Charlie is somewhere in Europe, though Caroline calls to tell him she’s back in LA: “I’ve got meetings,” she reports breezily, and Will purposely doesn’t ask if that’s the only reason. They go to dinner at a seafood place in Malibu, a big outdoor patio and the smell of the ocean, a band playing jazz standards underneath a white sliver of moon. It’s a fun time, actually—wine and oysters, Caroline complaining about all her friends from back in New York who are moving to the suburbs to have a million babies; still, Will can’t get over the feeling that something isn’t right.
“Do you remember the first summer we met?” she asks him, plucking a cocktail shrimp from the platter. Her hair is long and loose, the white-gold of summer corn at the Union Square greenmarket.
“Of course I do,” Will tells her. She was in town from Chicago to visit Charlie; they drank their way from Lincoln Center all the way down to the Brooklyn Bridge. “I was terrified of you.”
Caroline grins at him across the table. “Good,” she says. “That’s how I like it.”
It’s after midnight by the time they pay the bill and make their way to the valet stand; the back of her hand brushes his as they’re waiting for their cars. “You coming over?” she asks, and she is so, so casual. “Or do you want me to meet you back at your sumptuous accommodations in Pemberly Grove?”
Will takes a deep breath, and then he says it: “I don’t think we should do this anymore,” he blurts, which is of course the moment the valet pulls up with Charlie’s Land Rover. He resists the urge to dive in and peel off into the darkness, but barely.
Caroline doesn’t hesitate, her gaze like a nuclear missile. “Is this about Lilly Benedetto?” she asks.
“What?” Will feels himself blanch. “No.”
“It is!” she accuses. She looks utterly astonished. “You’re throwing me over for Lilly Benedetto. I cannot believe it.”
“I’m not throwing you over,” he says miserably. God, he hates conversations like this. “It’s not like—I mean, we always meant for this to be casual, right? We always said no strings.”
“I—” Something steadfast and fundamental slips in Caroline’s expression then, a look on her face he’s never seen in all the years they’ve known each other. He wildly underestimated what was happening here, Will realizes suddenly. This whole time he had no idea what she felt.
“Caro,” he starts, reaching for her across the pavement, but Caroline is already correcting, drawing herself up like a duchess. “You’re right,” she agrees; just like that she’s herself again, cool and unflappable. Just like that she’s a person who would never let him break her heart. “No strings.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Lilly
She takes one more run at it the night before they both leave, Olivia off to the festival and Lilly headed to Charlotte in the desert: “Look,” Lilly says, finding Olivia tweezing her secret unibrow in the magnifying mirror above the sink in the upstairs bathroom, “about Moon Landing.”
Olivia smirks. “Oh, Lilly,” she says gently, her reflection almost beatific, “I can’t even tell you how much I am not interested in hearing you lecture me about this.”
“I’m not lecturing you about anything,” Lilly argues. All week the weird bad feeling has been growing, clanging around like a rock in a dryer deep inside her chest. “I just think—”
“Can I ask you a question?” Olivia interrupts her. “Who exactly died and made you the boss of everyone?”
“I—nobody,” Lilly says, wounded in spite of herself. Still, she grits her teeth and tries again. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go and do Molly in the desert while wearing an Indigenous headdress so it can be onTMZtwenty minutes later, that’s all.”
“I’m not going to wear a fucking headdress!” Olivia’s tweezers clatter into the sink.
“It remains not a good look.”
“Yourfaceremains not a good look,” Olivia counters. “Forfuck’s sake, Lilly, lighten up for once, will you? Just because you have PTSD from Joe sticking one too many needles in his arm doesn’t mean the rest of us are never allowed to go do anything fun.”
For a second Lilly just blinks at her, reeling. Right away, Olivia seems to realize she’s gone too far. “That’s not—” she starts, then breaks off and tries again. “Lilly, honey, I didn’t mean—”
“No.” Lilly holds a hand up. She doesn’t know why it feels like Olivia has punched her. It’s not like Olivia is saying anything she doesn’t know. What does she even think she’s trying to accomplish here, telling Olivia not to make the same mistakes she herself made with flair and abandon? Who is she to tell Olivia not to do anything at all? It’s useless to try to stop whatever’s going to happen. It’s useless to keep trying to hold it all together with her two shaking hands. “You’re right, you’re a big girl. Do whatever the hell you want.”
“Lilly,” Olivia says again, reaching for her, “come on.”
But Lilly is already gone, down the stairs and through the foyer, out into the yard where the air is cool and blue. She walks the whole development, past Charlotte’s parents’ place and Rebecca Barnes’s absurd English Tudor and Charlie Bingley’s house where the windows are empty and dark.
She’s still standing there, hands in her pockets, when the porch light flicks on and the front door opens wide. “Lilly?” Will asks, squinting at her in the darkness. He’s wearing jeans and a thin-looking hoodie, his feet bare against the brick of the stoop. “Is that you?”
Lilly freezes. “... No?” she tries, then shrugs a little helplessly. Of course the truth is she came here looking for him. It’s ridiculous to pretend she wasn’t hoping for this exact thing at the back of her brain. “Hi.”
She’s prepared for something scathing, but instead Will just grins. “Hi,” he says, reaching up to scratch one shoulder. “Do you want to come inside?”
Lilly blinks at the directness of it, the sight of him touching himself so casually doing something to her stomach. “Now?”
