I slip behind a crowd of people and snake my way toward the bathroom, laughing into my hand. Once I’m through the door, I listen for the usual lamentations that bubble up in crowded bathrooms—aching feet and smeared lipstick. I exhale a sigh of relief when I realize the bathroom is quiet.
Then, I turn the corner—and freeze.
Tippy Schaeffer is standing in front of the bathroom mirror, angling her face as she freshens up her makeup. While I think Tippy and I are contemporaries, her exact vintage is a secret only her aesthetician knows.
But however old she is, she’s never worked a day in her life. She’s an heiress to a statewide liquor store empire—her house is known in the neighborhood as Casa de Tequila. Her husband, Shep, spends most of his time fine-tuning his backswing while they both live off of Tippy’s spirits-soaked trust fund. Shep likes to tell people he trades commodities, but the jury’s out on whether or not he knows what that means.
I’m hoping to sneak past her, but she stops me.
“Este,” she says and the way the “s” in my name sluices out confirms that Tippy is…tipsy.
My smile is guarded. Tippy has a Ph.D. in petty, and she’s not very good at hiding the fact that she thinks she—and her husband, Shep—should have taken Fritz and Gianna’s mantle rather than Nora and I.
“Nice party,” she goes on. “Your husband was just telling Shep and me about his tech days in California.”
“Oh?” My shoulders lock at the mention of our West Coast past.
She nods and says, “Beau is a genius.”
Beau could sneeze and they’d call him a savant.
He thrives in any room, effortlessly slipping in and out of conversations, laughing in all the right places. He’s good at it, and most people are so awed by the tech-titan persona they don’t even ask what he did out there. As soon as they hear he was an engineer, they assume the work would be over their heads. Sometimes I catch myself studying their faces, and I like seeing their eyes widen in wonder as they imagine Beau making our money materialize from the perfect combination of ones and zeros. They’re all intrigued to uncover whether he’s an evil genius or a benevolent mastermind.
They definitely never ask what I did out in California or if I had some hand in amassing our fortune. Everyone’s quick to imagine Beau luring me into a marriage with his piles of cash.
There was a time when it could have been me, though. It could have been my money that funded our glamorous lives.
“A genius?” I laugh. “Oh, never tell him that.”
Not that he wouldn’t deserve the praise. People practicallyworshipped him in California. But we vowed to leave all that behind us when we moved.
“Please.” Tippy sniffs. “The rich men in this town don’t need me inflating their egos.” The laugh that follows is a little too sharp, hinting at a deeper truth. I wonder how often she is undercut or vilified because she is a wealthy woman. I’ve seen the way eyes slide past her at parties, giving more weight to her choice of outfit than her influence or power. A rich man is so much morelogicalwith this crowd. They probably don’t know where to place her sometimes, and these people like brands. Something they can name and assign clear value to. Tippy straightens up, righting her smile. “I promise to keep it between us.”
I move to the sink beside her and reapply my lipstick.
“Speaking of which.” She clears her throat. “Did I see you last night?”
Fuck.
A ribbon of white toilet paper rising in the sky and unspooling as it catches on Carol’s fence flares in my memory. After adorning Carol’s lawn in Charmin, Polly and I saw Tippy slipping inside her house with someone who wasn’t her husband, and I can still hear her flirtatious laugh bubbling through the air. Shep’s a tall, sandy blond. The open car door eclipsed whoever Tippy was with, but the person was notably shorter than Shep. I had hurried Polly along, sparing us both a conversation about Tippy’s life choices.
Tippy has a reputation for dalliances—both the sneaky and the brazenly overt—and I can never tell if Shep knows and doesn’t care or if he’s too busy with his tee times and scotch tastings to realize Tippy’s antics. Tippy and Shep have been married for nearly a decade, but her wandering eye never seems to slow down. Sometimes I think racking up admirers is a kind of game to her. At the mention that Tippy saw Polly and me out, I freeze and meet her eyes in the mirror. Her reflection is tight with unease.
“I don’t know what you mean, Tippy.”
Her mouth twitches. She’s not smiling. But she’s notnotsmiling either.
“I got a little carried away with—” Her fingers fumble with the cap of her lip gloss, and there’s a mismatch between her body language and her words. Despite her implied shame, her eyes are bright and eager for an audience. She doesn’t want to hide her secret. She wants to hand it to me.
But I don’t want it.
“I’m going to stop you there.” I put up a hand. “I’m not being coy. I really don’t want to know.”
Her brow arches, incredulous; turning down fresh gossip around here is a cardinal sin.
“Everyone is entitled to their secrets, Tippy.” My shrug is deliberate, casual, but I’m preparing to insist if I need to. “I don’t need to know yours.”
Her jaw is still slack when she says, “You don’t want to know who I was with?”
