Kelsey slipped past her through the doorway, her canvas weekender slung over one shoulder and her garment bag draped over the opposite arm, the plastic catching the light from the window. She didn’t comment on the bed. She didn’t pause or glance at Elizabeth or make a joke about it. She just walked past it, dropped her weekender on the armchair by the window, and laid her garment bag across the foot of the bed, smoothing the plastic flat with one hand.
Elizabeth let the door close behind her. The hydraulic arm caught it and eased it shut with a soft click that sounded, in the chilled silence of the room, like something locking into place.
She wheeled her suitcase to the far side of the bed and set it upright against the wall. She hung her own garment bag on the hook beside the bathroom door. Her movements were precise and unhurried, the way she arranged files on her desk before a deposition, everything in its designated location.
Kelsey had unzipped her weekender and was pulling things out. A clear plastic bag stuffed with toiletries, a smaller pouch that might have been makeup, a phone charger, a pair of heels. She gathered the toiletries bag and the makeup pouch against her chest.
“I’m going to put some stuff in the bathroom. Do you need to get in there first?”
“No. Go ahead.”
Kelsey disappeared through the bathroom door, and Elizabeth heard the click of the light switch, then the small sounds of things being set on a counter. A zipper. The rattle of bottles against tile.
Elizabeth stood beside her suitcase and pressed her palms flat against her thighs.
The room was very still. The air conditioning hummed at a low, constant pitch, and beyond the window the faint sound of tires on gravel, someone else arriving.
She sat down on the edge of the bed. This was her fault. All of it. The stiffness in the car, the silence that had stretched. The week before that, when she’d stayed away from the café entirely, texted Kelsey only when logistics demanded it, treated the woman who had volunteered to help her like an inconvenience she was managing. Kelsey had done nothing wrong.
Kelsey had done everything right. At James’s party, she had charmed Sonia, handled the room, and rested her hand on Elizabeth’s arm with the kind of casual warmth that made every person who saw them believe they went home together at the end of the night. She had been funny and genuine and completely convincing, and she had done all of it because Elizabeth had asked her to and paid her to.
So what was Elizabeth’s problem?
She knew what her problem was. Her problem had started in that garden, under the string lights, with Kelsey’s palm on her cheek and her thumb against the corner of Elizabeth’s mouth. That had been performance. Elizabeth understood that. Kelsey had seen Grace walk into the party and she had moved Elizabeth outside and grounded her.
But it had woken something up. The warmth of Kelsey’s hand on her face had cracked something open, and the thing that had leaked out was not complicated. It was simple. She wanted someone to touch her like that again. And not just anyone. Kelsey. She wanted Kelsey’s hand on her face, and Kelsey’s eyes steady on hers. She wanted all of it to be real, and none of it was.
Water ran in the bathroom. Elizabeth listened to it and breathed.
Kelsey came out, drying her hands on a small white towel. Her face looked fresher, like she’d splashed water on it, and herhair was down now, falling over her shoulders, catching the light from the window in a way that made Elizabeth’s chest contract.
“So what’s the plan?” Kelsey asked.
“Well, the ceremony’s at four.” Elizabeth smoothed the bedspread beside her knee, running her thumb along the stitching. “I booked a stylist to come up at two to do our hair. We should probably get some room service now. Something light to keep us going.”
“Okay. But you didn’t have to do that. The stylist, I mean.”
“It’s not a problem. All part of the agreement.”
Kelsey nodded. Something passed across her face, and then she turned toward the window and looked out at the green lawn and the trees beyond it.
Elizabeth followed her gaze. Outside people were setting up white chairs in rows for a ceremony where Grace would marry someone else, and Elizabeth would sit in one of those chairs with a woman she was paying to hold her hand and smile, and afterward they would come back to this room with its one white bed and its cold clean air and the pretending would be over. Kelsey would go back to Queens and Elizabeth would go back to working long hours.
She stood up and opened her suitcase and began to unpack. Everything about today was strange. She should probably be more focused on the fact that her ex-wife was marrying someone else, but her mind kept drifting back to Kelsey, and trying to figure out how she’d let this happen.
16
The stylist arrived at two on the dot. A woman named Reina with a rolling case and the kind of calm, efficient energy that suggested she’d prepped bridal parties in rooms far more chaotic than this one. She set up at the desk by the window, laying out curling irons and pins and a collection of products, and within minutes Kelsey was seated in the desk chair with a cape over her shoulders while Reina sectioned her hair with practiced fingers.
Elizabeth sat on the edge of the bed reading something on her phone. She’d changed into a robe at some point, dark gray, belted precisely at the waist, and Kelsey could see the bare line of her collarbone where the robe parted. She kept her eyes on the screen and said nothing while Reina worked, and Kelsey tried to do the same, watching Reina’s hands in the mirror.
“Side part?” Reina asked, meeting Kelsey’s eyes in the mirror.
“Yeah. Left side, please.”
Reina nodded and kept going, and Kelsey sat still and breathed and tried not to think about the woman on the bed behind her whose reflection she could just barely catch in the lower corner of the mirror. Elizabeth’s ankles were crossed. Herfeet were bare. Her toenails were painted a muted rose that Kelsey had never seen before and would probably never forget.
The Hollywood wave took about forty minutes. Reina brushed each curl out with a boar bristle brush and then set the whole thing with a mist of hairspray that smelled like vanilla, and when she was done, Kelsey’s hair fell in a sleek, golden cascade over her right shoulder, the left side pinned back just enough to keep the wave from hiding her face. It looked like something from a magazine editorial, and Kelsey touched the end of it gingerly, half afraid it would collapse.
