Chapter Text
Wedding 5 - Headed South
April 2021. Galapagos Islands
“You can’t stay here forever man, like a knockoff Julian Assange losing your mind hiding out in a hellhole embassy.” It’s the most overwrought description of the Galapagos Roman’s heard since fucking ever.
“Look around, Ken. There’s a beach and freely available daylight. It’s a pleasant five-star spa resort. Should look familiar, hasn’t the fifth of your life you’ve lost to rehab been spent in one, getting worked over by the masseuse till your haunches have the consistency of a kobe steak?”
Kendall’s shown up uninvited. He plainly isn’t buzzed about taking a break from his flawless practice of self-absorption to pursue his brother across continental borders. So, he must really be bricking it about the investigation. He’s traded his usual ageing hipster get-up for a neat business-casual shirt and pants, which turns the tables on Roman, who’s dressed in a towelling robe like every other chump here.
“Okay, but dude, it’s not realistic to live at a hotel…”
“Fuck you, I’m buying a pad next island along.”
“Listen, I’m trying to talk, we really need to get our stories straight.”
Roman stretches. “We do? Maybe save it for your autobiography. My brother doesn’t listen to me sounds like a great chapter. Cool thematic links with That time, when I wrote twenty pages about Roman getting knocked out by Dad.”
“Come on. That shit’s sub judice. You know I can’t get into it.”
“Yeah, well, your butt plug’s location in your anal cavity’s gotta be sub judice by now, Ken. This conversation’s being redacted by a paralegal as we speak. Honestly, I only have two more minutes for this.” Roman checks the time. “I’m in full immersion-zone mode on diversification,” he says in his best bitchy simper.
That hits home nicely. Ken’s been too busy regurgitating his trauma and honing his prose to do any business in months.
“You’re dicking around streaming Korean TV channels Rome. I mean, whatever keeps the wolf out but don’t make it into something it’s not. Come back and have a meeting, it’s not you they want. It’s the guys with the links to the overseas funders, the fuckers with their hands down Putin’s pants. They’ll take Mattson too if they stumble on him, but I don’t think we need to offer to put in a shift harpooning on their fucking penitentiary-craft to catch him. I’m seeing two of the assholes next week, they can catch you same time, then that’s us done.”
He’s pulled out the special big-brother love-glow eyes; the worst thing about it is the fear that the trick might not work, that it might be leaving Roman cold.
“I’m not taking any meeting. Holing up till it blows over.”
“They’d do a video-call – you’ve seen the coverage you’re getting, get a line out on it at least.”
“Nope.”
“Come on, you shouldn’t be here.”
Roman stares at the cloudless sky, then at the clueless mother and daughter pair at the next table, having second glasses of some bright yellow and red vodka-based concoction brought to their table. “Geesh Ken. They do a good canelazo. The weather’s decent. What’s the fucking big draw in New York?”
“Nothing much,” Ken admits. “Apart from closing this shit down. And meeting Shiv’s daughter, maybe. Though I don’t know whether you’d make the grade, she’s Momma’s little bargaining chip already.” Thinking about Shiv makes Roman homesick. She’s fucking useless on facetime, and the baby’s even worse.
Kendall’s studying his face. “And, you seen the invites for the Kellman girl’s wedding next month? Payout’s gone to Gerri’s head. She’s gone imperial -delusional, hired out the Mandarin for two days. Bet she’s gonna have an ice sculpture of herself on horseback in Schiaparelli in the reception hall. Look on my works ye mighty, etc.”
Roman feels his face twitch. “You’re not going are you?”
“I don’t know. Mattson might show, so I guess someone has to, and Shiv and Tom have fallen out with Gerri since she turned Tom down, so I guess I’m the only fucking grownup left in the room. You going?”
Roman scoffs. Right. Turn up at her daughter’s wedding. After she’s gone out of her way to do nothing to row back on their last conversation where she threatened to destroy him and made it clear how very done she was. “Nope. You’ll have to eat a stuffed roasted swan on the Kellman dime for me. Just - don’t get loaded and kill the bride by accident.”
“That’s sick. That’s not funny.”
“Don’t start Ken. There’s a clinically significant pattern of you being fucking awful at weddings.”
“Fuck you. But. I guess there is.” Kendall chuckles, and Roman tries not to surrender to the aggressively encompassing recollection of the way the back of an optical orb feels when pressed hard against a skull socket. He claws Ken, in whatever fucking form he’s available, back from the memory.
“You staying a couple of days?” he asks.
