Hello, Sunshine

by Laura Dave

  So I didn’t knock. I turned the key and walked inside.

  And there was Danny, sitting at the dining room table, working on a blueprint.

  “Jesus!”

  Danny jumped up, shocked and confused.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” I said. “Though I guess I don’t have to.”

  I looked around the apartment. He had gotten rid of our furniture. Refurnished. Or, probably, Maggie had. The fuzzy and frilly couch had her shabby chic name all over it.

  “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

  “Sunny, this is not what it looks like.”

  “Really? ’Cause it looks like you set me up. It looks like you orchestrated the end of my career, and stole my home away, probably to move in with your girlfriend . . .”

  He shook his head. “I knew I should’ve called you back that night,” he said. “Maggie is not living here.”

  “You are, though, right? When did you start planning this, Danny? Technology certainly isn’t your strong suit. Who showed you how to send tweets on a timed schedule? Who even showed you how to tweet?”

  He was incredibly calm, the way he always was, which at the moment was infuriating.

  “It wasn’t tough to figure out,” he said.

  I felt hot tears start pouring down my face. “I guess you were pretty motivated.”

  He met my eyes. Fourteen years. “I guess I was.”

  “So you found out about Ryan? And you sought revenge?”

  “It wasn’t about revenge, Sunny.”

  “Then what? Maggie? Was this all so you guys could be together?”

  “There is nothing going on with Maggie. She is helping me redecorate, but that’s all. You should know that I would never do that.”

  “How can you ask me to know anything about you anymore?”

  “Maggie is dating a new guy. Simon Callahan. He owns a couple of restaurants in Brooklyn. I haven’t been going out a lot, so that night, the night you called, she said that she wasn’t leaving unless I went out with her to meet him. I had just gotten off work, so I jumped in the shower. She was being a friend. That’s it.”

  I made a mental note to look him up. “That doesn’t explain why she was answering your phone.”

  “She forgot her phone. She needed to reach her sister because she was supposed to head out to the Hamptons, but she stuck around to see Simon.”

  That sounded like Maggie. I wasn’t sure, though. I wasn’t sure what to think of that—what to think of any of this.

  “Not that I have to explain anything to you, but I would hate for you to think a woman would be the reason why. This only has to do with us. You, actually.”

  I looked at him, willing myself to stop crying. And failing.

  He didn’t look away, but he didn’t move any closer, either.

  He shook his head. “You were so far gone for so long. There was no way to make you understand . . .”

  “So you just thought you’d publicly humiliate me instead?”

  He laughed. “Do you honestly think I wanted the world to know you cheated on me? You think that’s not humiliating? It was the only way to make you see what you’d become.”

  “Oh, wow. You were making a sacrifice. I should be thanking you, right?”

  “Sunny . . .”

  “How about having a private conversation?”

  “I tried a million times. And I was running out of time.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The Food Network. If that show hit the air, you’d have gone from a couple of million followers to twenty million. It would’ve been too late.” He paused. “I’m sorry if you hate me. It had to be done.”

  “Really? Who asked you to take on the role of moral authority? Whatever I did to you, I didn’t mean to hurt you. What this is, is something else. It was cruel.”

  “Was it cruel? How are you doing?”

  I looked at him, confused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “How are things out in Montauk? ’Cause from what I’m hearing, it’s going pretty well.”

  “I’m smelling trash every night and living on my sister’s couch. No, correction, I was staying on Rain’s couch. Now I’m living with a smelly fisherman. It’s thrilling.”

  “At least it’s honest.”

  I was seriously considering hitting him. “What did you just say?”

  “You used to value telling the truth. Over pretty much everything. Tell me you’re not a little relieved to be in that position again.”

  I didn’t know how to answer him—or maybe I just didn’t want to answer him. If I admitted that it wasn’t all terrible, that I didn’t just fall apart, he’d feel like he did the right thing. Which was the last way I wanted him to feel.

  “I just needed . . .” He paused. “Do you remember our first date?”

  Did he really think I was in the mood for a walk down memory lane? “You’ve got to be kidding, Danny,” I said.

  “No, I’ve really been trying to remember it. I know that I dragged you for an hour and a half to some fancy restaurant in downtown Portland ’cause I was trying to impress you. And I know you wanted to split the squab. I thought that was so exotic. Who orders squab? Not something you order in the Midwest.”

  “It was quail.”

  “See? Can’t remember.”

  I could. Without even having to try, I could tell him everything about that night. We did eat the quail—which was terrible. Or I should say, I ate it. Danny, who was wearing a tie over a T-shirt (no joke), ordered truffle fries and tried to push the truffle part off of them, drowning them in ketchup to mask the taste. And I wore a short dress, which I thought made me look sexy, but it probably made me look like I was trying too hard. I forgot to be embarrassed. I forgot to decline the last bite of almond cake when he offered it to me. And I didn’t even pause in front of my door debating whether to let him come upstairs. It was as if from go, I had no ability to play games with him. I don’t know why I was so confident in my terrible dress. I was, though. I was confident I had found my person. Who happened to be twenty-one and a freaking jackass.

