“I heard,” said Cleo.
In fact, she had seen. She’d found out about his new girlfriend through some ill-advised googling. She was gorgeous, of course, a model. There were two photos of them together, both from the same event for his magazine in LA. The first was outside with their hands interlaced, heads cocked slightly toward each other. Then they were inside the party, holding flutes of champagne, both caught mid-laugh. Cleo had sat curled on Audrey’s sofa, bathed in the blue halo of light from her computer screen, the sound of Audrey and Marshall’s lovemaking permeating softly through the walls, and clicked back and forth between the images of them smiling and laughing, laughing and smiling …
“Is she here?” asked Cleo.
“No, sadly she travels a lot for work,” he said. “She’s in the Bahamas right now.”
Cleo gave him a thin smile. “Nice life.”
“I am only here for the weekend, in fact,” said Anders. “I had hoped to take Jonah to the movies tonight, but he wanted to see his friends, of course.” He avoided her eyes and looked over her head, registering the presence of someone else he knew in the crowd. He nodded at whoever it was and mouthed a hello.
“Where’s Frank?” she asked.
“Frank?” Anders refocused his attention on her. “He didn’t think it would be appropriate, since Danny was your schoolmate.”
He ran his hands through his hair. It was lighter now, streaked almost white in places by the sun.
“I see,” said Cleo. She focused on keeping her expression as neutral as possible. The disappointment, it was so physical, she was worried her face might actually drain of color. She felt desperate to go home, to be alone again, without all this pretense. But where? She was a long way from any home.
“He thought you’d be relieved,” said Anders.
“And you?” she asked, raising her head to meet his eye. “You didn’t think you should stay away too?”
“I wanted to see you. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Now you care if I’m okay?”
“Come on, Cleo.” He pulled his phone from his pocket again, unable to hold her gaze. “We’re still friends, surely? I wanted to give you space, you know, to work out how you felt.”
“Space?” she hissed. “You call never speaking to me again space?”
She had often imagined what it would be like to see Anders again. In her fantasies she was like metal, shiny and cold and impenetrable. But all her feelings, her stupid hurt feelings, kept bubbling to the surface.
“What was I meant to do?” asked Anders, raising his hands as if to shield himself. “You said you would leave him. You didn’t leave him. So I … I guess I tried to move on.”
Cleo wanted to say that she could not leave Frank without the assurance that Anders would be there for her on the other side, an assurance he could not give her when she asked. She hated herself for asking for it. She had been too afraid. And she really had believed that she could love Anders, although now she saw that she had simply clung to him because she couldn’t see another way out. She hated to think about it.
She was the one in her twenties, she wanted to remind him. He and Frank were in their forties. They had the careers. They had the money. They had the citizenship, the stability, the power. In comparison, she had nothing but herself.
“I called you,” was what she did say.
“I made what I thought was the best decision,” said Anders. “Please try to understand my side of things. I’ve known Frank for twenty years.”
A chain of people making their way toward the bar broke between them, yelling excitedly over their shoulders to each other. Anders stepped away from her to let them pass.
“You didn’t even say goodbye,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Cleo. I don’t know what to say. I did what I thought was right.”
Anders looked at her, and his face was filled with pity. He must think she was pathetic. She wanted to reach up and pull his expression away like a sheet of drawing paper, crumple it between her hands. She crossed her arms and backed away from him. There was nothing more to say. He reached forward to lightly touch her elbow.
“Cleo,” he said softly.
In his mouth her name sounded like something falling, two bounces down a flight of stairs. Cle-o.
“What?”
He began to say something, appeared to think better of it.
“Don’t be a stranger?” he said instead.
“Some of my best friends are strangers,” she said, and walked back into the crowd.