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All Gigi wants to do is have a glass of wine and go to sleep, but Tim and Santi did cat-sit, and paella does sound good. She drops Melba to the floor and heads down the street.
It turns out, paella comes at a much higher price than the six-pack of Mexican Coca-Cola she brought Tim and Santi as a thank-you gift. They want to talk about tomorrow’s trip. Oh, do they.
“I can’t believe you’re going,” Tim says as he scoops a huge serving of fragrant saffron rice with shrimp, mussels, and sausage onto Gigi’s plate. “Girl, what are you thinking?”
“Hollis knows about you,” Santi says. “I mean, comeon,Geej. Out of two million followers, she picks you? She definitely knows.”
“That’s what I thought too,” Gigi says. “I figured Matthew left some kind of incriminating evidence behind and Hollis wanted to, you know,hash it out.But I think she’s inviting me in earnest. She…likesme, and I like her too.”
“I have a theory,” Santi says. “I think texting with Matthew’s wife is your way of hanging on to him.”
Gigi blinks rapidly. This whole thing is so confusing. “I want to meet her in person,” she says. “I want to hear her talk about him, I want to get a sense of what their marriage was like. He told me only certain things, and I’m not sure if any of it was true.”
“He lied to you forhowlong about not being married?” Tim says.
“Seven months,” Gigi says—which, as it turns out, was long enough to fall in love. When Matthew finally did come clean about being married—and not only married, but married toHollis Shaw—Gigi hadn’t been able to break things off. She’d tried and failed. She cared too much about him.
Gigi meets Dr. Matthew Madden in the Delta lounge during a rogue hailstorm at Hartsfield. Gigi is supposed to fly to Buenos Aires for vacation and Matthew is “heading home” to Boston. Gigi asks the bartender to change the channel on the TV; she wants to watch college football.
Matthew turns to her. “I wouldn’t have picked you for a football fan,” he says. “With your British accent.”
“I’m Bulldogs all the way,” Gigi says with a wink.
“Ah, lucky you. I root for UNC, which is only satisfying during basketball season,” Matthew says.
“Did you go there?” Gigi asks.
“My ex-wife did,” Matthew says without so much as a blink. “One of the habits I can’t seem to shake now that we’re apart is cheering for the Tar Heels. What about you? Did you go to Georgia?”
“For two years,” Gigi says. “Then I transferred to Embry-Riddle. I’m a pilot for Delta, though I’m here tonight because I’m supposed to be flying to Buenos Aires for a little Malbec and tango.”
From that point on, they’re off to the races, asking each other questions, seeing if they have anything in common other than a love of college sports. Why, yes—they both like classical music as well as Dave Matthews, they both travel all the time, they’re both addicted to their work. When their flights are canceled, they decide to order a bottle of champagne. That’s when the flirting starts, subtle at first, then more overt. Gigi is no stranger to airport romances—it comes with the job—so when Matthew says he’s booking a room at the Marriott Gateway there at the airport, Gigi says she’ll get a room as well rather than drive home after she’s been drinking. When they approach the hotel desk, they’re holding hands, and the idea of two rooms is absurd. Matthew doesn’t call anyone, doesn’t text, doesn’t disappear into the bathroom for a suspicious amount of time. He wears no ring, and there’s no mark suggesting he’s worn a ring recently.
The following May, when Gigi and Matthew are spending a romantic weekend in Santorini, Matthew tells her he won’t see her much over the summer because he’ll be on Nantucket with his family.
Gigi looks out the white arched window of their hotel room in Oia at the sparkling blue Mediterranean and thinks,Something is up.
“You mean your daughter?” Gigi says. Matthew has told her about his twenty-year-old, Caroline, who goes to school in New York.
“Yes,” Matthew says. “And my wife.” Matthew, who is the definition of low drama, pauses dramatically. “Gigi, I’m married.”
It’s cute of him to tell her when they’re on a Greek island and Gigi can’t leave. Well, scratch that, shecanleave, and she threatens to, of course—How could you, you’re a liar, from the minute I met you, you lied, what iswrongwith you?But in the end, she lets him comfort her with what are certainly more lies or, at best, half-truths:Hollis and I have separate lives, we lost that loving feeling a couple years ago, I stay in the house because I want to avoid the mess of a divorce, plus Caroline. Please, Gigi, please understand just how happy you make me. You make me so damn happy.
He doesn’t sayI love youand that is, perhaps, why she stays. She becomes determined in that moment to make him fall in love with her.
Remaining in a relationship with Matthew while he is married isn’t a strong moral choice; this she knows. She tries to rationalize it: She’s not the one who’s cheating, Matthew is. But when Gigi finds out later that night—once she’s processed her fury and is able to ask questions likeWhat is your wife’s name?—that Matthew is married to Hollis Shaw, Gigi thinks,You have got to be kidding me.The flight attendants whom Gigi works with chatter about Hollis Shaw nonstop. They love her recipes, they love her blouses, they love her Serbian sheepdog, they love her preppy-boho vibe. She’s a greatest hits of American womanhood and they justlove her so much!Up until this moment, Gigi has had only a polite, passing interest in Hollis Shaw.I’ll have to check her out.Now that Gigi and Hollis are…connected,Gigi frequently visits the website and sets out to make Hollis notice her.
How will Gigi attract Hollis’s attention when she’s one of millions? Well, she has inside information. Matthew tells her that Hollis lost her mother when she was a baby—and as it happens, Gigi’s mother died when she was only twelve. Gigi gets on the Corkboard and messages Hollis that she’s grateful for the cooking demos becausemy own mum passed away before she could teach me her favorite Cantonese dishes.Hollis writes back immediately:I’m self-taught, my mother died when I was very young.Gigi is in! She responds to Hollis’s other posts in the most intelligent and interesting way possible. So many of the other comments are fawning, nearly obsequious:You’re my queen, Hollis!Or quotidian, likeYum! Looks delicious(sometimes shortened todelish). Or they ask irritating questions about measurements and substitutions. Gigi notices that Hollis is replying to her comments more and more frequently, and soon they’re private messaging about restaurants and books and their favorite shows and podcasts. It turns out they have a lot in common.
Gigi digs into her paella. Tim and Santi are the only people she’s confided in about her relationship with Matthew. (If Gigi had broken down and told the flight attendants, it would have been all over the company in twenty-four hours.) They comforted her when she found out—from the post on Hollis’s website—that Matthew was dead. But there’s a situation they don’t know about and she isn’t about to tell them tonight.
“I know it’s crazy that I’m going,” Gigi says. Not only has Gigi befriended her dead lover’s wife, she has become the wife’s confidante, and the wifehas invited her to a girls’ weekend. “But I have to meet her.”
“For closure?” Tim asks.
Gigi isn’t sure she believes in closure. “For something,” she says. “Besides, it’s Nantucket.”
Santi raises his wineglass. “To Nantucket,” he says. “May you make it back in one piece.”
