Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,54
fears with freedom…then I would never have known such abundance. The lustre of it all. My lustrous hair is a roadmap of where I’ve been and who I’m becoming. Not a straight line, but an exquisite tangle. Lustre hair care products with SPF 35 are my new go-to, guys. Highly recommend. Sending love and lustre from the shores of Bathsheba Beach.”
Elisabeth sighed.
Lustre. There was no such word.
Even more irritating was Charlotte’s insistence on putting quotation marks around half the things she wrote. Elisabeth had tried to explain that this made it look like she was quoting herself.
Charlotte said, “But I am quoting myself. Someday I might do a book of my quotations.”
Had a diet pill company Elisabeth had never heard of really offered her sister half a million dollars to promote their product? Had there ever even been a sponsorship deal? As recently as a month ago, Charlotte had said her lawyer was ironing out final details on the contract. But what if the whole thing had been a lie?
Elisabeth shook her head, as if to empty it of the thought. That wasn’t a path she could go down tonight.
She closed the tab. A moment later, she opened a new one.
She googled Sun Bun and then Bun Sun and finally solar powered, Sun Bun.
There it was—the Sun Fun 5000 by Solar Tech.
TURNS OUT THERE IS SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN! Our solar-powered cooker heats up five times faster than charcoal! As featured on Shark Tank.
Elisabeth felt a heaviness sink from her chest down into her gut.
There was a photograph of a smiling young woman at the bottom of the page.
Dr. Noreen Brigham invented the Sun Fun while on a Fulbright scholarship in the Himalayas, working with nomads on solutions for energy poverty. She received her doctorate from Harvard University and was named to the Forbes 40 Under 40 innovators list in 2011.
Andrew had once said an invention was only as good as the story behind it. She thought of the night he came up with his idea. How did drunk guys at a wedding compare to nomads in the Himalayas?
Elisabeth looked over at him. She felt like she was about to tell him someone he loved had died.
“Honey. Do you know about this?”
She handed him the phone.
Andrew glanced at the screen.
“I think I’ve seen it,” he said.
“And it’s not a problem?”
“No. See? It says right there. That’s a solar-powered cooker. Mine’s a grill.”
“Sure. But aren’t they the same thing? A device for cooking outside, using solar?”
“That folds up. It’s portable. You can take it camping or whatever. Mine is meant to replace the family grill. It’s a more solid piece of equipment.”
So the Sun Fun was the same as his invention, but portable. And where his heated up three times faster than a charcoal grill, this one worked five times faster. And unlike his, it already existed.
“It’s fine,” Andrew said. “The R-and-D guys I’ve talked to know all about the competition. They’re not concerned. Trust me.”
Elisabeth didn’t trust him, not on this. That was the problem.
She was about to put the phone down when Nomi replied to her text from earlier.
Book club was a bust?
It had been hours since Elisabeth reached out, lonely in the bathroom at Stephanie’s house. She knew her frustration was about Andrew and the Laurels, but she suddenly felt irrationally angry about Nomi’s silence. Nomi wouldn’t set a date to come visit. She never asked about the house.
Book club was soul-destroying, she wrote. Where were you??
Uhh…right here where I usually am. You’re the one who moved away, remember?
A minute later, Nomi added a winking emoji to make clear that it was a joke, but Elisabeth knew it wasn’t, not entirely. Nomi was right. What did she expect?
She took a deep breath.
How was your night? she wrote.
I asked Brian to get a vasectomy and he said no, because what if his second wife wants kids. To which I said, fair point. So nothing accomplished there.
Nomi and Brian both had a cool frankness about them. She was the executive director of a national nonprofit that focused on educating girls in the Third World. He worked in politics. They were tough, assertive, blunt. They could be almost cruel to each other at times, and it was fine, because each of them knew the other could take it.
If Brian had decided, shortly before the birth of their first child, to leave his job and become an inventor, Nomi would have said, You’re an