I look up at Hugo. “Being that he works in a hedge fund, I do believe the goal is investor profits.”
“Have you explained it to her? Like really explained it?” He turns to me. “Hugo makes lopsided circles into squares, Stella. He tames chaos. He looks for rough edges and smooths them right out, buffing out all of the deviation. He makes the imperfect perfect. He makes nonsense make sense.”
Hugo’s shaking his head. “That’s a ridiculous explanation, Charlie.”
My heart is pounding. I’m thinking about the torus orb. His hatred of the imperfection.
“Look at her,” Charlie says. “She knows I’m right. You think he loves you the way you love him, Stella?”
“Dude,” I say to Charlie. “If you didn’t like the picture of us that I texted to you, you should’ve just thumbs-downed it. You didn’t have to come all this way. Because we’re not buying what you’re selling.”
“He’s gonna break your heart. You thought the thing with Jonathan was bad? And you.” He turns to Hugo. “She’s my sister, for fuck’s sake.”
“If you can’t be happy for us, you can leave,” I say.
“This isn’t your home.”
“You heard her,” Hugo says.
“I’m trying to save you both a lot of misery.”
“If this is saving us misery?” I say. “I’ll take the misery, please. Double heaping helping, please.”
Charlie buttons his coat. “Consider this an advance ‘I told you so.’”
With that he storms out.
ChapterForty-Eight
Stella
I’m sittingat the kitchen island watching Hugo set the table in preparation for the coming takeout. He lines up the forks just so. Napkins are squared off with the edges.
I’ve been acting breezy since Charlie left, like his words didn’t bother me, and Hugo says Charlie will get over it and apologize, but the whole thing bothered me. A lot. And Hugo’s weirdly exact place settings make me think he feels as unhappy as I do. Like lining things up perfectly will bring some order to things.
The air feels tense and awkward, like neither of us knows what to say to make things okay.
Hugo grabs a bottle of wine and holds it up. I give him the thumbs up, and he opens it.
I shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach, but I do.
“I don’t want it to be like this. With the three of us,” I confess, because it’s easier to talk about the Charlie part of my bad feelings than the Hugo part. “I feel shitty now.”
“What’s shitty is that he didn’t apologize to you. He owes you an apology, and I didn’t hear one.”
“I could’ve handled it better, though. Maybe not sending that text out of the blue?”
Hugo fills waters. Two matched glasses three-quarters of the way full. “Both of us were involved in sending that text, as I recall.”
I down my wine in record time and put out my glass for more.
Hugo pours and takes the seat next to me. “You know Charlie. He can be moody and controlling, but he’ll think about it later. He’ll see he was acting like a jackass.”
“I don’t want your friendship to be messed up, either.”
“Let me worry about that,” Hugo says.
“I didn’t tell him I loved you,” I say.