Also, and even then Lilly hated the part of herself that thought this way: he was turning into a press liability.
“Here I am,” she agreed anyway, dropping her head back onto his shoulder and tilting her chin up to watch the stars. He smelled like this afternoon’s sunscreen and Lever 2000, cheap and slightly astringent: no matter how many fancy body washes she bought him, he always used the bars from CVS. “Everybody having fun in there?”
“Olivia just locked herself in the bathroom crying becauseAnwar Hadid blocked her on Instagram,” Joe reported, sliding his palms down over her stomach, “so probably that will require your attention at some point. Otherwise, I think everybody’s doing good.”
Lilly laughed, or started to: it turned into a gasp as his hands wandered lower, slipping up underneath her dress. “There are literally two dozen people right inside,” she reminded him softly, nodding in the direction of the cabin. She could see June through the plate glass window, tall and luminous. She could hear Isobel calling for more champagne.
“So? What do they care?” Joe’s smile was brilliant in the moonlight, nimble fingers sliding inside the elastic of her underwear. “We’re getting married.”
Lilly thinks there was always a part of her that knew what was coming. She thinks there was always a part of her that knew it couldn’t last.
Now she fusses with some dialogue, deleting a couple of words and putting them back again five minutes later. The last few months she’s been noodling on a screenplay about a lady vampire destined to outlive her one true love; she entered it into a blind contest over the summer and got to the very last round, but when she came in for the finalist meeting the team took one look at her, sent her out into the hallway for ten minutes, then brought her back in and explained as delicately as possible that having her name attached to a project made it virtually unsalable. “I read online that it’s actually one of the few things both Republicans and Democrats agree on in national polling,” one of the executives mused admiringly.
Lilly blinked. “How much they don’t like me and my family?”
“Well.” He had the decency to seem embarrassed. “Pretty much.”
Eventually Lilly’s eyes start to glaze over, so she gives up and closes the computer with a tidy click. After all, the problem isn’t that she hasn’t revised the damn thing. The problem is just... her. “If you ever wanted to develop something a little more on-brand,” the guy offered as she was leaving, an assistant all but yanking her from the room with a shepherd’s crook like something out of vaudeville. “A dating competition, maybe? Something with fun challenges! We could get your sisters in on the act.”
Inside the cool, quiet house June’s bedroom door is still open, the faint smell of gardenias and night cream hanging in the air. “Were you writing?” June calls, leaning back on her elbows and peering out into the hallway. She’s already in her pajamas, one of the crisp matching sets that are all she sleeps in, like she’s the sweet, plucky heroine in a Nora Ephron movie.
Lilly shakes her head. “Searching Craigslist for an honest living,” she jokes. “Thinking about getting a job as a naked sushi girl.”
“Do you think he was serious?” June asks, brow furrowing. “About the house?”
Lilly does, actually, but it’s her job in this family to make it so her sisters don’t worry, so instead she just shrugs. “Dad’s scrappy,” she promises, which is also what she said back when he was in the hospital undergoing an emergency triple bypass, the rest of them huddled in the waiting room at Cedars in their fuzzy slippers and robes. “He’ll figure it out.”
June nods, apparently satisfied. “You just missed Kit and Liv,” she says, scooting over to make room for Lilly on the bed. “They were going to some tequila thing at Soho House, but they wanted to pick a theme for Rebecca’s party.”
“Pirates,” Lilly says immediately. “The Bauhaus movement.That alphabet poem by Edward Gorey about all the kids dying in unusual and gruesome ways.”
June smirks. “I think they meant, like, jewel tones.”
“Well, Junie, there’s a real lack of imagination in this house, if you want my opinion.” Lilly flops back against the pillows. “Is Rebecca’s thing this weekend already?” Rebecca Barnes has the biggest, most over-the-top house in the entire development. She was a Hollywood sexpot back in the eighties and still dresses like it, is perpetually tottering down to the mailbox in a full face of makeup and three-inch heels, the morning sun glinting off her impeccably preserved décolletage. Every fall she throws herself an extravagant birthday party featuring acrobats or live emus or the entire cast ofHamilton; Isobel DesRoche would sooner be photographed perusing the clearance rack at Old Navy, but Lilly’s mother has always believed the whole affair to be the very height of glamour, and lord knows none of her sisters have ever forgone an opportunity to increase their number of search results on Getty Images. “I swear that woman has like four birthdays a year.”
“We could always skip it,” June reminds her, but Lilly just hums noncommittally. After all, it’s not like her social calendar is exactly groaning at the seams. She doesn’t want to be remembered for all eternity as the straight man onMeet the Benedettos, maybe. But that doesn’t necessarily mean she never wants to be remembered at all.
She says good night to June and pads through the bathroom they share, shutting the door behind her. She knows it’s strange that they all still live here, five grown women all crammed into their parents’ McMansion. She actually did move out for a while—she and Joe rented a place in a high-rise downtown right after the show got canceled, what was supposed to be a fresh start for themboth—but after everything that happened there was no way she could stay there, all alone with their sleek, modern furniture, the city sprawling endlessly down below. Two years back home and Lilly barely even talks about leaving: “The rest of us would kill each other,” her father said last time she mentioned it, “and I’d hope to be murdered first.”
It’s after midnight but already Lilly knows there’s no way she’s going to fall asleep anytime soon, so instead she slips on her sneakers and creeps out of the house through the mudroom, the blue night air cool on the back of her neck. She started doing this after she moved back to Pemberly Grove, wandering in loops through the mostly empty neighborhood—a way to spend her nights other than crying or staring blankly into the middle distance, trying to convince herself she wasn’t about to fly off the face of the Earth. It’s quiet out here, just the owls and the jacarandas and the soft, steady thud of her own two feet on the pavement. It’s peaceful.
She’s not consciously heading for Charlie Bingley’s but she’s also not completely surprised when she looks up and finds herself there, the house itself a faux-Mediterranean villa with arched doorways and a red tiled roof. There’s a warm yellow light glowing in an upstairs window and a Land Rover parked in the drive; on the lawn a single tennis ball glows neon in the moonlight, presumably abandoned after a wholesome and healthful game of fetch.
Lilly thinks about her Honda sitting busted at the mechanic’s. She wonders where her family will go if they have to leave Pemberly Grove. She imagines the last days of Rome, everyone washing their hair and pitting their peaches and falling in love while an empire fell all around them. Then she turns around and walks back home.
Chapter Two
Will
Will is lying on the couch in the living room, muttering to himself in iambic pentameter, when Charlie bounds down the stairs and tells him they’re going to a party.
“What? No,” Will says immediately—struggling upright, his dog-eared script still clutched in one hand. “Like, tonight?”
“Tonight,” Charlie says cheerfully. “Like, now. Go get dressed.”
“I am dressed,” Will protests, though admittedly he’s been wearing these particular sweatpants for longer than might be advisable. “And I can’t. Filming starts a week from Monday.”
Charlie clambers over the arm of the monstrous sofa, landing with awhoofat the opposite end. “Good thing I didn’t say the party was a week from Monday, then.”
