That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (read more books .txt) 📕

was beautifully browned. Clear juices ran when she pricked the thigh, and it looked so good that they both sighed when she set it on the cutting board.

“We did it!” Diana exulted. She pulled out her phone to take pictures, then picked up the bottle of wine, and looked a question at Daisy. “We only needed one cup for the rice, right?” Examining the bottle, she asked, “Is this wine just for cooking, or is it okay to drink?”

“Oh, that’s actually important,” said Daisy. “Don’t ever buy cooking wine at the supermarket. Never, ever cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink.” She filled two glasses. Diana raised hers in a toast.

“To new cities and new friends,” she said. They clinked, and drank, and talked about the restaurants Diana had to try, the best places to buy dresses and shoes and books and jewelry, where to go to hear live music. It was fascinating, Daisy thought, to imagine this as the life she could have led, if, back when she was twenty, she’d said, Are you crazy? to Hal instead of I do. Maybe then she could have been the glamorous single lady, on her own in a big city, in a high-rise apartment decorated in gold and peach with a closet full of beautiful clothes. Maybe she’d have gotten not just her bachelor’s degree, but an MBA, too; maybe she’d be running a national chain of cooking studios. Briefly, she let herself picture a life of first dates instead of PTA meetings; dinners alone, with a book and a glass of wine, instead of with her husband and a sullen teenager, and no one to please but herself.

“You’ll have to come over for dinner. Are you free Friday?”

“I’d love that,” said Diana.

“And if you’re here in May, you’ll have to come to this party I throw,” said Daisy. “My mom and Hal both have May birthdays, so I cook their favorites. You’ll be able to meet Danny and Jesse, and see Beatrice and Hal in the flesh.”

“There’s no way of knowing exactly how long this will take—it’s an art, not a science—but I’ll keep you posted,” Diana said. “And how about after that?” she asked Daisy. “What happens in Philadelphia in the summer?”

Daisy made a face. “Unfortunately, I think in Center City it’s about a hundred degrees, and it smells like hot garbage.”

“Oh, but you’re on the Cape, right?” Diana said, and gave Daisy a look she couldn’t read, tilting her head as she smoothed her hair behind her ears. “I almost forgot.”

15 Diana

After Daisy gathered up her knives and cutting boards and departed, Diana locked the door and used the peephole to chart the other woman’s progress down the hall. When she was positive that Daisy was gone, she opened all the windows and lit a few candles guaranteed to eliminate unpleasant odors. She slipped off her silk blouse and pulled on the T-shirt she’d packed in her purse. Then she got to work.

She’d allocated twenty minutes on regular cleanup, reasoning that if Daisy came back up to retrieve a lost lipstick or spatula, she’d find Diana involved in normal-looking tasks: washing dishes and sweeping the floor, the things she’d be doing if she actually lived in this place. Which, of course, she didn’t.

She wiped down the counters, getting every last drip off the stovetop and the oven’s interior, and the refrigerator’s handles and shelves. She put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher. While it ran, she scrubbed every pot and pan and utensil that they’d used, drying them by hand and replacing them in their drawers and cupboards.

With those jobs completed, she felt safe enough to really get to work. She pulled a duffel bag out of the closet, and scooped the clothes out of the dresser and off the hangers, cramming them all inside. She’d brought the handful of designer garments she owned with her, borrowed more from her friends at the Abbey, and used a coupon to join Rent the Runway, which had supplied the rest of the high-end designer gear. Diana reasoned that even if Daisy spotted the Rent the Runway tags sewn into the clothes, she wouldn’t think it was strange. Plenty of high-earning businesswomen used the service, instead of just buying clothes outright. Diana had read a piece in the Wall Street Journal about it when she’d been preparing for this role.

The toiletries in the bathroom went into a zippered case, and the case went into the duffel. The empty wine bottle went down the garbage chute, along with the rest of the trash. The chicken stock went into a tote bag. The cookbook Daisy had given her went into her purse.

Two hours later, the apartment was as spotless as it had been when she’d taken the keys that afternoon. The superintendent had been squirrely—“if anyone comes by and wants to see the model unit, I’m screwed”—so she’d pressed an extra twenty dollars into his hand and sworn to him that she’d leave the place immaculate, and no one would ever know that she’d even been there, and that if someone did come, she’d make up a story about a magazine photo shoot.

Before she left, she triple-checked everything—the cupboards, the refrigerator, the bedroom, and the closet, looking to see that she had every single thing she’d brought in. When she was satisfied, she closed the windows, blew out the candles, slipped them in her bag, and slung the duffel over her shoulder, with the cooler dangling from her left hand. She locked the door behind her and dropped the keys off with the super at the front desk. “Same time next week,” she said.

Her Airbnb was less than a mile away. It, too, technically, was in Rittenhouse Square, but it was far less grand than the penthouse she’d borrowed. The layout reminded her of her cottage, as it had been when she’d first lived there: a single large room, with a half-sized kitchen on one