“Staying tonight anyway.” Ken’s looking out at the sea, where the tide’s sucking out. “But might head off tomorrow.”
_________
It’s late, by the time they get back from dinner at a seafood restaurant along the coast. Ken’s listlessly sober on the way home in the car, hypercritical about Rava and about how Sophie should be old enough to understand Ken’s point of view by now. He’s too spiky for a nightcap in the bar, so Roman goes alone. He looks at the luxe beach-cabin belonging to the fluorescent-cocktail drinking, recently divorced Floridian mom. Another classic of her type; needy, early fifties, pre-disposed to miscalculate that the presentable, solo billionaire at the next breakfast table is a nice guy. Easy, now or soon, to knock on her door. Easy to make a shitty joke, get into her room, get into her pants, get his mouth on her, to pick the top off the crust, to feel it fuck him harder.
May 2021. New York
Released at last by the photographer and the bridesmaids, Gerri sips her aperitif and looks down from the window of Peti’s apartment at the line of cars pulling up outside, ready to ferry the guests to the rehearsal dinner. It’s a seated meal for a hundred, an extravagance which Catherine and her girlfriend Poppy have been tittering about for months, and which Daniel’s parents are paying for. Gerri’s bankrolling the wedding reception for five hundred tomorrow, a who’s who of Peti’s associates at the New York, Shenzhen and London stock exchanges.
“OK, that’ll do … ready in ten minutes out front, okay?” Peti dispatches the bridal attendants and the wedding planner with quick kisses and hugs. She gives herself a last check in the mirror, buzzing with energy. “I’m with Dan’s lot. Poppy and her Dad are in your car, five minutes later,” she tells Gerri. “Here for a second Mom, I still think you should try switching those shoes out for sandals.”
Gerri dismisses her with a quick headshake.
“It would break up the black … shit, Alan’s going to lose it if he sees the revision on this tax rate cut…” Peti says, pulled into an intense focus on her phone.
Gerri puts her drink down and collects her coat. Peti has swiftly put out whatever the fire was and is looking at her. “Actually, ignore me. You look so beautiful,” she says.
“Thanks.” It’s not the family style. It should be Gerri, letting herself be swept up in wedding sentiment and complimenting her daughter, who really does look sleekly lovely.
Peti laughs. “You sound doubtful, Ma.”
Gerri shrugs. “I feel a little trussed up.” It’s not just the dress, the first couture she’s ever owned. It’s the step-up, the stupid money, the letting herself be arm-twisted into seeing the wedding stylist then talked into Dior and sapphires, simultaneously ridiculous, a bemusing delight and an embarrassment. She can’t avoid the suspicion that she looks like a workhorse with a silk ribbon tied around its tail.
“You should get used to it,” Peti grins. “I’m counting on you to spend our inheritance. You can’t leave any of it to Catherine, she won’t understand why she can’t keep it all in her current account.” Retirement and suddenly quadrupled wealth, it turns out, cause one’s children to assume they’re experts in how their erstwhile capable parent should spend her time and run her life. Not that Gerri is retired. As soon as the wedding’s out of the way, she’s going to firm up on which offers she intends to accept.
Gerri puts her coat on. “Off you go then.”
Peti rearranges the collar of Gerri’s coat. “I’ve seated you next to Gavin at dinner. Telling you so you don’t think it’s matchmaking by stealth. It’s upfront as hell.”
Gavin is the lantern-jawed Australian neighbour of Daniel’s mother. His interest was flattering and formed a constituent element of the Christmas holiday backdrop; like the cranberry sauce and the carol playlists, it was pleasant enough in its place. Gerri gives Peti a look.
“Okay, don’t give me that, sorry for picking up on the obvious vibes,” Peti says, leaving. “God forbid that the sexy property development tycoon might make a move.”
Sexy isn’t how Gerri would put it. Although, she’s considering it all the same. She collects her phone and her clutch from the table and refreshes her perfume. Gavin is handsome in the manner of a figure from the cover art in one of the pulpy Wilbur Smith novels Baird used to read on the beach in the eighties. He can’t help that, but it makes it difficult to take him wholly seriously. She wonders whether, in her days as a salaried and perennially harassed GC, he would have found her quite so alluring during evening walks around the park as he seems to do, now that she’s in receipt of her record-breaking goodbye kiss of a package from Waystar.
Alluring, she thinks impatiently. Since when is that a category that she’s at pains to fill?
