3
The tiled wall at the back of the bathroom stall was cool, and I leaned back and let my head rest on it. A ball of wadded-up toilet paper rested in my open palm. I’d been in here for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes now, listening to the morning rush of women emptying their post-commute bladders and blotting off excess blush and swiping on lipstick. I waited them all out.
Sitting fully-clothed on a toilet while locked in a bathroom cubicle at work wasn’t a high point, and sooner or later Ben would send in a search party to rescue me. I took a deep breath and stared at the little silver latch that was keeping the outside world at bay. I knew I couldn’t stay in there for ever. But I wasn’t quite ready to leave my little bleach-scented cocoon.
I reached up and into my bag, which was dangling from a hook on the back of the door. I might be going through an existential crisis, but I wasn’t about to let my bag touch the bathroom floor. I rummaged around until my fingers curled around my phone. I checked the time: 10.07. The case assignment meeting started in twenty-three minutes. That gave me time.
It was 5 a.m. in New York, but I knew Isla would be up, either patrolling the hospital corridors where she was a last-year neurosurgery resident or being ferried home from a BDSM club in an Uber. She was a rainbow of contradictions, my best friend.
I unspooled a fresh length of toilet paper as I listened to the phone ring out. She picked up right before the voicemail clicked in.
‘Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude!’ I could hear the sound of surgical equipment beeping and whirring in the background. Work, then. At least that meant she wouldn’t be on a come-down from anything. ‘How was your birthday? Did you play shot roulette like I told you to?’
My throat tightened. ‘Not exactly,’ I whimpered.
‘Shit.’ She heard it in my voice instantly. That’s what twenty years of friendship gets you. ‘Hang on a minute.’ There was the sound of clipped footsteps and a door opening and closing. ‘Okay, what’s going on?’
‘It’s Christopher.’
‘Has that motherfucker cheated on you? I swear to fuck, I am getting on a plane and I am going to kick his stupid English ass.’
‘He’s Welsh,’ I croaked, ‘and no, that’s not it.’
‘What then? He’s obviously done something wrong, the little shit. Honestly, the plane ride isn’t that long. I could be kicking his ass by dinnertime.’
I balled up the tissue and pressed it into my eyes. ‘He doesn’t want to marry me.’
‘What? How do you know?’
‘He told me!’
‘He told you that on your birthday? What kind of a sick fuck—’
‘Okay, he didn’t exactly say it. But he intimated it.’
‘What do you mean, he intimated it? How do you intimate something like that?’
‘I thought he was going to propose last night. Because—’
‘Because of the list.’ I could practically hear her eyes rolling back in her head.
‘I’m thirty-one now! You know this is the year I’m supposed to—’
‘Marry your soulmate – I know! I know! I was there when you wrote it, remember?’
‘Exactly. Which means you should understand.’
She sighed. ‘So you thought he was going to propose …’ she prompted.
‘He booked us into this super fancy restaurant – which turned out to be terrible, by the way—’
‘Never eat in a restaurant outside New York,’ she said. ‘That’s just basic common sense.’
‘But we ended up going to this Italian restaurant and there were candles and garlic bread and a man playing the piano—’
‘Very Lady and the Tramp.’
‘Exactly! Perfect, right? And the whole time I was just waiting for him to do it.’
‘Willing him.’
‘Waiting, willing – whatever. Anyway, we were crossing over the Thames, and there was moonlight, and water lapping, and sparkly city lights, and all of a sudden he dropped down on one knee, and I thought, this is it!’
‘But it wasn’t it.’
‘His shoelace was untied.’
‘Fucking shoelaces. Velcro should have made them obsolete. Oh, babe, I’m sorry. What a goddamn headfuck.’
‘I know. And then we ended up getting into this huge fight, and he was basically like, I’m not ready! And I was like, Why not? And he was like, I don’t know, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be.’
Isla heaved out a long sigh. ‘Where are you now?’
‘Crying in the bathroom at work. Obviously.’
‘Obviously. Okay, well, here’s how I see it. In times like this, there’s only one solution.’
‘Nunnery?’
‘Vegas.’
‘Vegas? What do you mean, Vegas?’
‘I mean we go to Vegas. You and me. It’ll give you a chance to get drunk and blow off some steam, and it’ll give him a chance to miss you. You know how men are. They don’t realize how much they need something until it’s threatened to be taken away from them. Like toddlers and their pacifiers. Or Americans and Obamacare.’
‘I don’t know … When were you thinking? Next month?’
‘Next weekend.’
‘Next weekend! What about work?’
‘Jenny, you live in Europe. Well, what used to be part of Europe. How many vacation days do you guys get over there? Fifty? A hundred?’
‘Twenty-five,’ I said quietly.
‘And how many of those days did you take last year?’
I hesitated. ‘Twelve.’
‘Jesus. Who are you, Bob Cratchit? “Oooh, please Mr Scrooge, may I have Christmas day off so I might eat a speck of goose?”’ Isla’s British accent was terrible.
‘Whatever. What about you? Don’t you have brains to operate on?’
‘Bobby Miller owes me a favor. Also, he’s desperate to get in my pants. He’ll cover for me.’
I searched my mind for more roadblocks. The thought of a spontaneous trip to the grocery store was enough to make me break out in hives, never mind a weekend in Las Vegas with the human hurricane that is Isla. ‘The flight will cost a fortune.’
‘Ah, there’s where you’re wrong. I have, like, a billion Air Miles thanks to all those boring pharma conferences I’ve been forced to attend. Thanks to Pfizer, I can totally swing your ticket and mine.’
‘Oh.’ That was it. Not a single obstacle in sight. ‘What will I say to Christopher?’
‘The man told you he didn’t want to marry you on your birthday. Do you really give a single flying fuck what he thinks?’
I thought about it. ‘No,’ I lied.
‘Good. Go talk to your boss now and email me when you have the all-clear. I’ll start researching hotels. I’m thinking penthouse suite.’
‘Is that somehow covered by Air Miles, too?’
‘No, it’ll be covered by one of my many little plastic card-shaped friends.’
‘Isla …’
‘Jenny …’ she mimicked. ‘I’m going to qualify as a fully-fledged neurosurgeon next year. Do you have any idea how much money people are going to pay me to cut their heads open?’ I felt momentarily queasy, though I couldn’t pinpoint if it was stemming from the thought of Isla operating on someone’s brain or of her being super rich. ‘Just let me do this, okay?’ She sounded serious. I knew it was pointless to argue.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘Ohhhhh my God, amazing. Amazing! We are going to have so much fun. Vegas isn’t going to know what’s hit it.’
The queasiness returned. I wasn’t someone who dropped everything and jetted off to Vegas. I was someone who planned a vacation a year in advance, researched the best options for travel insurance, and checked the Home Office website to make sure the threat level wasn’t above a sunny yellow. But these weren’t ordinary times, and I knew if I stayed in London, I would just stew. I had to get out. And there was no one I’d rather see at that moment than Isla.
After we hung up, I let myself out of the bathroom stall and spent a few futile minutes trying to mitigate the damage to my blotchy, swollen face before returning to my cube.
Ben looked up when I came in, concern etched across his face (along with a little dab of frosting – my grief hasn’t stopped him from polishing off the caterpillar’s face). ‘You okay?’ he asked.
I blinked. ‘I’m going to Las Vegas,’ I said, and then I sat down heavily in my chair and spun around to face my computer. It was time to get to work.