Brooke squeezed his arm. “Stop worrying about me. Go enjoy your trip!”

“Call if you need anything, okay?”

“Will do,” she said with more fake cheer than she would have thought possible. “Drive safely!” She stood and waved until they turned the corner, then beelined for the front door. She barely made it ten feet when the other photographers—no doubt tipped off by the earlier flashbulbs—seemed to fly right out of the various SUVs and convene in a loud, flapping group directly outside the door of her building.

“Brooke! Why didn’t you go to any after-parties with Julian?”

“Brooke! Did you throw Julian out?”

“Did you know your husband was having an affair?”

“Why hasn’t your husband come home yet?”

Good question, Brooke thought to herself. That makes two of us wondering the exact same thing. They shouted and shoved cameras in her face, but she refused to make eye contact with any of them. Feigning a calmness she didn’t feel at all, she first unlocked the outer door, pulled it closed behind her, and then unlocked the door to the lobby. The flashbulbs continued until the elevator closed behind her.

The apartment was eerily quiet. To be honest, she had allowed herself to hope against hope that Julian would drop everything and fly home to talk things through. She knew his days were jam-packed and nonnegotiable—as an approved member of the “cc” list, she received his daily schedules, contact info, and travel plans by e-mail every morning—and she knew he couldn’t very well cancel any of the post-Grammy press opportunities to come home a couple days early. But it didn’t change the fact that she desperately wanted him to do it anyway. As it stood now, he was scheduled to land at JFK in two more days, on Thursday morning, to do another round of New York media and talk shows, and she was trying not to think about what would happen then.

She only managed a quick shower and a bag of microwave popcorn before the buzzer rang. Nola and Walter burst through into the tiny foyer in a happy entanglement of leashes and coats, and Brooke laughed for the first time in days when Walter jumped vertically four feet in the air and tried to lick her face. When she finally caught him in her arms, he squealed like a piglet and covered her mouth in kisses.

“Don’t expect the same greeting from me,” Nola said, scrunching her face in disgust. Then she relented and hugged Brooke hard, and together with Walter, the three of them made a funny little tepee. Nola kissed Brooke on the cheek and Walter on the nose and then headed straight for the kitchen to pour vodka over ice with some olive juice.

“If what’s going on outside your apartment right now is any indication of how it was in Los Angeles, I think you might need this,” Nola said, handing a glass of cloudy vodka to Brooke. She sat opposite Brooke on the sofa. “So . . . you ready to tell me what happened?” she asked.

Brooke sighed and sipped her drink. The liquid was sharp, but it warmed her throat and hit her stomach in a surprisingly pleasant way. She couldn’t bring herself to relive the whole thing again, point by miserable point, and she knew that although Nola would be sympathetic, she could never really understand what the night had been like.

So she told Nola about all the assistants swarming, the gorgeous hotel suite, the gold Valentino. She made her laugh with the story of the Neil Lane security guard and bragged about how perfect her hair and nails had been. She glossed over the call from Margaret, saying only that the hospital higher-ups were crazy and she really had missed a lot of work, and waved off the look of shock on Nola’s face with a laugh and a sip of her drink. She dutifully provided details on what the red carpet was like (“so much hotter than I thought—you don’t realize until you’re there how many lights are beating down”) and what the stars looked like in person (“thinner, for the most part, than in their photos, and almost universally older”). She answered Nola’s questions about Ryan Seacrest (“charming and adorable, but you know I’m a Seacrest lover and apologist”), whether or not John Mayer was cute enough in real life to warrant all the women he cycled through (“I honestly think Julian is cuter, which, now that I think of it, really doesn’t bode well”), and offered a highly unhelpful opinion on whether Taylor Swift looked better or worse than Miley Cyrus (“I’m still not positive I can tell them apart”). Not really knowing why, she deliberately omitted the Layla Lawson meeting, the women in the bathroom, and the lecture from Carter Price.

What she didn’t tell Nola was how thoroughly devastated she’d been when she hung up the phone after being fired. She didn’t describe how icy Julian had been when he told her about the pictures, how it was Julian’s focus on “managing their impact” and “staying on message” that upset her the most. She left out the part where, as they strolled the red carpet, the paparazzi hounded them with humiliating questions about the pictures and screamed insults, hoping to make them turn toward the camera. How could she explain to anyone the way she felt listening to Carrie Underwood perform “Before He Cheats,” wondering if every single person in the auditorium was staring at them and chuckling to themselves—then trying not to remain stony-faced when Carrie delivered the song’s refrain, “Cause the next time that he cheats / Oh, you know it won’t be on me.”

She omitted the parts about sobbing in the car on the way to the airport and praying Julian would beg her to stay, absolutely forbid her from leaving, how his tepid, halfhearted protestations were devastating. Brooke couldn’t admit that she was the last to board the flight in the pathetic hope that Julian would come sprinting to the gate, like in every movie, and plead with her to stay, or how, when she finally walked the jetway and watched the door close behind her, she hated him more for letting her go than whatever idiotic crime he’d committed in the first place.

When she finally finished, she turned to Nola and looked at her expectantly. “Was that a good summary?”

Nola just shook her head. “Come on, Brooke. What’s the real story?”

“The real story?” Brooke laughed, but it sounded hollow, miserable. “You can read the real story on page eighteen of this week’s Last Night.” Walter jumped up on the couch and rested his chin on Brooke’s thigh.

“Brooke, have you even considered that there’s a logical explanation?”