__________
Gerri is a member of a group hearing a long and good-natured story from Daniel about a mix-up with the honeymoon booking when she catches sight of Gregory Hirsch, making a pantomime of recognition at her across the room.
Gerri had pushed back on the notion of any Roys on the guestlist. Peti’s argument had been that the other godchildren were invited, so it would look strange if Shiv and her brothers weren’t. Strange hadn’t much to do with it, was Gerri’s guess; Peti wanted what seems to pass muster as a little celebrity glitter at her wedding. Gerri hasn’t troubled herself to research the state of the RSVP list; they’ll come or they won’t, they’re sure to meet somewhere sooner or later. As the dust has cleared, she’s glanced at the contours of the ruin of the last weeks at Waystar, where the worst of the damage is exposed to the light. She could, if she was minded to, reconstruct the explosion and examine the more striking impact craters. But what difference could it make?
Greg makes his way over. He has both hands full of cocktail burger canapes, having failed to avail himself of a plate. “Good evening Gerri, and congratulations on these events. You’re looking really well.”
“Thank you for coming. It’s good to see you Greg,” she lies.
“Yeah, well, you know, honoured to represent and so on. And to convey regrets from the others. Tom and Shiv were going to come but now they can’t, with the baby I think? And Connor has a dignitary-thing in Moldova.” It’s offensive, that they’ve sent her such a noxious emissary. A no-show would have been more courteous.
“But we think Kendall might come by tomorrow?” Greg adds. “It’s a little unclear. Nobody’s inside on his plans, what with the level of widespread … enragement at him about, you know, all of it. In general. With his book.”
“I haven’t heard much about it.” Gerri has only gotten as far as rolling her eyes at the title - Patria Potentas: How I got out from under my father and how America can too.
“You haven’t? It was going to be serialising in the NYT but there’s a lot of … resistance and injunctions. Threats and such. The whole thing’s largely fictional is the word, and Kendall is of questionable standing in the capacity for sound judgment department. You know, as to his mental fitness. That’s the family line.”
Gerri wonders from whom Greg’s taking the family line, nowadays. Tom’s bastardised version, probably. In spite of the fact that nothing could be less of a thrill than hearing of the drab machinations of those two pricks, her heart is thundering, hard.
“There was a wondering, a sense perhaps, that maybe you’d heard from the publishers as well, been approached for a comment or whatever…” he’s going on.
Gerri shrugs. “Nothing. I take it I’m not mentioned.” Kendall evidently considers her too dull or dangerous to implicate. It’s a novelty, she tells herself, not to be in the middle of the nuclear reactor when the meltdown starts, able to take the mushroom cloud in on television, from a safe distance. Or from a safer distance; what distance is adequate for caution?
“Maybe not. Maybe you’re missing from the chapters on the old days.” Greg sighs meaningfully. “The simpler times.” He finishes his last canape. There’s a sterile pause. Gerri is aware of the cause of the wrenching curiosity which prevents her from making her excuses and moving on. She resents the unshiftable burden of it.
“So, what are you up to, out to pastures free, so to speak?” Greg breaks the silence.
Gerri’s not answering a question about her activities from fucking Greg. She makes a face and a dismissive sound.
“I don’t know whether you’ve heard about the happenings at GoJo. Both in general and as pertaining, well, to myself,” Greg volunteers into the silence, feigning modesty. “It’s been … I mean, I think there’s been some coverage. Basically, I’m kind of a … somewhat well-known whistleblower now?”
Gerri wonders how many women he’s picked up recently with that line. If she catches him trying it out on either of her single great-nieces this weekend, she’ll have him quartered. “I hadn’t heard. Your renown must be niche,” she replies.
Greg gives a rueful shrug, “Well, it was thrust upon me, mostly. By the happenings. You know, Mattson cozying up with Mencken in the aftermath, and the – the - prior things too, at ATN.” He glances around worriedly for listening ears, as though he isn’t himself voluntarily bringing the subject up at a party. “There are persons pursuing matters in … well, either in the Agency maybe, or the Bureau possibly, who aren’t happy about the way things shook out. There’s impeachment talk, and Mencken’s basically a squatter in the White House at this point, so although they’ve denied me a security detail, I don’t think there are risks, particularly, to me or to … you know, my associates. I don’t think I’m about to get extracted from your daughter’s wedding and subjected to extraordinary rendition, in case you’re concerned about that.”
“I’m not.”
