Isobel nods. “I’ll bring something out to you.”
Fitz opens his mouth to argue, but just then laughter spills from the dining room. The laughter strikes him as youthful… so very youthful… almost callously so. It pierces him in a way that he can’t explain. He blinks and waves his hand again, vaguely now, his anger deflated.
“Fine,” he grumbles, and turns away.
Outside, the morning air is cool and damp. Fog clings to the ground, making the terrace feel otherworldly, like its own little island floating in a sea of gray. The sounds from the dining room are muffled out here; he hears them as though through cotton. Someone has placed games on a few of the tables—he spots chess and checkers and dominoes—and draped woolen blankets over the backs of the chairs.
Fitz sits down and, after checking with his dignity, pulls one those blankets over his knees. He looks out at the garden, the lemon trees and reflecting pool all draped with that veil of mist. If Lucy and her dog are down there somewhere, he can’t see them.
But there’s that laughter again. Is it real? he wonders. Or is he imagining it?
Roiling, throaty laughter.
That laughter had chased him through his entire doomed marriage, spilling out from Millie’s big, lipsticked smile. In restaurants, in the lobbies of movie theaters, at the bar of the jazz club she liked to drag him to, men smiled at Millie and she always, always smiled back. She would place her hand on Fitz’s arm and throw her head back and laugh, though he had said nothing at all. A fire of anger and humiliation would ignite within him at the sound, burning him from head to toe.
This was what happened on the nights that he waswithher—who knew what Millie did during the nights she slipped out of the door without a word to him? She could not stand to stay home; he’d learned that she loathed quiet the way others feared death.
When he confronted her about what she did when she went out, she feigned innocence. She was a good actress, and it took Fitz some time to learn her tricks. Once he did, she dropped them, and showed him exactly who she was.
In the end, though, he supposed he had shown her exactly who he was, too.
There was a time when he’d hoped that motherhood might soften his wife and turn her, if not domestic, then at least… softer. His naiveté makes him shudder now. After the baby, she found more excuses to leave the house than ever before.
The constant humiliations pecked at Fitz’s heart, leaving holes that would never heal.
It was during those years that he began to feel as though he weremade entirely of anger—anger that he directed as much at himself as at Millie. Why had he been such a fool as to marry her? He’d been fine alone. Why had he linked himself with someone who was perpetually looking away from him, wondering what else—or who else—she might be able to take for herself? Why had he fallen victim to the same curse that haunted all the men in his family, that curse that made them crash so blindly into love when they were so careful in every other part of their lives?
On what would prove to be the second worst day of Fitz’s life, the head of his brokerage firm’s New York office came to town. A big dinner was planned, and all of the men were meant to bring their wives.
“It’s at Buona Notte,” Fitz told Millie. “Seven o’clock.”
Millie’s brown eyes lit up. Buona Notte had opened only a few weeks earlier, and everyone was talking about it.
“Nadine saw Joe DiMaggio there last week,” she said breathlessly.
There was a naked hunger in her expression that made Fitz’s mouth go sour. A wave of foreboding washed over him. He wished, fervently, that the wives had not been included in the dinner.
Later, Millie called him at his office and informed him that she’d made a late appointment at the hairdresser and would meet him at the restaurant. Everyone had been seated at the table for twenty minutes when she finally arrived. The light gathered around her in the doorway, and all eyes were drawn to her. She wore a dress Fitz had never seen—red satin, sleeveless, belted tight around her waist, and cut low in a heart over her breasts.
Beside Fitz, there was an empty seat reserved for Millie, and beside that empty seat sat Bruce Leonard, the head of the New Yorkoffice. Bruce’s own wife was on his other side, but her presence didn’t stop him from letting out a low, appreciative whistle at the sight of Millie. When Millie walked toward the table, her hips strained the red satin of her dress and Bruce’s wolfish smile grew.
“This dinner is looking up,” Bruce said, pulling out her chair. When she sat, he leaned across her, his shoulder a knife’s width from her breasts. “Some guys have all the luck,” he said to Fitz, which might have been a compliment but Fitz could see in his cold expression it was not.
Millie was in top form. She threw back her head and let loose her raucous laugh at everything Bruce said, her smile so bright it made Fitz flinch. She was the star of the table, and let the conversation revolve around her, turning her head from one man to the next but reserving her most charming witticisms for Bruce. Fitz felt a stab of pity for the man’s wife. When he put his hand on Millie’s leg to remind her of his presence, she pushed him away, raising her pretty fingers at the same moment to signal to the waiter that she wanted another drink.
“These San Francisco waiters are sleepwalkers compared to the ones in New York,” Fitz heard Bruce say, his voice slick. “Why don’t we skip the middleman and get you that drink at the bar?”
And then they were gone.
Bruce’s wife excused herself to use the restroom. Fitz, face burning, was left alone with the men he worked with and their wives. Each and every person at the table avoided his gaze.
Later that night, once he and Millie were home, Fitz’s anger boiled over.
“What were you thinking?” he hollered. “That man is my boss. You made a fool of me in front of everyone I work with!”
Millie never missed an opportunity to match his fury with her own. Her charm, so sparkling all night, fell away like a mask. “I did you a favor!” she hissed. “He’ll want to have dinner with us again now. You wait and see!”
“A favor?” Fitz was flabbergasted. “You will go to any length to justify yourself, won’t you?”
