Page 50 of A Secret Escape

“I don’t know how. I’ve never been this angry before.” She felt as if she was boiling inside.

“You need to vent your excess anger somehow. Exercise?” Nicole tucked the mat away. “You could go for a run?”

“I’m horribly unfit. That would kill me, not calm me.” Milly rubbed her fingers across her forehead.

“Cook something, then. Chop an innocent vegetable into tiny pieces and fry it in hot oil. That always works for you.”

“That’s true. It does.” Milly wondered why she hadn’t thought of it herself.

She stalked to the kitchen and pulled open the fridge with such force that all the bottles stacked in the door rattled together. She grabbed leeks and mushrooms, and Nicole leaned against the countertop, keeping a safe distance.

“Tell me about Avery. She’s a yoga teacher?”

“Yes. But not just that.” Milly grabbed a sharp knife and slit the leeks down the middle in a single decisive move.

Nicole flinched. “Careful! If you slice your finger off, you won’t be able to make rude gestures.”

“Avery has her own studio and a huge social media following.” She felt a wave of insecurity, which seemed to be happening more frequently.

“You stalk her on social media?”

“No. I’m not a masochist.” She washed the leeks, and then the mushrooms, splashing water everywhere. “I looked a couple of times at the beginning and it made me feel bad about myself, so I stopped.”

“Why did it make you feel bad?”

“All the usual reasons. She’s twenty-five. Successful. Skinny. Blonde. Your average nightmare. And she runs her own business. And she’s fun, apparently.” She heard the hurt in her own voice. “A whole lot of fun. Unlike me, who is officially boring and also amartyr, according to Richard.” She lined up the leeks and chopped them so quickly that Nicole drew breath.

“I’m not sure if this is helping your stress levels, but it’s definitely not helping mine. You know I’m not good with blood.”

“I have excellent knife skills. I may be no fun, but I can chop a leek.”

“Okay.” Nicole was calm. “Am I allowed to point out that you’re also fun and run your own business?”

“I inherited my business.”

“Which you have successfully grown into an aspirational destination through a mixture of extreme hard work and ingenuity.”

It was true, so why didn’t hearing it said aloud lift her mood?

“Maybe. But holding it all together requires a poise that eludes me.” She sloshed olive oil into a pan and started to fry the leeks. “In every one of Avery’s social media posts she looks calm and together, as if an anxious thought has never entered her head. The sky behind her is always blue. It has been raining nonstop here for months, but somehow the sun shows up for her. Her life looked so perfect, and mine was—is—such an imperfect mess.” She pushed the leeks around the pan, waiting for them to soften. “Ignore me. I’m angry, upset and worried about Zoe. Let’s talk about you. I want to talk about you and Justin and the baby.”

“Later,” Nicole said. “First let’s address the whole social media thing. You do know it’s all fake? That’s the whole point of social media, at least for someone like Avery. She’s trying to persuade the people watching that she has a perfect life and if they subscribe to her app or show up at her classes, then they too can have a life like hers. It’s not about truth, it’s about building an audience. She is showing them a life they can aspire to. It’s no more real than a movie.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m uniquely qualified to know it. Let me show you something.” Nicole grabbed her phone from the pocket of her yoga pants and started to scroll. “Look. Tell me what you see.”

Wondering what this had to do with Avery, Milly stopped stirring the leeks and took the phone from her friend. She saw a photograph of Nicole posing for photographers on a red carpet. She was wearing a figure-hugging dress that plunged almost to her navel and was slit to the thigh. Jewels sparkled at her throat, and her makeup was immaculate. But what really caught the attention was her famous, full-wattage smile.

“That dress is spectacular. You look happy.” Milly felt a twinge of envy as she handed the phone back. “As if you really are living your best life.”

“Right. This was taken three weeks ago at a time when I’d never felt more miserable. It took a team of people five hours to get me looking like that, and I wanted to cry the whole time.” Nicole’s voice was husky.“That photo tells you nothing about what was really going on. And those blue-sky yoga photos? She probably waited for that one blue-sky day and took a whole bunch of them together and changed her outfits. It’s not real, Milly. You should know that.”

“Maybe I do deep down, but being left in such a brutal fashion distorts your vision and hammers your confidence. Not just because I’m not a svelte yoga teacher, although that doesn’t help, but because Richard chose her.” The conversation with Zoe in the car had been playing on her mind. “He wasn’t seduced or tempted or led astray, he made a choice. And he could have chosen me. He could have chosen Zoe. His family. The life we’d built together. But he chose Avery.”

Tiger padded warily into the kitchen, lured by the smells of cooking.

“You’re saying that as if it’s something you only just realized,” Nicole said.

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