Inside Anouk’s pristine packaging is a shadow-box frame encasing an intricate collage. The kind she told me about that night on the beach in Cabo, and that I’d spotted on the wall in her dressing room the first time I’d visited her home. Mounted within is one of her elegant line drawings of a familiar seascape, minimalist, ink on linen. A pressed dendrobium orchid. A wooden cocktail stirrer withAMANengraved on the head. A scattering of dried tea leaves, affixed to look like a swarm of constellations. And a black-and-white photo of the two of us flanking a baby elephant. I’d taken it at the sanctuary near Udawalawe and gifted it to her the previous Christmas. On the back of it I’d writtenTHE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM.
“Oh, Anouk.”
“It’s from our time in Sri Lanka.”
“Yes. It’s beautiful. Thank you.”
For a moment I lose myself in the details. The tea-leaf stars, the etching. Her artistry. I am moved that she has taken the time to create something so specific, so personal. Particularly because I thought I’d felt her, us, distancing these past several months. Not over any one thing. Not that I was any less attracted to her. Just life getting in the way.
“I wanted you to have something to remember it,” she says, tightening her cashmere cardigan around her shoulders and reaching for her glass of wine.
“I would have remembered it no matter what. But this is truly special. Thank you. I didn’t know we were exchanging gifts.”
“We’re not.”
She turns her attention toward the water, and I observe her. The half-light hitting her face just so. Her cheekbone bronzed, her wide upturned lip, her hair curling at the nape of her neck. And because I am feeling strangely secure about my place in her world, and hers in mine, I bring it up.
“May I ask you something? Who’s Delphine?”
I sense her stiffen.
“What?”
“Delphine? Who is she?”
A series of expressions washes over her face. Pain? Loss? Anger? “She was a very good friend,” she says eventually. “And then she wasn’t. It was a long time ago.”
“How long?”
She shrugs. “Long. It’s not important… Who told you about Delphine?”
“Sacha.”
“Ha. Sacha is a child. And a mischievous one at that.”
“He asked me if I was the new Delphine.”
“Did he?”
Sacha had just begun his freshman year at Bard College in upstate New York, studying music. Mischievous, perhaps. But no longer a child.
For a second, I say nothing, and then, “Were you sleeping with her?”
“I was. Yes.”
“Were you sleeping with Minnie?”
“Oh là là… So many questions.”
“Is that why we left Hayden’s so quickly the night of the concert?”
She stares at me with her big green eyes, ruminating. And I detect something there. Condescension. Annoyance.
“Cecilia. Were you under the impression I’d never done this before?”
“I wasn’t. I just thought you weren’t doing it with anyone while you were doing it with me. I mean, besides your husband.”
“I’m not. I wasn’t.” She pauses. “Is this why you needed a label?”
