Page 8 of The Note

May sat upright. “Oh, oh, I know. Three syllables. The white part of your fingernail. We’ve looked it up before.” She began tapping at her own screen, trying various letter combinations.

“Yes, we know this,” Lauren said. “Luluna. Lunaca? Wait … trylunula!”

“And the plural,” Kelsey added.

May smiled as her phone app accepted first one word and then the other. She held up her phone in triumph. “Our first Queen Bee in the same room!”

“Oh my god,” Kelsey said, “I love us so much together. Okay, I’m unpacked and ready to rumble. Let’s go into the village and get the lay of the land?”

May had been hoping to take advantage of the view and the pool while it was still sunny, but waited for Lauren to weigh in.

“Sounds like a plan,” Lauren said, heading toward the kitchen. “Let’s do it.”

The thought of traipsing around town with crowds of vacationers packed into tiny stores and cramped restaurants made May’s brain itch, but she was clearly outvoted.

Kelsey pulled her tank top away from her chest and gave it a quick sniff. “I’m gross from the trip though. I need to make myself look more like an actual person.”

“I’ll order the Uber,” May offered. “How long do you need?”

“Let’s just drive,” Kelsey said. “We might want to tool around. Dinner in Sag Harbor maybe? Or Montauk could be more fun.”

“It’s just … we’ve already been drinking,” May said.

“I’ve had like two sips of prosecco,” Kelsey said. “And after boozing it up through the bad times, my threshold is still through the roof. I can drive, but it’s going to have to be your car if that’s okay? Mine’s a two-seater. Meet in the kitchen in fifteen all dolled up? That’ll give me time to call Dad, too.” She unclipped the bib of her overalls and stripped off her tank top on her way to the bathroom. The sound of a running shower followed through the open door.

As May closed the bedroom door behind her, she wondered if she was supposed to change, too. She went upstairs and slipped on her black shirt-dress. She was, in her opinion, as put together as she could be.

*

From the backseat of Josh’s car, May found herself studying Kelsey in the rearview mirror. May didn’t believe in false self-deprecation. She knew she was not the least bit unattractive. She had almond-shaped eyes, a heart-shaped face, and flawless skin she’d inherited from her mother that probably wouldn’t see any wrinkles of note for another decade. Her nose was flatter and wider than she wished, but she was—by any reasonable standard—a nice-looking human.

But Kelsey Ellis? She was in an entirely different category. A lot of it came naturally—full lips, long legs, flat abs, a cute nose sprinkled with just the right number of freckles to make it even cuter.

But when she actually made an effort? Kelsey Ellis was the kind of pretty that made May wonder how it must feel to experience the world while looking like that. It helped that she had long blond hair and blue eyes, which, all things being equal in May’s experience, tended to correlate highly with subjective measures of attractiveness.

But Kelsey was beyond that. She had a look that meant they never paid for drinks at their usual haunts in Boston. One time in New York, a guy had even left the hotel bar to go to the front desk and pay for their room, even though Kelsey had made it blatantly clear to him that he would not be going upstairs with them.

Kelsey was beautiful in a way that made men literally stupid.

But to May’s surprise, Kelsey’s current version of “dolled up” was nothing like it used to be. She had chalked up Kelsey’s appearance on their various Zoom calls to the fact that she, like May and everyone else May knew, gave zero fucks what they looked like on a girlfriend Zoom party. But she could see now that the expensive highlights were gone, leaving Kelsey’s hair more of a light brown than any shade of blond. And instead of the perfect tumbles of messy curls that used to fall tothe middle of her back, her hair was pulled into a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck, topped with a cream-colored fedora. The only makeup she appeared to have on was a sheer rosy lip gloss. Most of her face was hidden behind aviator sunglasses that were even bigger than Lauren’s retro frames.

May wasn’t sure she would have even recognized Kelsey if she happened to pass her on the street. And then she realized that was exactly the point. Beautiful women turn heads, which means they get attention, which means they could be identified as the woman who may or may not have been involved in an estranged husband’s unsolved murder.

What had brought May, Lauren, and Kelsey together again was the shared anguish of becoming notorious. But not all notoriety is the same. As hard as May and Lauren had been tumbled around in the media cycle, the scrutiny to which Kelsey was exposed after Luke was killed dwarfed their experiences many times over. Kelsey wasn’t accused by strangers of being “problematic” or “toxic.” She was accused of hiring someone to murder her husband.

As they walked down Newtown Lane through the main shopping district in East Hampton, May noticed that when they passed other pedestrians, Kelsey would turn her face away or pause to look into the window of a store she wasn’t actually interested in. She kept her sunglasses on, even whenthey stepped inside a shop to browse around. She checked her hat in the reflection of parked cars, keeping the brim of the fedora tipped low.

Kelsey was still beautiful. She just lived her life in disguise.

6

Lauren flipped the passenger-seat sun visor closed and tucked her bright red lipstick into the bucket-shaped bag on her lap. “Wow, that man is really taking his sweet time, isn’t he?”

The man in question was the driver of the house-sized black pickup that was currently occupying the primo Sag Harbor parking spot that would soon belong to them. May had been certain from previous trips to the Hamptons that they’d need to park on a remote side street and then schlep themselves back to the historic American Hotel, where Kelsey had decided they absolutelyhadto go for a cocktail. The hotel itself was small,but the restaurant, she insisted, was a “veritable institution.” Lauren and May deferred because, one, Kelsey cared about where-to-eat-and-drink far more than they did; and two, she had really good and very specific taste, forsaking any place that was the least bit hipster for what Kelsey liked to call “a classic old-man bar.”

Despite the hotel’s location on one of the busiest blocks of Sag Harbor, Kelsey insisted that she had “good parking karma” and stuck it out in the long line of cars creeping down Main Street through the village. Apparently she had been right because just as they were approaching the American Hotel, Kelsey squealed in delight at the sight of a bearded man opening the driver’s side of his pickup. They’d been hovering for a full two minutes as the man fiddled with his cell phone, reverse lights promising an imminent departure that had yet to happen. The clicking sound of the turn signal seemed to get louder with each annoyed car that maneuvered around them and the lane they were now blocking.

“Why don’t you guys go in and get a table?” Kelsey offered. “I’ll wait for this dude to work his way through his Tinder matches. Maybe I’ll even find a way to say hi. He’s a slowpoke, but he’s pretty cute, right?”

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