You’re unbelievable.
Talk about a HYPOCRITE.
Check Page Six.
Whaaaa? Fray thinks.
Leland comes out of the bathroom. She’s glowing—as luminous as he’s ever seen her. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” Fray says. He plucks his underwear from the floor.
“Let’s not bother showering,” Leland says, tousling his hair. “We’re just going to swim when we get back, anyway, and I’m starving.”
“Me too,” Fray says. “I just need to stop and get a copy of the New York Post on our way.”
Leland laughs. “I thought I was the only person I knew who read the Post,” she says. “Fifi used to give me so much jazz about it.”
“Everyone reads the Post,” Fray says. “But only the brave admit it.”
Coop is passed out on the sofa and Jake is nowhere to be found, so Fray jots a note saying he and Leland are taking the Jeep to breakfast. He drives to the big mid-island grocery store and leaves Leland in the car as he runs in to get the newspaper. Page Six? Is he on Page Six? Talk about a HYPOCRITE. What does that mean?
Leland had asked about Anna the night before, but Fray dodged the question; his divorce was the last thing he wanted to talk about. He imagined that getting divorced as a regular person—an accountant in Cheyenne or a florist in Shreveport—would be painful and difficult enough, but as a very wealthy, semi-famous person, it was a whole other circle of hell. Fray and Anna’s story, although not unique, was a source of endless tabloid fascination. Anna had cheated on Fray with Tyler Toledo, the manager of her former band, Drank. They had been spotted out to dinner at L’Oursin by one of Fray’s vice presidents while Fray was down in South America on business and while Cassie was home with a sitter. When Fray asked Anna about it, she broke down in tears and said that yes, she and Tyler had been seeing each other for nine months and it was all Fray’s fault because he had robbed Anna of any identity except for that of “Frazier Dooley’s wife” and “Cassie Dooley’s mother.” She used to be interesting, she said. She used to be cool. Now, she was just another Botoxed Seattle socialite with a private Pilates instructor and a twelve-thousand-square-foot glass house on Puget Sound.
Fray had asked Anna if she was in love with Tyler and Anna had said she was, though it was clear from both her facial expression and her tone that she was lying. She didn’t love Tyler Toledo; sleeping with him was an act of rebellion, a cry for attention. Fray did a little investigative work and found out that Tyler’s best days had been when he was managing Drank. Since then, he had couch-surfed his way around Queen Anne and Capitol Hill; he’d even been homeless for a while. Certainly reuniting with Anna, Drank’s former bassist, had been a huge boost to him, especially since she was married to the eighth richest man in Seattle. Fray thought maybe he could pay Tyler off to make him go away but when this was intimated, Tyler doubled down and leaked the scandal of his affair with Anna to Google News, and in a nanosecond, it was everywhere. It was news of the scandal rather than the scandal itself that led to the divorce. Fray could have forgiven the infidelity. What he could not forgive was Anna on TMZ both disparaging him and shamelessly promoting old songs by Drank. （It worked: Their song “Back It Up” had a surge on iTunes.） The tabloids gobbled up the seedy aspects of the story, which was bad for everyone involved, but especially for Cassie. Ten was such a tricky age. Cassie was old enough to understand what was going on but not old enough to understand why, and Anna had broken every single rule in the Evolved Parenting Handbook. She thought nothing of badmouthing Fray in front of Cassie any chance she could get.
Fray agreed to a 280-million-dollar settlement only because he wanted the whole thing to be over.
He grabs the last copy of the Post at the Stop and Shop and somehow resists looking at the paper in line. When he gets back to the car, Leland has the radio cranked to the rock station playing the top 500 songs of all time and she’s singing along to “Heaven,” by Bryan Adams.
“‘You’re all that I want! You’re all that I need!’” She turns down the music and grins at him. “This song has always reminded me of the Calvert Hall junior prom. Remember my lavender dress?”
Fray shakes his head but he can’t stop his smile. “I need coffee,” he says.
Frazier Dooley loves nothing more than a good breakfast place and as soon as he sees Island Kitchen, he knows he’s found one. It’s mid-island, right across the street from the Stop and Shop, as it turns out, so it doesn’t have a water view but the place is loaded with character. The post-and-beam construction is charming, there are lush pink impatiens in the window boxes, it feels rustic and homey—like the island’s kitchen.