Chapter 1
“My life used to be perfect.”
“Your life was never perfect,” Gillian said loud enough for the tasting room staffer, who I was almost positive was listening to our conversation, to hear. I didn’t flatter myself into believing that the hot twenty-something who had been pouring us wine since we’d arrived was interested in two women ten-plus years his senior. I assumed feigning interest in the guests was part of the job. He was also listening to the conversations of the couple from New Jersey to our right and the family of four from San Diego to our left.
My phone pinged, and in the few seconds it took me to pull it out of my purse, Gillian managed to slide my wineglass across the lacquered wood bar and out of my reach. As if that would stop me! I pushed up on my stool’s footrest and reached across the bar to retrieve it while I scanned the message from my assistant. Although she wasn’t really my assistant. I shared her with two other people.
Bob wants to know when you’ll be back in the office.
I thumbed, Monday, while maintaining my hold on my wineglass. In fact, I was planning on stopping in at the office for a few hours on Sunday night, but it was to catch up on my work, not to cover for my ass-kissing colleague who liked to take credit for my accomplishments but not actually put in the hours to accomplish anything himself. Bob’s motto was Work smarter, not harder! Translation: Get other people to do your job for you so you can spend your time sucking up to management. I was sad to report that so far his strategy had been a huge success. He started as a mid-level lawyer in the compliance department a year ago, and was now the go-to guy for many of the company’s VPs, or at least all the arrogant, geeky male VPs, which was most of them.
I worked in the technology industry. When you lived halfway between San Francisco and San Jose, otherwise known as Silicon Valley, it was pretty much the only industry. And when you were a lawyer in Silicon Valley, you either worked for a tech firm or you worked for a law firm representing technology clients. Or you worked for the government or a public interest agency, but then you couldn’t afford to live anywhere near Silicon Valley.
When I looked up again, Gillian was giving me her trademark arched eyebrow.
“What? It’s the office. What am I supposed to do, ignore it?”
Gillian was constantly admonishing me for working too much. You’re supposed to leave a law firm for an in-house counsel job to work less hours, not more! Easy to say that when you’ve left the daily grind behind to become a stay-at-home mother, with the help of a full-time nanny, of course. In her defense, Gillian was doing an amazing job raising her three children—a five-year-old girl and twin two-and-a-half-year-old boys—practically as a single parent since her husband, Gary, was a tech executive who worked even more hours than me. Even with the nanny, I considered Gillian’s job harder than mine. Some of my colleagues were jerks, but at least they didn’t throw temper tantrums when they didn’t get what they wanted. Well, most of them didn’t.
“Not your phone,” she said, then purposefully shifted her gaze to my wineglass, which I was absentmindedly swirling between my fingers. I was letting my wine breathe, just like my yoga instructor was always telling me to do. Of course, I usually wanted to smack my yoga instructor when she said that. Obviously I was breathing. Otherwise I’d be dead.
I stopped swirling but still held tight to the stem. “Hello? We’re at a wine tasting.”
Gillian raised her second eyebrow. I’d always considered that a great trick—raising one eyebrow at a time. Mine moved simultaneously. I always thought that ability was a genetic abnormality. Gillian claimed it’s a skill anyone could learn. I always told her it’s on my to-do list—somewhere between studying Chinese and scrubbing the grout in my bathroom tile. “Hello?” Gillian replied. “You’re driving.”
“You can Uber back to your hotel,” the cute staffer offered, eliminating any remaining I doubt I had as to whether he was eavesdropping on our conversation. “Unless you’re staying in San Francisco. Then it might get a bit pricey.”
“I told you we should’ve rented a limo for the day,” Gillian said before taking another sip of her Cabernet.
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, because a limo is so much cheaper than Uber.”
Gillian smirked. “For you it would’ve been. Gary would’ve paid.”
Gary hired limos all the time; he’d never notice one more on the credit card bill. Actually, he would never see the credit card bill. Gillian paid the bills and took care of all their other household business. As Gary liked to say, I make the money and Gillian spends it. But he seemed happy with that arrangement. And so did Gillian.
