Page 66 of Best Offer Wins
The week before that, she’d begged to go with him to Pittsburgh. (Yes, he really was out of town with those goddamn coasters in the back of the car. Otherwise, I would’ve smothered him with my pillow already.)
It’s a business trip. Don’t be ridiculous, he’d responded.
When she wouldn’t relent, he came up with a compromise:Fine. I’ll come to your place when I get home Friday night and tell Margo I’m in Pittsburgh till Saturday morning.
Seeing him use my name with her had momentarily paralyzed me. I sat there unmoving on the bedroom floor before an overwhelming urge to break everything started pumping through me like venom. I wanted to punch through the walls, smash all the furniture. Instead, I tore furiously through Ian’s nightstand until I found the maroon velvet box holding his great-grandfather’s watch, the one Ian had worn at our little nothing courthouse wedding—the family heirloom that he dreamed of one day giving to his own son. I snatched it from the case and ran full speed from our apartment all the way to the trash chute at the opposite end of our floor. I lobbed it with such force into that dark, metallic abyss that there’s no chance it survived the impact with the dumpsters below.
That had done the trick. The rage subsided to its comforting,rolling boil; my head cleared enough that I could focus on the silver lining—that Ian was sounding increasingly annoyed by Alex.
A light rain has started to fall now, pattering on my windshield. While I wait, I confirm tomorrow’s Zoom interview between theNew York Timesreporter and Causa’s general manager, and follow up with the Rivière team about settling on a date for the media dinner. The street is quiet. Hardly any cars have driven by since I’ve been here, but now a white Hyundai pulls up and idles at the curb. Ian walks out of the building a minute later.
Alex trails him.
This is why I’m here. I needed to see them together for myself. She is impossibly young, not more than a year or two out of college, in tight black workout shorts and a white tank top, dark hair falling in disheveled layers around offensively buoyant tits. She’s so thin, it would take no effort at all to shove her to the ground, to kick in that pretty face.
Especially if I took a running start from this side of the street. I press the button to unlock the car, let my fingers curl around the door handle.
She stops Ian at the bottom of the steps, standing on tiptoes to wrap her arms around his neck. But he pushes her away, looking anxiously over his shoulder. Even from all the way over here, I recognize the aggravation in his eyes and the desperation in hers.
I loosen my grip on the door handle—it would be dumb to interrupt them now, and I didn’t come here for a confrontation.
She’s saying something, but he waves her off. Before he gets into the back of the Hyundai, he rakes a hand through his hair. They must’ve had an argument upstairs.
If you bother to watch closely enough, even a fleeting, wordless interaction like this one can be incredibly revealing. When I saw Ian with the other girlfriend—the one he was with back when Imet him—I could tell that he was different from the other assholes I’d dated.
A couple of days after he first kissed me in that bar, I waited for them outside the law firm (she was an associate there, too). I was tucked into a bus shelter on the median so they wouldn’t see me, but I had a clear view of them. She was willowy like a ballerina, nearly as tall as Ian in her kitten heels, auburn hair pulled into a ponytail. I didn’t love that she was so beautiful. But at least she wasn’t Asian. I wasn’t interested in wasting my time on some creep with a fetish.
I liked the way Ian held the door for her—propping it open, then lightly placing his hand on the small of her back once she was through it. As they made their way down the sidewalk, he offered to take her laptop bag. The entire sequence was passionless—she looked about as fun as a pap smear, I could see easily why Ian was ready to end it—but it was all so considerate. He followed this exact same routine the next night, and the night after that. Ian was a good guy.
I’m not sure he’s a good guy anymore, of course. In fact, I’m fairly certain I could kill him. But based on the display I just witnessed, whatever he has with Alex won’t last.
And I can’t turn my frozen eggs into a baby on my own. I can’t, at my age, tear everything down and start from scratch. Not if I still expect to get the life I’ve been working so fucking hard to build.
I can’t keep Ian’s family—the perfect holidays together, the sweet check-ins from his mom, the advice from his dad about how to fix literally anything—if I throw Ian away.
Once we’re in the dream house, especially once I’m pregnant, this will all get much easier to compartmentalize. I don’t have to like Ian. I just need him to be there.
After the Hyundai drives away with my piece-of-shit husband in the backseat, I find the number for Erika’s real estate agent in my email.
It rings once. “This is Derrick.”
“Hey, Derrick, it’s Margo Miyake. Erika Ortiz connected us last week?”
“Oh, right. It’s nice to hear from you.”
“I’m sorry, I meant to call sooner, but life got a little crazy.”
“No problem at all. What can I help you with?”
“The easiest sale of your career, I hope.”
He laughs. “All right, you have my attention.”
“There’s only one house that I want. It’s supposed to hit the market in two days, but I think we can get it sooner. I don’t need to tour it or anything. I just need you to help my husband and me submit the offer.”
24
Curt is such a cliché—like a guy playing a professor on TV—that his office at Georgetown is almost exactly how I envisioned it. He has a hulking antique desk, piled with papers and leaning stacks of folders and books, and a burgundy Chesterfield sofa, the leather worn to a faded pink in the spots where legions of students have sat over the years, captive to his bluster.
