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It’s okay. Didi’s voice was surprisingly gentle. It’s almost over. Just get your stuff and you can leave.
I pushed my shoulders back and walked into the next room. But I wasn’t sure if room was the right word, since it seemed to be basically the whole bottom floor of the house, just without any dividing rooms or doors. The kitchen—enormous, with two islands and no visible refrigerator—flowed into a dining area, which became a huge TV room. The TV room had a fireplace, lots of chairs, a coffee table, and was ringed with an enormous, squashy sectional couch.
There was more impressive art on the walls, but there were also family pictures, portraits and candids and Polaroids, hung up right next to the Rothkos.
I could see Russell standing off to the side of the room, talking to a dark-haired woman in her twenties who was holding an iPad. In addition to them—there were a lot of people in this house—there was a big group sitting around a massive dining table, which was right in front of floor-to-ceiling glass windows. And through the sliding glass doors I could see the backyard and a huge pool glowing with soft, subtle lights.
There were at least eight people sitting around the table—including Wylie Sanders—and most everyone seemed to be talking at once, laughing and yelling, their voices overlapping. It had to be getting close to eleven at night—why were all these people here? And who were they? What was going on?
The woman with the iPad walked across the room toward me, and I stepped quickly into her path. “Hi—do you know where my stuff is?”
She raised an eyebrow at me, and I realized a second later I’d asked this in the stupidest way possible. “Um—I’m Darcy,” I said, and her eyes widened in recognition. “Kendrick and Bella brought my things somewhere?”
She nodded. “Russell just asked me the same thing.” I looked over and saw that he’d now joined the group at the table. The woman gave me a nod and started to walk again. “I’ll track it down. Are you staying for dinner?”
“No—” I began, but she was walking past me and into the kitchen. I started to follow, when a pony stepped into my path.
A second later, I processed that it wasn’t a pony. But I wasn’t that far off—it was a harlequin Great Dane, with ears that stood straight up. It was light gray and dappled, with black spots all over. This dog was huge—its head was higher than my waist, and as it plodded over to me, head cocked to the side, I just blinked at it, trying to make sense of this massive creature that had suddenly appeared.
“Oh—right,” the woman with the iPad called, looking over at me from the kitchen. “That’s Tidbit.”
“Tidbit?”
“Darcy?” I looked over and saw Wylie Sanders walking from the table to the kitchen. He was motioning me over with a smile. “Come meet everyone!”
“Oh,” I called to him, still trying to get my head around the fact that Wylie Sanders knew my name. “I just need my stuff?”
“Hm?” he asked, cupping a hand around his left ear. “Come on!” Maybe thinking he was being called, Tidbit padded gravely over to him. Wylie scratched his neck, without even having to lean down to do it. Clearly getting jealous, Andy stood up from under the table, shook himself, and ran over to Wylie, walking under Tidbit to accomplish this.
Feeling like I really didn’t have a choice, I walked over to the kitchen, where I could see that in addition to the woman with the iPad, there was a South Asian woman in her thirties who was stirring something on the stove.
“Give us your opinion on this pasta sauce,” Wylie Sanders said to me with a kind smile.
“Yes!” the girl at the stove said as she turned around, looking irritated. “Everyone keeps adding stuff to it and they’re messing with its integrity.”
“We just want to eat, Priya,” the woman with the iPad said, a faint Southern accent lurking in her words. “We’re trying to move the process along.”
“And we will,” Priya said, “when the sauce is right!” She looked at me expectantly.
“Oh,” I said, shaking my head, even though my stomach growled in spite of myself. “I’m actually not staying—”
“Hey!” Wylie Sanders yelled to the room at large. When nobody at the table paid him any attention, he put two fingers in his mouth and let out an ear-piercing whistle. Every human in the room stopped talking, even as the dogs started barking frantically. “Hush,” he said in the dogs’ direction. “Everyone,” he continued, raising his voice. He pointed at me. “This is Darcy. She’s Russell’s friend.” Eleven people—and two dogs—turned to stare at me and I felt my face get hot. Russell, I noticed, was deliberately not looking in my direction. Wylie smiled at me and took a comically large breath. “Ready?”
“Um,” I said, not exactly sure what he was talking about.
“That’s my daughter Montana,” he said, starting at one end of the table. I tried not to do a double take when I realized I recognized her from her yacht escapades. She looked like she was in her late thirties, with long dark hair, and she waved at me cheerfully.
“My son Connor, her brother,” Wylie continued. Connor looked like he was older than Montana—in his forties maybe, with a sandy beard—but I could see the resemblance between them. “His wife, Sydney,” Wylie continued, pointing to an Asian woman next to Connor. She gave me a friendly, if slightly confused, wave. She was wearing a very cool jumpsuit and had perfect, straight-across blunt bangs. “My son Wallace,” he continued, nodding at a guy in his late twenties who, bewilderingly, had a pile of small, folded pieces of paper in front of him. He was Black, with trendy oversized glasses.
“Russell you’ve met,” he continued, and we made eye contact for half a second before looking away again. “I’m Wylie,” he said, and then chuckled, like it was the best joke he’d heard in a while.
“Dad,” Wallace, Montana, and Connor groaned in unison.
“Now,” he said, gesturing to the other side of the table, where three women were sitting. They all looked back at me and I felt my eyes widen—because I recognized all of them. I was looking at three of Wylie Sanders’s ex-wives, but what were they doing here? And sitting next to one another?
“This is Kenya,” he said, nodding toward a regal-looking Black woman wearing a flowing caftan. I gave her a smile, hoping it wasn’t clear that I recognized her from paparazzi photos and red-carpet pictures. “Wallace’s mother and my ex-partner.”
“Nice to meet you,” Kenya said, sounding polite but confused.