She’d known that someone would bleat. It had only been a couple of days into the New Year when her afternoon with a book in the garden was interrupted by an unarranged visit from a woman who had flown out to Singapore for a private interview. The woman’s description of her employment and her purposes had been nebulous enough to identify her as some kind of spook, looking to ask a few questions about Gerri’s rumoured firing as General Counsel of Waystar, mere hours before events at the centre of allegations of collusion and conspiracy. Gerri explained that there had been a pretty bad few months with Logan at the end, reasons irrelevant, and the firing in L.A. was the culmination of that, a bereaved son keen to fulfil his father’s last wishes. She’d had no knowledge about communications with the President-elect’s campaign. She’d been very sorry to be unable to assist further. It’s very bad of her to think of it as bleating, she supposes; it’s just very striking that this act of questionable utility in defence of democracy happens to weaken Mattson and bolster the positions of Tom Wambsgans and Gregory Hirsch.
“They want to talk to Roman too but he’s … I’m not sure, on the lam? I should have said, I haven’t talked to him so it’s not really apologies, but that’s why he’s not here, I would surmise. He’s a person of interest to the special prosecutor. He’s said to be in Ecuador. He’s bought a house out there, I guess.”
“Fucking idiot,” Gerri says before she has time to think.
“Er, yes, that might be a widely shared view. He’s not, like, actually in hiding anyway. The family’s understanding is that he’s spent most of the last month in Japan, where his girlfriend works. You know, Tabitha? They’re back together. The family take on that is that it’s a good thing, probably, if they’d straighten out their press, because it’s all a little … confusing.”
“Sure. Well. Excuse me Greg, I’m wanted elsewhere.”
Gerri returns to the group around Daniel, where the story about the honeymoon plan is still going on. She is, she reminds herself, in a room full of her own relatives and friends this time, with nothing to lose. The self-inflicted woes of a past colleague, the fact the asshole’s fled the country on a solipsistic self-pity jag and fallen into the arms of an ex to compound his problems, doesn’t have to concern her, doesn’t call for a fix. This doesn’t have to be anything at all.
__________
Later, that night, she’s upstairs in Gavin’s suite, by the balcony window, looking across the pinprick-lit void of the park to the lights and spires of downtown. She’s nominally here for a drink, which Gavin is mixing at the bar counter. She’s actually here for a fuck. From what she’s gathered of his character, she expects he’s going to go at it with a level of earnestly romantic passion that’s not really her scene. But she feels pulled so close to the outside of her skin that he shouldn’t notice the difference, and she doesn’t give a shit if he does.
He joins her on the balcony and, in due course, puts a hand on her waist, kisses her neck. He’s making an offer, initiating something more than a night. He’s chosen a fine moment, set up with the view, the occasion, the bed in prospect in the background. She touches his face and brushes a hand across his hair. He has nice hair. Though it’s wiry and curled, she notes, not silky, and notes the stab of pain at the thought. Noisy pain that’s dizzying, that makes her high. It’s a pain that doesn’t require a process of examination, with a surprise diagnosis. It arrives already tangled up with the thought of that still-silent, self-destructive, aggravating little prick. She imagines him flitting about the room, hot eyed and untouchable, smart or irritatingly obtuse, nasty or nice, indulged either way. Whining, disruptively puckish, pathetically tied down by the useless erection that he’ll always manage to work matters around to. She takes a tiny bite of the hurt and the anger and lets it explode on her tongue.
Enough, she tells herself. She’s not retired from the exercise of common sense. It’s not heartache; after Baird she knows what that is, and she won’t permit it here, not over a fucking spoilt brat. It’s the salutary disappointment of betting on a bad hand and losing, the humiliation of publicly setting out to master a rabid animal and ending up with an infected wound. Enough.
Enough. It won’t be a difficult stricture to observe. It’s one of many things she’s good at.
She’ll waken on the morning of Peti’s wedding next to Gavin, after an enjoyable-enough night. He’ll make an agreeable wedding date. She’ll wish, as she listens to the speeches, that he’d whisper a joke.
She will decide, the following week, to take up an appointment for later in the year to audit an investigation into bullying and fraud scandals at a multinational professional services firm. She will invest her damages judiciously. She’ll attend the christening of Julia Roy in an act of formal reconciliation with the little girl’s parents; Connor will be the only uncle present. She’ll travel to the Cote d’ Azur and buy a hillside villa outside a quiet village. She’ll work from the sunny dining room, burying herself in email trails and witness statements from buck-shifting executive directors. Driving along the hairpin bends into the market on mornings in the late summer between the bright saturation of the hillside and the sea, she’ll feel, with relief, that she’s returned to herself.
