Page 3 of The Delivery

She swipes at her eyes angrily. Her mascara is no-run, a prophylactic measure she’d been wise to take. She knows she is spiraling, that she is not in real time, that grief is speaking through her, using her like a puppet. “I could’ve eaten better. And the beach, Santa Monica, the water quality . . .”

“We have to live in the world, Beccs. We live in the real world.”

“We could’ve moved to the country or something, less toxins, pollutants.” She is talking nonsense, but she cannot stop. Her hand has slid down to her stomach, and when she speaks again, her voice comes as a whisper: “What if I did something to cause this too?”

“Oh, Beccs. Oh, no, honey. No, no, no.”

He leans to her, and she nuzzles into his neck. He smells like sage and cedar—the soap she bought for him on a day trip to Ojai—and for the thousandth time this week she thanks the universe for delivering him to her. Though they have plenty of blessings, she wants nothing more than a chance to rest, a break from her rabbiting mind. “I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for.”

“But I’m all cry-y like I get. And we’re supposed to be on a date.”

“We’re grieving, Beccs. This is what this date looks like.” He reaches for his cocktail, a penicillin. The waft of peat reaching her nose smells like Band-Aids. He offers his glass in a toast. “One sip,” he says, “and we’ll call it a night.”

Her gin and tonic fills a ridiculous balloon glass, augmented with sprigs and peppercorn. It looks like a witch’s cauldron. They clink their glasses, sip, set them down.

Two tables over, a woman brays laughter, throwing back her head, vixen-red tresses parting to reveal a milk white throat. Her manicured fingertips trawl along her décolletage, drawing focus even in Rebecca’s peripheral vision.

Rebecca feels frumpy and ordinary, a child playing dress-up. She cannot wait to leave here, to be home in bed in her jammies, lying on Mark’s chest.

He gestures for the check.

“Mark?”

Rebecca’s stomach clutches.

The woman has called over to their table.

That voice, velvety and familiar.

“Mark and Rebecca?”

The squeak of chairs shoving out, a couple rising. Rebecca feels that heat again beneath her face and for a terrible instant thinks she might just break down and start sobbing.

Alexa de Grasse. And her husband, Derek, Mark’s big boss.

At the holiday party last year at Soho House, Alexa drank too many cosmos and tried to make out with Mark on the rooftop garden in front of half the marketing department.

Though Derek brushed the incident off, covering with aggressive affability, he has never forgiven Mark for it. Given that Derek is the founder, CEO, and self-proclaimed visionary, while Mark is one of three chief product officers clinging to the C-suite by their fingernails, that adds an undertow to an already-strained dynamic.

And now here they are, the de Grasses, pulling up chairs to their table. The pianist has taken a break from the sleek Steinway grand, and the semisilence feels intrusive, an acoustic spotlight glare fixed on their table.

“Well, well, well,” Derek says, grinning big as he sinks into his seat. “Look who the cat dragged in.”

Alexa descends into a chair with a balletic swing of hips, fold of legs, tuck of hem beneath the thighs. Her champagne flute, narrow like her waist, effervesces. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes a touch wild. It is not her first glass.

“Surprising to see you two here,” Alexa says in something of a purr. Her bitter perfume is less an aroma than a flick to the nose.

“Oh?” Mark says, “Why’s that?”

“It’s not a bad thing. Just, you two always struck me more as homebody types.”

“Not far off the mark,” Rebecca says, leaning in. “In fact, we were just —”

“C’mon. It’s Saturday night, and the mood is right.” Derek signals the waiter, arm shooting up, fingers just shy of a snap.

Saturday night, sure, but Sunday is Rebecca’s chore day—laundry and grocery shopping, making lunch, cleaning Bao-Bao’s cage, coordinating pickups and drop-offs and appointments, preparing for the week. She wishes that she could clone herself, that there were two of her to perform the daily tasks that suck away all her hours, tasks that shouldn’t feel nearly as draining as they do. Then she could have time to—time to what? Read on the sofa? Go to a matinee? Finally call her estranged mother? Something, anything to reclaim that full-of-life college girl she seems to have lost somewhere along the way.