  Danny shook his head. “I know at some point it started going well. But I don’t know, the details are a little slippery . . . maybe it’s because, whenever I think of you, I’m stuck on the day we met.”

  I stared at him, not sure where he was going with this, not sure I wanted to know.

  “We were at the football game, right? And you were sitting in the row in front of me.”

  “I was behind you, Danny.”

  He shook his head. “No, definitely not. You were sitting in the row in front of me, and I tapped on your friend’s shoulder to ask if she had an extra beer. And she did, she had brought a six-pack, which was right beside her, and there were two beers left, and she started to give me one. But then you stopped her, literally pulled the beer back and said, no way.”

  He was right. That was what I’d said. And he was also right that I was sitting in front of him. I had turned around and looked at him. This guy who had that killer smile—those eyes—and I realized that probably no one had ever turned him down before. No one had ever said that they didn’t have an extra beer for him. They probably ran out and grabbed one for him, if they needed to.

  But I had wanted that beer—had been looking forward to it—and I knew that if she gave it to him, she would keep the other one for herself. So I pulled it back, told him he would have to head up to the concession stand. You know, like everybody else. Sorry, was I asking you? he’d said. But he was already flirting a little. He was already leaning forward to see what I would say next.

  Danny shrugged. “And, the thing is, you weren’t playing games or trying to impress me. You just genuinely wanted the beer.”

  He looked right at me.

  “I tried a million times to get you to see what you were doing, to get you to understand what the cost was. Putting us to the side. The c
ost to you.”

  “So I wasn’t supposed to change at all?”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s not what I’m saying. I didn’t expect you to stay like you were at twenty-one.”

  “Sounds like that’s exactly what you wanted.”

  “You were the most honest person I’d ever met. That’s why I chose you. And it’s why I wasn’t particularly weirded out about the fake cooking videos or you playing make-believe. I didn’t think you could lose what defined you. But that’s exactly what got lost,” he said. “I couldn’t reconcile the woman you turned into with the person I know you are. Or were . . .”

  My heart started racing. “So you should have just left.”

  “But it’s my fault too. You would ask me, all the time, It’s not a big deal, right, if I lie about this? Or if I fake it a little?” He shrugged. “I gave you permission to give yourself away. And the worst part was when you stopped even asking. I became someone else you would try to spin.”

  I put my hands up to stop him. “I can’t listen to this.”

  “Why? Because you don’t want to hear it?”

  “Exactly.”

  He nodded. “So ask me again why I did this.”

  I stared at him, feeling like I might explode. Was he seriously looking right at me and telling me that he did this to save me? That he did this for love? Even if I believed him, who wanted love if this was what it looked like?

  I hadn’t taken off my wedding ring, not the entire time we’d been apart, but I took it off now. I took it off and put it on the sofa between us, the soft sofa that looked so wrong in there.

  Then I stormed out the door, trying to ignore a tugging on my insides as I headed down the stairs.

  It wouldn’t go away, no matter how fast I moved, this tugging, like a despair I didn’t want to feel yet, that I still thought I could outrun if I just got as far enough away from him, as quickly as I could.

  41

  I don’t remember the drive home. I vaguely remember stopping at a rest stop, trying to catch my breath, trying to make sure that I arrived in one piece.

  I finally got back to Montauk at 6 A.M., the sun rising up over the ocean and the dunes, the roads still empty.

  Rain opened the door. She was already dressed, ready to start her day.

  I was still in my dress from the night before, tears and mascara running down my face.

  She looked me up and down. Then she turned to the couch, to a tall guy with a baseball cap on, extra-long crutches by his side, a ragged scar on his knee.

  Thomas. Her boyfriend. He was looking at me with a far more sympathetic expression than my sister was.

  Rain met his eyes. And she turned back toward me.

  “What makes you think you can just show up here?” she said.

  Then she moved out of the doorway and let me inside.

  August

  42

  Did you know that chanterelles are picked, at their peak, in late summer?

  Chef Z loved chanterelles, and counted down until a specific date in July (which he refused to share), when he picked them from the garden. Then he made them a centerpiece of a course each night for as many nights as the mushrooms would allow. It had been eight nights since Danny had shattered my world and, on each of them, Chef Z’s world was shattered by chanterelles.

  He started on Sunday night with a pear and chanterelle salad, moved on to stuffed artichokes with crab and chanterelles, moved from there to a crostini, a fricassee, a pasta with chanterelle mushrooms.

  Every night, Z gave the staff a lecture about the versatility of the vegetable, their meatiness and flexible quality. And, every night, he almost cried (the closest I ever saw him to crying, at least) when too many of the chanterelles returned uneaten.

  I tried to stay out of his way most of those nights, even though he came over every few seconds to ask why more people were leaving them behind. I shook my head, trying to look equally disgusted. And I was—though about something else. I was disgusted at myself. At how exactly Danny had accomplished what he had. At how I had missed it.

