Jo extricated herself from under his arm slowly, and the loss of contact told him her answer before she could say it.
“I... don’t know,” she said. “Not what I used to feel. But not nothing either.”
Logically, Mal knew that Jo was just being honest, and that he appreciated honesty. Jo would never feed him just what he wanted to hear, and her transparency was one of the things that drew him to her in the first place. But emotionally, hearing her answer with anything other than apathy strummed a chord of misery in him.
Jo seemed to sense his despondence. “Not the way I feel about you,” she tried, putting a hand over his.
Her attempt at comfort came too late; he was already spiraling. If Jo had loved Ezra Adelman once, it would not be hard for her to find that feeling again. And Mal had met Ezra, had felt himsize him up. That was a man who didn’t intend to lose the same woman twice.
“Is that why you didn’t reach out after you changed your number?” he asked, willing his voice to be steady. “Because you were with him? Because you weren’t sure aboutus?”
Jo’s smile fell to her feet. Mal heard it drop like a bell toll.
“It wasn’t just that,” she said softly.
“But itwas, a little bit,” Mal said.
When Jo didn’t respond, Mal turned away. His body had kicked right into a fight-or-flight response, and he felt dizzy with adrenaline, the muscles in his calves tensing and relaxing as they dangled over the edge of the pier. He picked up a cherry, pitched it into the lake, and somehow the fact that it bobbed in the water instead of sinking underneath frustrated him more.
“I understand that things are complicated,” he said, “but I’m not going to wait forever. At some point, you’ll have to choose.”
He didn’t need to look at her to tell that she’d frozen in place.
“I know that,” she said eventually.
Mal smiled, more to himself than to anyone else. The old Mal, the one Portia had left behind, would have taken a year and a half to recover. He would’ve holed himself up in his apartment, shut the blinds, and become one with his carpet.
This new one was capable of snapping back.
“Good,” Mal said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jo
Paul Adelman was of the belief that there was nothing in the world that money couldn’t buy, and forgiveness was no exception. The bigger his transgression, the more ostentatious the gift, and over the twenty-eight years of their marriage, Renata Kovalenko had accrued villas in balmy locales; historical diamonds with names like the Heart of the East, which she loaned out to museums; and, on occasion, seed funding for what her husband termed her “pet projects.” The day after an exposé inUS Weeklydropped, detailing the Knydus CEO’s scandalous weekend in LA with a twenty-two-year-old reality TV bombshell, he presented Renata with the gift of her dreams: fifty million dollars and the staff to kickstart a film studio.Imagine yourself sitting in the theater. The lights dim, and then, there on the screen: En Garde, he’d told her, dropping a binder of mock-ups of her logo over the splayed pages of the magazine.
Renata took the money. She’d understood when they were married that Paul was not a man who let opportunity for either business or pleasure pass him by. Once upon a time, she had admired that about him, and now she found that she could tolerateit, when the price was right. Still, the night after Boris Finnegan solemnly handed her the fresh-off-the-press printing, she’d wandered into her expansive bar, hunted down a bottle of horilka, and knocked it back straight.
“Want more for yourself than this, Josephine,” she’d slurred when I found her hours later, slumped like a felled angel at her kitchen table next to a half-empty bottle of Nemiroff.
I stared, stunned that a woman so full of fervor could let someone snuff her out.
“I don’t understand why you don’t leave him,” I said.
Renata snorted, then lifted her head back to look at me through bleary eyes.
“Paul is a great man, but he is not a good one,” she said. “When you love a great man, you understand that that love can’t be just yours. Men like him will love other people too.”
I refused to accept that as an answer. Before we had ever met, I’d seen Renata’s face staring back at me from magazine covers, billboards, and, later, television shows. She commanded attention in every room she existed in, even when she wasn’t physically present. To me, Renata was not just a woman but a monument. Her husband, in contrast, was just some guy. Sure, he was a guy with a multimillion-dollar company, but after meeting him and his ilk, I’d been convinced that even that wasn’t impressive—anyone with enough ancestral wealth, a deficient supply of scruples, and a dragon’s hoard of audacity could make it big.
“You’re great too,” I’d said, but I knew that any more would be overstepping my boundaries. Paul Adelman was a ghost in his own home. His interactions with his own son were stiff and stilted; with his wife, strained; with me, nonexistent. He could disappear in a puff of smoke overnight and his household wouldoperate as it always had, probably not noting his absence until the next time they had to make a public appearance. What Paul Adelman was doing—humiliating his wife, dragging her honor through the streets—was notlove.It was selfishness. It was cruelty.
Ezra had been away for a shoot on the day the article about his father’s affair dropped, but he booked a flight home the next day. By that time Renata was back in her normal state, the only sign of her hangover the extra-large cup of coffee she carried into her office that morning. When Ezra tried to ask how she was doing, she said primly, “Come now, we both know how your father is,” before opining about a meeting she had had with a producer about being a judge on a reboot ofAmerica’s Next Top Model. But when Ezra asked me, I didn’t mince words. We debriefed in his room, the only place safe from prying eyes and curious ears, and I watched his face tense with anger.
“That man is the greediest motherfucker alive,” he said of his father. “If I had the honor of being loved by someone like my mom, I would never even think of letting them go, let alone disrespecting them like this.”
I stilled beside him, noting two things at once. First: that Ezra hadn’t yet met a woman he wanted to hold on to, not even his girlfriend at the time, with whom I’d thought he was head over heels in love. The second: that this also included me.
