Page 6

The day after

Every morning at nine, a kayak tour pushes off from a public park called Dinky Dock, near downtown Winter Park.

Boaters put in under the shade of mossy trees, and over the stretch of a couple of hours, they paddle through part of what is known to locals as the Chain of Lakes—the six lakes of Winter Park, connected to one another through a collection of canals spanning almost a thousand acres.

Save for the odd hurricane days, the boating conditions hold up almost year-round, offering a perennial playground for water sports.

It takes time and effort to paddle past the waves kicked up by wakeboarders and Jet Skis.

And of course the wildness of Florida is never far from view: Snakes and egrets linger near the sandy shorelines.

No alligators, though. In a state that boasts a seven-digit alligator population, Winter Park residents will tell you they “got rid of” the alligators in their lakes in the seventies.

Money really can buy most anything.

Those who aren’t scared off by the wake or the wildlife are rewarded with views of some of the city’s most historic and beautiful architecture.

On Lake Osceola, they can take in the Palms, a Colonial Revival–style home that gained prominence in the 1920s for its architectural beauty and then notoriety in the 1980s when it was occupied by a drug trafficker and seized by the federal government.

Paddling through the Venetian Canal, the last and longest of the connecting waterways on the tour, will bring you to Lake Maitland.

Home to the Rollins College crew team’s boathouse, the Winter Park Racquet Club, and an ultraprivate, less-than-a-quarter-mile-long peninsula called the Isle of Sicily.

It sounds kind of ridiculous when you say it out loud. It’s a place in Florida with Venetian canals. But around here, you get what you pay for. And people pay a lot for it.

On a good day, I’m up before the tour reaches our lake.

Este and I go for a run through the neighborhood and then grab a coffee on one of our pool decks.

But the morning after Will’s birthday party, the blackout shades in our bedroom stay drawn long past the time the tour ends.

And it’s not until the sound of a humming vacuum creeps into my dreams that I realize it’s time to wake up.

In fact, it’s well past noon, and Autumn’s cleaning crew is downstairs.

I roll over, stretching out a searching hand for Will.

This is wishful thinking, of course. Will doesn’t sleep until noon.

Will doesn’t sleep past seven unless he’s at death’s door.

But I open my eyes when I feel that his side of the bed is still neatly made.

I remember washing my face and brushing my teeth, and then getting into bed naked to wait for him. Did I fall asleep that quickly?

Poor Will. He came upstairs expecting birthday sex and found me out cold.

I grab my cellphone off the nightstand. There are three missed texts from Este waiting for me.

11:00 a.m.

Wanna come over for green juice before hot yoga?

Shit. I completely forgot about the hot yoga torture session I said we’d go to.

11:50 a.m.

Are you alive?

The most recent message was sent five minutes ago.

12:42 p.m.

I’m coming over.

Naturally.

Este lives next door, and we quickly adopted an open-door policy between our houses. It’s not unusual for her to let herself in through the side kitchen door to borrow something, even if I’m not home. She knows the alarm code.

Looking again at my phone, I see there are no messages waiting from Will, so I fire off a text to him:

12:48 p.m.

Sorry I fell asleep last night. Where’d you go?

I hurry to the bathroom knowing Este won’t stand on ceremony if I’m still naked when she walks in. As I hear the French doors by the kitchen creak open, I splash cold water on my face, and hastily pull on workout clothes.

“Morning!” Este trills as she strolls in, making herself comfortable on the edge of the tub while I attempt to revive my blowout from yesterday.

“Was Will downstairs?”

She shakes her head. “Just the cleaning crew.”

“Right. He’s probably at the office.” I call him twice, but each time, it goes straight to voicemail. “Hey, Will, it’s me. Where are you? Call me when you get this.”

Este’s tastefully Botoxed brow attempts a frown. “Working? The Sunday after his birthday?”

I give her a “be serious” look. “He’s a trial attorney. He’d work twenty-four hours a day if he could. It was a miracle I got him to take his birthday off. I bet he’s heads down, making up for lost time somewhere.”

I don’t expect Este to get it. Beau retired at the ripe old age of thirty-four after making a boatload of money out in California in a tech acquisition.

Sometimes, I get the feeling the second he sold his company she forgot about the long hours that he undoubtedly had to pour into his job to get to the acquisition stage.

And good for her, by the way. Who among us wouldn’t take selective amnesia in exchange for endless amounts of cash? It’s not time that heals the wounds. It’s money.

I open the shared iCal that I had insisted Will make for big cases so that I would understand when he was completely absent even when he was sitting in the same room. He’s never posted anything in it, so I’m not surprised to see it empty.

“Hey, you know who else I didn’t see downstairs? That world-class kiss-ass Autumn.”

“Last night was fun, right? She did a good job.” I walk down the stairs with Este trailing behind. “And she went straight from our place to Jacksonville to set up for another job this weekend. I don’t think she sleeps.”

I can’t help myself. Part of me will always root for a hardworking underdog.

“It was a good party.” Este shrugs.

“Was it? I mean, I thought it was. Maybe the icy hearts of the country club shrews are thawing a bit?”

“Oh, please, there’re, like, ten more parties before you can even expect to get an invite to ‘Carol’s Carols Extravaganza’ this Christmas.

” The tone in her voice makes it clear being included in Carol Parker’s holiday tradition would still be one of the lower rungs of the social ladder.

“ You threw a great party. Don’t give that credit to Autumn.

Ask yourself: What did she do besides arrange the flowers?

It’s your gorgeous house, Marcus’s amazing food, and your fabulous friends. ”

Will’s fabulous friends.

Even though I think it, I don’t correct her. “Why do we hate Autumn? Do we have to hate her?”

Este’s face pinches like she smells something sour. “Autumn has been mainlining the Kool-Aid of this place for too long.”

She follows me into the kitchen, where I grab a protein bar before we head for the door. “Said the woman who moved here a few years ago,” I say. “Do you not like living here?”

“I like tax breaks. I like boat rides and sunsets on the lake and summer all year. But people like Autumn act like this place is fucking Paris or something. It’s Florida, not the goddamn center of the universe.”

“You’re spicy this morning. Who hurt you? Did someone at the party try to tell you the Morse Museum is better than the MoMA again?” The small art museum is a long-lauded Winter Park landmark best known for housing the most comprehensive collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s stained glass.

“It’s just a bunch of glass!”

“It’s Tiffany glass,” I counter.

This earns me a deadpan glare. “Thankfully, no one tried to gaslight me with another ‘I’ll never leave Winter Park because everything I could ever need is right here’ speech last night. But Beau did get hammered and hurled in your jasmine bushes on the walk home.”

There it is. Este is salty because she likely spent part of the evening getting Beau to bed. I pull a face in her direction. “My jasmine? He puked on my jasmine? Damnit. I like those flowers.”

“I know. They’re going to smell like whiskey for like a month.”

“Gross.”

We go out through the garage, and I see Will’s car parked neatly in its space. Maybe his car being here when he’s gone would be suspicious for anyone else, but I know that Will hates to drive when he’s deep in trial mode. He thinks it’s a waste of time. He’s always Ubering.

I double-check inside the sports car. I don’t know what I think I am going to find. All I see is a coffee cup from last Friday that is probably growing mold. I’ll tackle that petri dish later.

Just as soon as I figure out where the hell Will is.