  I couldn’t stop going over it, each new detail like salt in the wound. And I remembered the strangest details. The oak floors in Danny’s Upper West Side apartment project. He had obviously been working on that project longer than a few days—had it afforded him a way to buy me out of the loft? The morning it had all started “Moonlight Mile” had come on the radio alarm clock. What was that doing on the radio? Had Danny managed to plan that part too? Was it not the alarm clock, but his iPhone connected to the charger, scheduled to go off and play that song? My favorite song playing, like a chance, to remind me of who I was. Whom I’d been.

  He had given me other chances that night. He had asked me not to go to the party. I remembered clearly. He had brought Gerber daisies home with him and said he would call the whole thing off if I wanted. Was the whole thing, which I thought was the party, really the unraveling of our life together?

  Why hadn’t I taken him up on that offer? Where would I be now if I had?

  Chef Z would come over to my station, and it would be like looking in the mirror. Utter and total despair. For him, it was his underappreciated vegetable. For me, it was the reminder—as if repeated on playback—that I was completely and utterly alone. Career-less, husband-less.

  It was almost enough to make me confide in him. It seemed to be enough to make him confide in me.

  “The chanterelle is a tricky beast,” he said, on night eight, his eyes on a gorgeous plate of pasta. “They need to be picked at precisely the right time to reach their full potential.”

  Was it happening? A connection? “For what it’s worth, Chef,” I said, “I think they’re delicious.”

  He banged the plate on the table. “Not much,” he said.

  Then he walked away.

  I seriously considered hiding them for the rest of the night. Just to see a different look on his face. Just to do something proactive, as opposed to sitting here, stewing in it.

  Adding insult to injury, Amber’s cookbook was a raving success. One week in, and she had already gone into another printing. I was yesterday’s news. Literally.

  Perhaps this was what I got for lying so publicly. Now everything I had was private. My life was so private that I was about to have a baby with someone who didn’t even know about it.

  Another plate of the pasta with chanterelle mushrooms was returned to the kitchen. Chef Z’s homemade and quite exquisite bucatini was absent from the plate. Several mushrooms remained.

  I looked around the kitchen to see if anyone was watching. No one seemed to be, so I scooped up a mushroom and dropped it into my mouth.

  It was delicious, rich and meaty, with a perfect amount of spice.

  I reached for another when I heard a voice behind me.

  “No, you didn’t,” he said.

  I turned around to see Ethan standing there, a stainless-steel thermos in his hands.

  He shook his head, disgusted. “That’s a new low.”

  Then he reached down and took a bite himself.

  “So you’ve been keeping a low profile,” Ethan said. “One day you’re staying over, the next you disappear.”

  We sat on the bench outside the restaurant, after hours, Ethan pouring us each hot cocoa from his thermos.

  He handed me a cup. “Are you all right? Thomas told me you’re sleeping on the couch.”

  “I’m surprised he even noticed. I stay in the car until late at night after they’ve all gone to sleep. And I sneak out before they get up. We’ve avoided saying more than two words to each other.”

  “That sounds comfortable. And sustainable.”

  “It’s great.”

  “Why don’t you just stay with me?”

  “You have the celebrity friend. And I can’t impose like that.”

  He put up his hand to stop me. “First of all, it’s not an imposition. And second of all, she’s in Paris for the week. Doing her fall shopping.”

>   I looked at his outfit, the same hoodie he seemed to live in whenever he wasn’t fishing.

  “You guys have so much in common,” I said.

  “It is our hobbies that bring us together.”

  I laughed, took a sip of the cocoa.

  “So the party didn’t end up going so well?” he said.

  I paused. “It was Danny,” I said.

  “What was?”

  I looked at him, waiting for him to figure it out.

  “Holy shit. The husband was the one who hacked you?”

  I nodded, afraid to speak—afraid if I said another word, I’d burst into tears. Fourteen years. The tears hadn’t seemed to stop. Danny had been my person. I’d trusted him so much it hadn’t even occurred to me he would have done this, regardless of his reasoning. What did that say about me? What did that say about how little I’d been paying attention to him?

  Ethan folded his arms over his chest. “Why would he . . . just . . . why?”

  “He said he did it because he loves me,” I said, my voice cracking.

  “There are other ways to love someone.”

  I met Ethan’s eyes, desperate for a lifeline. “You think so?”

  “I know so,” he said, trying to process. “How do you think the girlfriend plays in?”

  I wrapped my hands around the cocoa, held it to me. “She doesn’t. There is no girlfriend.”

  He looked confused. “What about the showering?”

  “She was redesigning our apartment, Danny’s apartment now. I guess the guilt I heard in her voice was about that, about her choosing him in the breakup or something . . .”

  “You believe him?”

  I did. Would I sound like a fool if I admitted it? I’d looked up Simon Callahan when I got back to Montauk, and he was who Danny said he was. But I hadn’t found any photographs of him and Maggie. Not on Wireimage, not on her Facebook page. I didn’t find any proof. Danny’s word was my proof. And it was really the only proof I needed. What did that say about where I was now?