Page 25 of One-Star Romance

SUBJECT: A Break at the Lake

Hi!

We all know how supportive and encouraging Angus can be. But now it’s his turn to be showered with love and praise, because our guy has landed his dream job at Insight Capital! For those who don’t know, it’s an incredibly well-respected financial firm, and this position is a huge step up. He’ll be starting soon, but before he gets sucked into the world of Wall Street, we’d like to invite you all to a weekend of fun with us. We’ve rented a luxury vacation cabin on a lake in Pennsylvania for a long weekend. Our treat! Think lots of wine, swimming, relaxing, and quality time. Let us know if you can make it. I’ve attached an itinerary, suggested packing list, the weather report for the weekend, and a map with detailed directions to the property, since I’m told that phone service can get a little wonky. If you have any other questions, I’m here!

11

Natalie was standing in her kitchen, eyes fixed on the broken burner on her stove—the one that her landlord had been promising and failing to fix for months—when Gabby rang the bell.

In a normal kitchen, one broken burner wouldn’t be that big of a deal. How often did you use all four at the same time? But Natalie still lived in the same crappy apartment she’d moved into right after college, an apartment in which everything was a little too small. That included the stovetop: a two-burner unit on top of a half-sized oven. Two burners were fine when you were twenty-two and subsisting on ramen packets, a person without standards. But somehow the years had passed, and her apartment had stayed small and her life had too.

Now, she opened the door to Gabby, who smiled and held out a bottle of wine. “Hey! Sorry I’m late, the trains were so backed up.” She walked in and hung her jacket carefully in the small closet by the door, just as she’d done when she lived here.

“Thanks for coming. I was thinking maybe we do a fun one-pot meal? Rice and beans?”

“Sure,” Gabby said, bending down to rummage in her bag. “I also brought some veggies I can start sautéing.”

“Great. Um, we’ll just have to do it in stages,” Nat said, her cheeks flushing. “Because one of the burners isn’t working.”

Gabby straightened up and squinted at the stove. Her eyes flitted around the rest of the living room / kitchen, as if she’d forgotten just how small and shabby it was. Or maybe she hadn’t registered the size and shabbiness before because she’d been used to it, but now that she and Angus lived in a two-bedroom in a luxury apartment building (with a roof deck and a gym!), she couldn’t see anything else. Natalie and Gabby had tried, ever since the wedding, to have a good long talk at least once a week, either in person or over the phone. Mostly, Natalie came to Gabby, or they met at a restaurant in the middle, but this week she’d felt too sad and broke to go anywhere else, so Gabby had invited herself over. Here she was, a local girl made good returning to her shitty hometown, feeling utterly relieved she’d gotten out.

Natalie couldn’t help seeing the place through Gabby’s eyes: The tiny rickety table. The peeling paint up by the ceiling. A pipe in the corner began to clank, as it liked to do at random intervals, including in the middle of the night.

“No need for the veggies,” Gabby said, settling herself down at the table and opening up the wine bottle. “A one-pot meal sounds wonderful.”

Natalie began to chop an especially large onion with a dull knife, wincing as she tried to cut the whole thing in half. She paused and rubbed her wrist. A few weeks ago, she’d tripped up the apartment steps on her way home from a late-night catering event (she was exhausted, not drunk, at least not that night). She’d used her wrist to break her fall, and it hadn’t felt right ever since. But she was off her mother’s health insurance now that she was twenty-eight, and since none of her part-time jobs gave her benefits, the only plan she could afford was a basic emergency version. It would come in handy if, say, she was run over by a taxi, but made less-urgent care seem out of reach. A doctor’s visit would probably cost her a few hundred dollars, only for them to give her the same recommendations she could get from WebMD—wrap it in an Ace bandage, take some Tylenol, try to be gentle with it.

She recommenced onion-chopping more gingerly, glancing over at Gabby to see if she’d noticed. She had not.

Natalie could feel the walls of this place closing in on her. She needed to get out. But moving was expensive. Once she got this new book deal and the first chunk of her advance came through, then she could get on StreetEasy and make some changes. As Natalie sautéed the onions and Gabby began to chat about the latest annoying stunt that her work nemesis had pulled, Natalie reached over to her phone on the counter and checked her email. Still no word from her agent.

“Hello?” Gabby asked.

“Sorry, I am listening, I promise.”

“No offense, my love, but you look like a zombie. What’s going on?”

Nat sighed. “It’s just been a stressful few weeks, waiting around for these editors to get back to me about the new book.”

“Mm,” Gabby said, her tone sympathetic. “I’m sure someone will come through soon.”

“Yeah. They have to. I mean, I got a deal for Apartment 2F, and I know this one is better.” She shot a look at Gabby. “You’re welcome to read it, if you want.”

Gabby made a noncommittal noise, a little door inside of her seeming to slam shut. Rob’s face, during the wedding reception, flashed into Natalie’s mind, a familiar and annoying intrusion.

In the year and change since that night, Natalie had tried a few times to delicately feel Gabby out on the subject of Apartment 2F, and each time, Gabby had closed herself off. Maybe Rob’s horrible barb had been true. Or maybe Gabby just felt embarrassed that she hadn’t gotten back to reading, and that was why she was so weird about it! If the latter, Natalie certainly didn’t want to start apologizing and bring up a whole unnecessary mess.

Because, yes, she could admit to herself that Angus had provided her with a certain inspiration. How could he not have? In the thick of her writing process, he was always either sweeping Gabby away for another celebratory engagement dinner (At what point did you stop celebrating? He was really milking it.) or joining them in the apartment (“Girl talk time!” he’d say, settling himself on the sofa like he belonged there). Her resentment of him was top of mind, along with her sadness that Gabby was abandoning her, leaving up searches for luxury apartments on her computer screen as if each one wasn’t a dagger in Natalie’s heart.

Natalie had channeled it all. And the writing had swept her up so fully that she’d never stopped to think about other people actually reading it. She’d thrown in details to disguise the portrayal, but during the revision process, it felt impossible to make bigger changes to Dennis without doing fundamental damage to the whole book itself. Besides, it wasn’t that obvious, was it? And people understood the nature of fiction!

“The new one is super different from Apartment 2F,” Natalie said to Gabby now. “I think writing about a woman during the suffrage movement allowed me to get outside my own head and experiences, you know? Think about bigger issues?”

Again, Gabby made that noncommittal noise. Back in college, she and Natalie would occasionally proclaim their dorm room an “artists’ den.” They’d turn off their phones for a whole afternoon, light some candles, and Gabby would paint while Natalie wrote. To-do lists melted away. Hours flew by. And when they finally yanked themselves back to the real world, Gabby always demanded to read whatever Natalie had been working on. She declared to all their friends that Nat was her favorite author. Was she not going to read any of Natalie’s work going forward, slowly but surely unraveling another one of the ties that bound them to each other?

Tonight, her wrist aching and her anxiety spiking, Natalie couldn’t move on like she had every other time this had happened. She put down the spatula and braced herself.

“Speaking of Apartment 2F,” Natalie began, and Gabby started concentrating very hard on pouring them both glasses of wine. “You do know that it’s all fiction, right? I hope you don’t feel strange about it.”

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