New Canaan is a quaint town twenty minutes west of Westport, a bit more inland, but just as wealthy. And the real estate market is better, too; according to my realtor, Anne, house prices in the area are low, and this is an ideal time to buy. Anne is a middle-aged mother of two who drives a Range Rover and invited me to join her book club. I already like the women here exponentially better than the T.J.Maxx–clad washouts of New Haven.
I closed on a great house here, a $1.1 million Cape Cod–style gem with two immaculate acres, four bedrooms, and—drumroll, please—a saltwater pool. That’s more than half my Big Plan prize moola, but if you saw the newly renovated kitchen, with the Wolf twelve-burner and the soapstone counters and the black walnut floors, you’d understand why I had to make this place mine. Besides, real estate is an investment, and the best one you can make according to lovely Anne.
My days here aren’t lonely, not even close. The girls are both living with me; Maggie’s nannying for a local family before she starts college in the fall, and Hope broke up with Trevor and quit her communications job in New Haven. It wasn’t fulfilling her, and she’s thinking of pursuing an entirely different career. Maybe law school. She’s having what she likes to call a quarter-life crisis, and right now we’re just enjoying the summer together, sipping iced coffee by the pool and going for walks and having girl time. Garrett comes down from Boston some weekends; I can tell he loves spending time at the new house, loves the crisp new Matouk sheets on his bed and that he no longer has to share a bathroom with his sisters. All three of them are crazy about the house, and when they ask where all this money came from, I don’t lie—I tell them sweet Mrs. Lucas generously left it to me in her will.
When the kids aren’t around, I have my new friends, the ladies I’ve met through Anne and the book-club gatherings: Ginger, Helen, Grace, Fiona, Kerry, Adeline, Betsy. They are the same breed of women I knew when I was a young mom living in Gramercy; twenty-five years later, they haven’t changed. They’re older, yes, but startlingly well preserved and still immaculately groomed, with stylish clothing and careful makeup and expensive jewelry. They’re well-mannered and charming and materialistic and a little bit bitchy, and they like me. They believe my story that my soon-to-be ex-husband made some bad financial decisions and cheated on me, and that I left his lying ass and moved here, and you know what? It’s a version of the truth.
Here’s something that will blow your mind: Burke didn’t go to prison. How’s that for a miracle? I almost wish I didn’t know—I wish I could ignorantly and blissfully imagine him behind bars as I fall asleep at night—but I have to know these things; we’re in the middle of a divorce. Burke, insanely enough, is still my husband.
The kids keep me updated on their father, too. They don’t know the full story of what happened—the Starlings ensured that the local papers never even covered the plea hearing—but Burke did come clean with them about “having a relationship” with Skye. From what I gather, these days the kids think he’s pretty scummy, but it sounds as if he’s making a real effort, and they don’t hate him. And that’s okay. That’s better. I wouldn’t want my children to go through life hating their father—I’m not that kind of mother.
The news also never got wind of the stolen two million, and all Burke got was a year of fucking probation, so I can only assume Skye dropped those charges—what a doormat. I don’t know if they’re a couple again. The kids say Burke doesn’t mention her, and Skye made her Instagram private, so I can no longer stalk her. Maybe they’re back together. They’re both so dumb, they probably deserve each other.
Besides, I have better things to worry about these days. About a month ago, Ginger called and said she wanted to set me up with her husband’s single friend, a man named Paul.
“He’s divorced and a sweetheart and he’s loaded,” she gushed to me on the phone. “Hedge-fund manager. And he’s definitely looking to settle down again. And you’re, like, ten times hotter and saner than his ex.”
The evening of our scheduled setup I blow-dried my hair and slipped into a baby blue Milly dress I’d bought online at Saks. It hugged my body perfectly—fitted but not tight—and I knew I looked good. For forty-seven, I looked amazing.
Paul and I hit it off right away, his eyes glued to me throughout the evening, and after dinner ended, he invited me to stay for a nightcap. We got together again a couple of nights later and have been “an item” ever since. In a nutshell, Paul is ideal. Polite and interesting and successful, with a house four times the size of mine and a membership at the country club and a fifty-foot Hinckley sailboat on a mooring in Greenwich Harbor. And he doesn’t have kids, which is perfect because I have zero interest in being involved with some other woman’s children. I haven’t introduced him to my kids yet, but I told the girls I’ve been seeing someone. They’re supportive. “You deserve to be happy, Mom,” Hope told me the other day when we were sunbathing on chaises by the pool.
Paul isn’t as good-looking as Ginger first made him out to be. He’s partially bald and he’s not tall like Burke—I don’t feel small and delicate in his arms—but I guess not every man is going to make your spine feel like a melting candlestick.
But Paul adores me, and there’s a cap on the New Big Plan money, a very real cap, one that gets realer the longer I live in Fairfield County and realize just how quickly two million dollars can go. If I play my cards right, Paul has the power to take this cap away, to make it limitless. Something about him is so refreshingly reliable, too, the way he always has a nice bottle of wine breathing on the wet bar when I come over, the way his lavish house is permanently tidy, the kitchen stocked, how he always seems to have everything I need on hand. He’s a provider, Paul is. He’s nothing like my husband.
These days, living in Fairfield County, I think about Libby often. I think she would’ve approved of my house, the way it’s decorated, with the white walls and beige furniture and faded Persian rugs and designer printed drapes.
Some nights I’m alone, when Maggie and Hope are busy and Paul is working late. On these nights I like to open a bottle of wine, a nice, light red, the kind I imagine Libby would’ve had on a casual summer evening. I pour myself a glass and walk around the house, admiring the details of each room, inhaling the smell of fresh paint as I pace the sleek wood floors of my beautiful home, the home I’ve made for myself and my children.
Then I wander out onto the back porch—the wraparound that overlooks the pool—and watch what’s left of the sun disappear, the tangerine melting into darkness. I stay out there awhile, until I’m well into the bottle and the cicadas are buzzing in the black, and on these nights I feel Libby. I feel the way we were together, sitting on her porch in Langs Valley, drinking good wine and talking about nothing and everything, the vivid memory of the hope that brewed inside me in those precious moments with her. And what I feel now isn’t anger. It isn’t vengeance. It isn’t appreciation, or even nostalgia. But it might be fondness. It might be something like peace.