Page 34 of Best Offer Wins
“I just want you to be happy. I wantusto be happy.” Another line of dampness threatens to breach his lower lids. “Let’s hit pause on the house hunt, okay? We need a break. I need my wife back.”
He needs his wife back? I didn’t realize I was a thing he could loan out.
I force myself to keep smiling.
“I get it, I really do. This has been a lot. I know it has. But now I’m just worried about interest rates. They only seem to be getting higher, and we might get totally priced out if we don’t make a move pretty soon here.”
There. A perfectly reasonable point, made by a person who is not struggling.
“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.” He lets go of my hand and picks up his burger. “I’m sorry, babe, even if we could, I wouldn’t make an offer on that house with you. We need a breather, just for a little while.”
He takes a hulking bite. A blob of orange cheese sauce plops onto his plate, gleaming and fatty. Is he really chewing that audibly? Or am I so disgusted by him that I’m imagining the most unflattering soundtrack possible? Something vicious stirs within me. The space behind my eyes begins to throb. The scattered twinkling of the string lights overhead fuses into a single, searing beam. I want to scream in his face. To grab him by the collar and shake until he understands that we can’t go on like this. How is it fucking possible that he doesn’t grasp the urgency? But instead, I keep the smile fixed in place. I blink slowly a couple of times to clear the spots dappling my vision. Pushing this idea any more will only hurt me. Blackmail it is.
“Okay, fine, enough house talk,” I say, as I swipe a fry off his plate. “You can have your wife back now.”
12
I’m wearing real pants and pouring the remains of our French press into a travel mug because Ian says this is what I need.
He rolled over in bed this morning, after the alarm went off, and declared in his most concerned tone: “I think it would be really good for you to go in today. You know, see other people, socialize a little?”
He said it like a question, but it wasn’t one. I’d already been awake for hours, the fury cresting and crashing inside my chest like a boiling wave, while Ian snored softly beside me—the unbothered slumber of a man whose wife carries his stress for him. I thought of how satisfying it would be to throw the lamp on my nightstand against the wall on his side of the bed. The collision, and maybe the sting of a few shards, tearing him from the quiet.
But I need Ian to believe that I have truly moved on. So, when the alarm sounded and he looked at me like I was more breakable than that bedside lamp, all I said back was “You’re right. I’ll go in.”
He’s working from home today, so I can’t fake it. I have to pack up my laptop and kiss him goodbye. Now I head out the door like a white-collar nomad, wandering the city, on the hunt for a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi where I won’t run into anyone from my officeor, worse, Ian on a break from the apartment. I walk all the way to Dupont Circle—that’s almost a mile and a half, and in ankle boots, not sneakers—and take the Red Line north to Woodley Park.
Late in the morning on a Tuesday, the Starbucks across from the zoo is sparsely populated by a couple of tourists waiting for their drinks, and a woman who looks barely out of college trying to sweet-talk a toddler into eating grapes from a plastic cup. The nanny.
I order a cappuccino and install myself in a quiet back corner, next to an outlet. I refreshed my work email every ninety seconds the whole ride here, but it’s still the first thing I check once my computer is plugged in and open. I drum my fingers on the table while the Wi-Fi connects. Six new messages appear, one after the other. Most are from clients—they’ll get my vague out-of-office reply:I’m away at the moment, but looking forward to connecting upon my return!
None of the emails are from Jordana.
A knot tightens in my stomach. I can’t take much more of the not knowing. All the blackmail material in the world won’t do me any good if I don’t have the salary to pay for the house.
But at least this gives me more time to dig. I open my bookmarks bar and click on the Amazon page forFalling Apart. I stare at the one-star review from Ellipsis, my nickname for the mystery author.
DO NOT TRUST CURTIS BRADSHAW.
Simultaneously, the most exhilarating and frustrating five words I have ever read.
One rabbit hole I didn’t have time to dive down yesterday was the press around the book. Maybe the clue I need is hidden in plain sight—in some interview that Curt gave somewhere—not buried in decades of old court records. Maybe I’ve been overthinking things.
I do a simple news search for Curt’s name and the title of thebook. The Squawk Box interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin comes back as a top result. I put in my earbuds and listen to it again, but nothing stands out. It just sounds like a lot of bloviating.
Curt also did a TV interview with Fox Business. But it’s more of the same—almost verbatim. When the Fox interviewer asks how he got the idea for the book, he gives nearly the same aw-shucks humblebrag response that he gave on Squawk Box: “Frankly, somebody should have beaten me to the punch writing it. All I did was explore a question that every single one of us has probably considered…”
BloombergandBusiness Insiderboth ran short pieces, too, though neither outlet seems to have interviewed him. Both articles include the same pair of canned quotes, which I can only assume were written by somebody like me for the press release announcing the book, and not ever really spoken by Curt himself.
A story fromThe Washington Post, dated January 26, 2019, appears lower down in the results. Since Curt is local, maybe someone there actually bothered to pick up the phone and talk to him. When I click on it, the byline explodes off the screen: Erika Ortiz.
I skim quickly to make sure there are real quotes, and of course there are. Erika would never turn in some boilerplate bullshit. Then I start from the beginning and read the whole thing. It doesn’t take long, since the article can’t be more than six hundred or seven hundred words. And, honestly, it’s a snooze. Erika must’ve been desperate for copy that week.
I pick up my phone and search for the same story. I include the link with my text:Hey, do you remember anything about this guy?
Erika’s response comes back right away:Not really. He was a little arrogant but that’s about it. Why?
I have my cover story ready to go:He’s an investor in a restaurant that we might sign. Just doing some due diligence.
