began, up until the end. I didn’t know you had no knowledge.
Jenny laughed. Give me a break, she said. You didn’t give a shit about me.
That’s not true!
Jenny kept laughing. Sloane felt a great blackness, a sludge, moving through her body. She felt the pure hatred from this woman. She had never been so close to hatred.
I don’t have to be here, Sloane said quietly. But I’m here. And whether or not you believe me, I’m telling you I didn’t know, until the end, when I got the idea that you didn’t know. And—
Sloane could not say the rest. How awful it was in the end. How she did it maybe two or three more times, fucked this woman’s partner, though she knew that Jenny might not know. She could not tell her how she’d asked Wes if they could include her, and how he’d brushed it off with silence. He brushed it off by beginning to make love to Sloane. She could not say that part. She knew it was best for this woman to hate her and not the father of her own children.
Why didn’t you fucking come by? Jenny said. If you felt so bad, why didn’t you fucking come by and talk to me?
Sloane remembered the advice from her friend Ingrid: Richard has to go over. Tell him he has to go over there and take care of this. Tell him to go and say it was all his idea. Which is the truth. That’s what you deserve. That’s what this other woman deserves. It’s his responsibility. His and Wes’s. Not yours.
Now Sloane said to Jenny, I should have. You’re right. I’m so sorry I didn’t. I guess I felt it was best to leave it alone.
You were so cryptic in your text message! You didn’t act caught, you acted like I was crazy!
I’m sorry, Sloane said. I didn’t know what you knew. I didn’t want to hurt you more.
You were protecting Wes. And yourself.
I swear to God I was protecting you!
Jenny shook her head. You were fucking the father of my children. And you were protecting me from that? That’s what you actually think? Tell me that’s what you actually fucking think. I want to hear you say that.
Sloane felt her lip trembling. She knew it would sound ludicrous to say that she thought she had done the right thing.
You like yourself, is that right? You can look at yourself in the mirror every morning. You like how you look.
Sloane found herself smiling, suddenly, despite herself. At the inanity. She remembered a moment a few months ago when she took the pickup to Providence, to run some errands and get the restaurant’s tent cleaned. Afterward she had some time to kill so she stopped at a patisserie. Her eyes were drawn to an almond croissant that looked like the most beautiful pastry in the entire world. The shape of it was a perfect elbow. The flakes were crisp and fragile, the color of sunshine.
She hated herself for wanting it and then she hated herself for hating herself. She knew there were women out there, like this woman in her car, with terrific pain, terrific malnourishment, and so she had always felt she had a responsibility to succeed, not to squander her opportunities. She’d been a good rider, skater, skier, singer, and model before the age of thirteen. She’d played field hockey and run track. She graduated from one of the best private schools in the country. But even within the spectrum of that relative ease, she had to constantly reassess what kind of woman she was. The right way to be. How sexy, how perfumed. Not to give up too much of oneself, not to give up too little. The perfect amount, or she might be a ghost, fat, disagreeable.
What Sloane wanted more than anything else was to like herself. She wanted to sit in the patisserie that day and not think too much about a croissant. She wanted to just eat it. She didn’t want to be distracted with hating herself every moment of the day. There had always been a sense of personal inadequacy if she was not nailing every single thing. She was forty-two, she was going through yet another hormone change, and even just the word hormone sounded like an adult diaper and she wanted Botox but she didn’t want to want it and at the same time if she didn’t get it she would keep hating those lines, that decay,