I sighed loudly and slid my wineglass away from me. “Fine, I’ll stop drinking.” I knew if I wasn’t able to drive, Gillian would offer to pay for an Uber or a cab ride or whatever form of transportation we needed to get us from the winery to the restaurant where she’d made us a dinner reservation, then back to our hotel in San Francisco where we’d be spending the night. But she’d already picked up the tab for our hotel for the weekend and tomorrow’s spa day—her birthday present to me—and I couldn’t allow her to pay for the car service too.
To my surprise, Gillian slid my wineglass back to me. “No, you’re right. This is your birthday. You should be able to get drunk if you want to. I’ll drive.”
Technically it was not my birthday until tomorrow. The big four-o. I could hardly believe it. I still felt like I was in my twenties, not on the edge of the cliff staring into the abyss that was officially middle age. I could even remember all the details of my thirtieth birthday party. I was married to Lying Bastard at the time, Gillian and Gary had just gotten engaged, and my sister, Stephanie, who had moved to San Francisco the month before to start a new job, had driven down to Silicon Valley to join us for a night of drinking and dancing.
I’d invited Stephanie at my mother’s insistence and was surprised she had decided to come. She and I had never been close growing up. I always assumed it was because of the five-year age gap. My mother claimed that as we got older the age difference would matter less and we would become good friends, just as she had with her own sister, my aunt Dee. For a while I thought my mother had been right. But that turned out not to be the case.
“Stop it,” Gillian said.
I looked up, having no idea what I was being admonished for. I’d just been staring into my wineglass. I hadn’t even taken another sip yet. “Stop what?”
“Stop ruminating.”
I didn’t bother to deny it. Gillian knew me better than almost anyone. We’d met eighteen years ago on our first day of law school. She’d sat down in the empty seat next to mine in Civil Procedure I and said, “Please tell me you didn’t decide to become a lawyer because of Ally McBeal.”
I laughed. “Um, no.” Although I did watch the show in college, along with the rest of the girls in my dorm, and had enjoyed it. “I’m here because I have a degree in English lit, thirty thousand dollars in student loans, and I have no idea what to do with my life. You?”
“Same,” she said, “except my degree’s in sociology and my parents paid for undergrad so I’m debt free.”
We’d been best friends ever since.
But now Gillian said, “It wasn’t meant to be, Sabrina, and that’s why it ended. That’s why all of it ended.”
And I knew we weren’t just talking about the demise of my marriage anymore. “That is not why it ended and you know it.” To my surprise, I felt tears pooling in my eyes. I hadn’t cried over any of this in a long time. Unlike arching one eyebrow, not giving in to my emotions was a skill I had practiced, and I thought I’d become adept at it.
The old me, the one who was married to Lying Bastard for six years before he left me for my younger sister, was a crier. The new and improved me, the one who breathed in yoga class and swirled her wine like she could actually taste the difference between a Chardonnay aged in an oak barrel and one that had been stored in a stainless steel vat, did not cry. Not over lying bastards, not over lost babies, not over anything.
Obviously the wine is making me sentimental. I pushed the glass away and sniffed loudly, trying to suck my emotions back inside of me too while I carefully dabbed at my nascent tears with my fingertips so as not to smudge my mascara. Then I focused on my breathing until I felt my composure return. Hah! All the hours I’d spent meditating and being mindful had not been for naught.
Then Gillian leaned over and hugged me.
It was this simple gesture of friendship, of empathy, of basic human contact, which was not something I got a lot of these days, that undid me. The new and improved Sabrina left the building and old Sabrina dissolved into a flood of tears.
“It will happen for you,” Gillian whispered as I clung to her as if she was a life preserver and I was a woman who’d never learned to swim. “I promise.”
“When?” I blubbered.
“When the time is right.”
But I was hours away from turning forty. Time was running out.
