanwhile, I threw myself into work. I got promoted again—this time to senior merchandise planner—a role in which I managed a group of twenty. I was excellent at my job, Molly—I don’t like to fail, and I’d gone the extra mile at Marc Jacobs since the moment I started there. My boss, a fortysomething divorcée named Portia, considered me her right-hand woman. She’d brought me to Paris and Milan for Fashion Week every year I’d been at the company, while many of my colleagues had never gotten to go. During my darkest days, the ones when I pined for Jake so badly I thought I might split in two, my career was the one place where I felt in control.
Debbie suggested I find a hobby, which made me laugh out loud. Did she expect me to take up knitting? Pottery? Do I seem like the kind of woman who has hobbies, Molly?
Elena pestered me about dating; she said I had to stop wallowing and get back out there. To prove her wrong, I let a guy buy me dinner once every couple of months. But none of them excited me—none of them were Jake—and I always left these bland, tedious dates freshly reminded of the person who was no longer mine.