She thinks about going to a bar and getting so drunk she can’t see straight. She thinks about calling Richie and seeing if he can hook her up. She thinks about doing something so weird and public and fucked that she winds up back at Cedars, but in the end it all feels like a lot of work for nothing, so instead she rides home in the back of the Uber with her head against the window, looking numbly at Instagram photos of Martha’s Vineyard cottages on her phone.
“Hey,” says the driver, glancing at her in the rearview. “Aren’t you—”
“No,” Fiona says flatly. “I’m not.”
Back at home she gets into bed, putsWives With Kniveson her laptop, and passes out like someone has decked her. When she wakes up, the screen saver is on, and she can tell by the light spilling in through the blinds that it’s already the middle of the afternoon. Her head is throbbing, a dull persistent ache at the back of her skull; the foot masks she did with Claudia and Estelle have finally started to do their thing, and her feet are weird and wrinkly, little shreds of skin flaking off her toes. When she looks at her phone, there’s nothing from Sam—not that she was expecting there to be. There are, however, eleven missed calls from Georgie.
“I have bad news,” Georgie announces when Fiona calls her back, sounding darkly excited to be the bearer of it. “Larry broke both his ankles.”
“What?” Fiona sits upright in bed. “How?”
“He stepped off a curb wrong.”
Fiona shakes her head even though Georgie can’t see her. “That’s... not real.”
“It’s real.”
“I—okay,” Fiona says, scrubbing a hand over her face. Larry is their Torvald, Fiona’s onstage husband. Without Torvald, there’s no show. “Well, DeShaun can do it, can’t he? That’s what we have understudies for.”
“That’s the other thing,” Georgie says. Fiona can’t decide ifshe’s imagining the glee in her voice or not. “Apparently DeShaun booked a three-episode guest spot onMalibu Nights.”
Just for a minute, Fiona can’t breathe. “That’s not real, either,” she manages.
She sends out a group text canceling tonight’s rehearsal, pending a plan she has no idea how she’s going to come up with. Then she pulls the blankets over her head and goes back to sleep.
She stays in bed for a long time. It’s embarrassing; she hasn’t cried in years and she doesn’t intend to start now but she can feel that familiar heaviness in her chest and throat and sinuses, like clouds gathering before a storm. She knew better. Sheknewbetter, and still she let him—
Still she letherself—
Ugh, she is the stupidest fucking person in the world.
“You’re here?” Claudia asks at some point later that night, stopping in the doorway. “This whole time I thought you were out.”
Fiona shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m going to get up in one second and make dinner.”
“It’s like ten thirty,” Claudia tells her gently. She’s wearing a pair of white coveralls that make her look like a trendy Ghostbuster, Fiona’s heart-shaped sunglasses perched in her hair like a headband. “Are you okay?”
Fiona sighs. “No,” she admits.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Is it about your play?”
“Sort of.”
“Is that all it’s about?”
“No.”
“Okay.” Claudia looks at her for another minute, then crosses the room and gets into bed beside her, pulling the sheet up over them both and scooching so close Fiona can smell the peanut butter toast she must have been eating before she came in here.
“My feet are peeling off,” Fiona warns her.
“Mine too,” Claudia assures her, brushing her gross, flaky toes against Fiona’s legs.
“That’s disgusting,” Fiona says—laughing in spite of herself, trying to wriggle away.