Gerri will find that she likes investigative consultancy work, that it addresses her craving whilst never pushing her heart rate to the point where her head gets light and her nails get ruined. She’ll put in nine-hour days from several homes and will have to remind herself at intervals to leave the house. She and Gavin will spend a couple of springs in France and winters at his place in Thailand. They will gradually, amicably learn that they prefer vacations spent with their respective children and new grandchildren to those spent with one another; will find that their times together grow shorter instead of longer.
She will be generally aware of the doings of the Roys. She’ll drop in once or twice while she’s in New York to see Shiv and Julia, and little Sawyer when he comes along, and will hear Shiv’s alarming but hopefully skewed updates on her brothers. The main strands of development will be unavoidably foisted on her as she watches the news or glances at an article. But mostly, after forty years, now that she’s out, she will be out.
As Waystar and Logan fade, as Gavin recedes, she will find that she’s content alone in her apartment, in her villa, at her beach house. It’s the closing chapter she anticipated when she married Baird, and she will not mind it. It will be new, having no men to accommodate. She will no longer handle their egos, manage their outbursts, judiciously conceal the truth from them, cater to their proclivities, bury or cook their kills. She will make no quixotic attempts to improve their characters or prospects. By and large, she will like it.
She’s in the Mandarin again for the first time since Peti’s wedding, almost four years later, giving an address at a conference organised by a think-tank she consults for. She looks over the park during the coffee break and remembers the sapphires and the Dior that she hasn’t worn since. The experience is punctuated, spotlit in retrospect, almost too bright to fucking look at.
She finishes her coffee. She goes to the podium to double check her slides. She loathes presenting, but it’s a keen crowd and her consultancy practice has built a solid reputation in the field.
Ethics, Corporate Governance and the Law, the first slide in the deck is titled.
Wedding 6 – Modern Love
January 2025. New York
Shiv looks up from her phone. “I told you we should’ve come down Lafayette. Does your driver even listen to you at all? We’re going to be half an hour late.”
Roman shrugs and looks out at the traffic. “Not like they’ll start without us.”
Shiv eyes him. “You aren’t drunk are you? You’ve not taken anything?”
“Fuck off. You can do what you like but I’m rawdogging it. Going in there totally sober. Facing cancer without morphine. I’m joking obviously, I’m looking forward to it.”
Shiv looks at her phone again and swears. “I knew Tom would fuck this up. Jules has spilt blackcurrant on her flowergirl dress. Why’d he let her drink it in the fucking car?” She’s texting furiously.
“You wanted, you could have gone in the car with her.” It would’ve given Roman a fucking break.
Shiv puts her phone back in her purse and looks out the window. She’s cranking up again, Roman can tell. He looks at the street in the meantime. Lots of ugly fuckers out. Bedraggled-looking Christmas trees posted along the sidewalk, waiting to be picked up for the trash.
“If you’re holding out for Mummy making a declaration at the speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-peace part, she won’t,” Shiv says after a moment.
“At least she’s pitched up. More than she does when you pop a sprog. Anyway, it’s City Hall, they don’t do that. They don’t give a shit whether you’re a bigamist, whether you’re marrying a racoon, whatever. It’s your funeral if it turns out to be a state offence.”
“You’ve got no idea. You’re going to suck at it.”
“Fuck off, I’m definitely not going to suck at it worse than you. Or, it goes without saying, Con.” He leaves Ken out of it. It doesn’t always feel good, mentioning Kendall these days.
“Lay off Con. He’s the early-adopter for the monetised, mid-life crisis seeks washed-up party-girl for celibate freakshow shit that passes for marriage in this family.”
It’s getting a little annoying. “It’s not about the money Shiv…” Shiv cuts him a bitchy look and scoffs. “Oh right, sorry, I thought you were actually concerned. You know what, at least I actually fucking like her. In that, I have no plans to get her hauled in front of a grand jury.”
“Oh come on, Tom walked straight into that one,” she interrupts.
“It’s wild Shiv, but I kind of want her to be happy.”
“Wow, romantic. So, what, it’s romantic now?”
“Fuck you. What kind of question’s that supposed to be?”
Shiv groans, like Roman’s about to tip her over the edge, as though she isn’t the one who’s been working his nerves all week. “All right. Whatever. End of the day, you’re too emotional to last the course with this shit. You have no idea.”
“What, and you do?”
“You’re a fucking numbskull, Roman.” She’s serious; tedious painkiller-abuse discourse serious.
“What?”
She tosses her hair superciliously. “That’s me done. I’m not developing it. Do your own processing.”
Typical, giving Roman sweaty palms and a neuralgic feeling in his head, and then washing her hands of whatever she’s stirred up. “Thanks for the last-gasp quickie headfuck, then. And I meant to say, your hair’s really ageing like that.”
“Your suit’s vanity-sized.”
“Well that’s a stupid thing to remark on, in the car, one fucking block away…”
“Oh shut up, it’s fine,” she says irritably. She glances at a message on her phone. “Bastard stock sell-down hasn’t bumped the share price. Fucking regulators.” She looks thinly at Roman. “This affects your hedge fund shit too, you know.”
Roman shifts awkwardly. “It’s fine Shiv, I’ve got a team handling it. They’ll … call if they need to.” Which they won’t need to; they’re good. He feels like such a fucking blowhard. He sighs and fidgets with his hair.
Shiv tries to make a call and doesn’t get through. She types a message, glaring daggers at her phone. She looks at Roman again. “Anyway,” she says. “Good luck. I love you, I’m sure it’ll be great. And you know I’ve never hated Tabs. I really don’t hate her at all.”
There’s never going to be a better moment to ask, he supposes, and Shiv’s left this one wide open. “Have you and she ever? … you know…”
“Eugh. Come on.”
“Cool, you haven’t.” Roman shrugs. “That’s fine. I don’t care.”
The car pulls up at City Hall. Shiv grabs her corsage, slams the door and steps out onto the sidewalk. Roman tries to check out whether his suit fit is all right in the car window as it drives off. “Stop that, you look good,” Shiv says. She pulls him by the arm until he’s facing her. “You’re fucking your life up again,” she tells him. “But it’s okay, got it?”
“Yikes. Argh, fuuuuuuuck.” Roman looks at her. “Can we … ?”
“All right.” Shiv hugs him tightly.
“You’ll be OK,” she whispers. “I bribed your office to copy me into the pre-nup. I had Tom’s Mom look it over, because you’re a crappy lawyer’s wet-dream.” She gives him a bracing pat to the arm. “But it’s fine now. Tight as fuck.” She lets him go and sets off to give Tom hell about the blackcurrant syrup stain.
____________
That night, Roman ditches his suitcase in the dressing room and heads into the honeymoon suite, where Tabitha’s arranged gracefully on the bed.
“All right! Slumber party!” he says, picking up a pillow and throwing it at her head.
“Yeah yeah,” she says, messaging someone.
Roman throws himself onto an armchair with his legs over the arm. “Who’s that?” he asks, nodding at her phone. “Drake?”
“No! It’s our wedding night. It’s just work.”
“Thought you’d quit?”
“Nope, I will.” She finishes what she’s doing and drops her phone. “Okay. There! All yours. What should we do. Want me to paint your nails?”
“Fuck off. I’m never letting you do that again. You did a hack-job. Movie? Monopoly?”
“Scrabble?”
“Okay I guess, but you’re totally getting whipped as usual,” Roman says, going to get the box from his suitcase.
When he gets back, Tabitha has the refrigerator and the minibar open. “What do you want to drink? And there’s popcorn.”
“Well I am pumped about that.” Roman starts setting the board up in the middle of the bed. “And, um, vodka tonic?”
Tabitha’s plopping ice cubes into a glass. “Actually babe, I’m gonna order a cocktail up from the bar. You want one?”
“Nah.”
Tabitha brings him his drink and lies on the bed, ordering from her phone, on the opposite side of the Scrabble board. “That’s funny. I just remembered how you used to order cocktails all the time. In Japan. You wouldn’t drink anything except gin martinis.”
Roman’s counting the tiles, so the game won’t be fucked when there’s one missing at the end. He frowns. “Did I, yeah? Not sure if I remember that.”
“You did. It’s normal I guess. I used to like tequila.” She shudders. “Makes me puke now. I guess your tastes just changed.”
“Just fucking … No. They didn’t change.”
Gerri sent a fucking stupid engraved vase from Tiffany’s, for the wedding. And a handwritten card saying she couldn’t make it. The warmest of good wishes. It was always emails, so he didn’t even know whether it was her writing, or some P.A.’s.
“Who fucking cares anyway, what I drink?” he snarls.
Tabitha looks at him; not like she’s mad. “Okay, grumps,” she says.
“Okay. So, we getting started playing this or what?” he asks.