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Renata's career is the only thing in her life that feels like it's still going right.
If, by "right," she excludes the whispers in the hallways, the conversations that come to an abrupt halt when she enters the room, the awkwardly sympathetic smiles from colleagues. Well, fuck them and their condescension, fuck all of the magazines that pooh-pooh her at present because her marriage has turned out to be one huge, embarrassing charade.
Renata's personal life may be falling to pieces, but she knows she still is one hell of a businesswoman. The office is where she can become the woman that she understands herself to be—not the humiliated wife of a cheating criminal, but a cutthroat, savvy negotiator who will wring every last concession from a competitor before leaving the bargaining table. All of the smirking rival CEOs who make snide, veiled comments on the way out of conference rooms can kiss her ass. Renata may be broke for the moment, but she meant it when she told that motherfucker she called her husband that she would not not be rich. Business is still booming. Within a few years, she'll be back at the top of the Silicon Valley food chain, with all of these gossiping nobodies wishing that she didn't remember their names.
But, for the moment, Renata needs help. A lot of it. That's what's on her mind when she and Celeste grab coffee the weekend after the lie implodes.
(Neither of them had cried at the police station. Madeline, of all people, had emitted a choked sob or two when Bonnie gave her statement, her voice steady and her head held high with dignity. Celeste had gripped Madeline's hand tightly, but she couldn't cry, not when Bonnie was the one being so brave, not when Bonnie was sacrificing herself with such calm.)
"Hi," says Celeste, when Renata arrives. The two embrace for a long moment, quietly propping each other up.
"How are the boys?" Renata asks as they take seats across a table from one another.
"Good," Celeste replies, a genuine smile creeping across her face. "They're good. Everything feels... settled, with Mary Louise gone."
Renata nods. It's nice to remember that there's been one genuine victory, in the midst of all of the instability of their recent lives.
"And you?" Celeste asks.
"I filed for divorce," Renata responds without hesitation. "It was a long time in coming, to be fair. Don't know why I didn't do it the instant I found out what he'd done. Who knows. Maybe I was trying to salvage what was left of my life."
She hesitates. Celeste tilts her head slightly.
"What is it?"
"Do you... do you happen to know any divorce lawyers?" Renata asks. "Ones who would be willing to do this for—" She lowers her voice to an exaggerated whisper, shooting a quick glance around them. "For not too much money?"
Celeste sighs, thinking. But Renata sees her furrowed brow and suddenly looks mortified.
"I mean, hopefully it wouldn't take too much time and effort," she babbles, "it's not like we have any physical possessions anymore, for a court to divide between us. Hell, I don't even know where we'll be living, once the house is sold! Probably some Days Inn off of Highway 1, I don't know. The point is, I need to get custody of Amabella, Celeste. You understand why. And Gordon... damn it, Gordon's always played good cop when it comes to her, she absolutely adores him, and especially now that I've hit him with a baseball bat, I..."
"You what?" Celeste interrupts.
"Or, whatever, I didn't hit him with a baseball bat, I was destroying his stupid train sets Beyoncé-style, and he walked straight into my line of fire. What's that line from Chicago, about someone's husband running into her knife ten times? It was like that, but not a euphemism."
Celeste stares at Renata.
"I'll ask around," she says finally. "If worse comes to absolute worst, I'll represent you. But you really need a lawyer for this."
"I know that," Renata grumbles, "how could I not know, watching what you just went through."
"And, if you don't know where you're going next, you're welcome to stay with me until you have that figured out." Celeste isn't exactly sure where that offer came from, but she doubles down. "Seriously. I certainly don't miss Mary Louise, but the house just feels very... big, with only me and the boys. Empty."
Renata frowns.
"Well, if you're sure..."
"Positive." Celeste smiles. "You and the rest of our friends gave me so much support throughout my custody hearing. I couldn't have made it, without all of you. The least I can do is give you the same support as you go through yours."
There's nothing to move out of Renata's house when the sale becomes official. She and Amabella arrive on Celeste's doorstep with a suitcase apiece, Amabella's free hand clutching Renata's.
"Come on in," says Celeste, smiling. She's just pulled a casserole out of the oven, and Amabella quickly claims a mismatched chair pulled up next to Max and Josh at the table, her face already slightly less miserable than it was upon arrival.
"I can't thank you enough for all of this," Renata mutters to Celeste.
"Not at all," Celeste answers.
"Can I ask..." Renata bites her tongue, then swallows her pride. "Do you have a spare car that I could borrow, just to get to work? We..." Renata sighs. "We had to take a Lyft to get here."
"Of course," says Celeste, and leaves it at that.
Renata looks as if she wants to say something more, but instead she looks down at the table, uncharacteristically quiet. Celeste spoons an enormous dollop of casserole onto Renata's plate, and adds a healthy dose of salad to the side. The two eat in companionable silence as their children chatter away about delightful nonsense on the other side of the table.
Amabella wants to stay in the twins' room, so after dinner, Celeste pulls out an inflatable mattress that's far too large for Amabella's tiny frame. She manages to get the extra bed set up despite the kids' insistence on impishly jumping on the mattress as it inflates. Renata's bed is as comfortable as any that she's slept in, but she still can't fall asleep. She lies alone and awake, staring vengefully at the ceiling, unspeakably grateful to Celeste, and simultaneously wondering how the hell her life has come to living temporarily in her friend's guest room.
So she is awake when she hears Celeste scream.
"Celeste?" Renata barges into Celeste's room without even contemplating whether she should ask permission first. "Oh my god..."
Celeste is sitting in bed, her hands covering her face, sobbing.
"Hey." Renata sits down next to Celeste, wraps her arms around the other woman, and gently rocks her back and forth. "It's okay, Celeste. You hear me? It's gonna be okay..."
When Celeste's sobbing finally subsides, Renata gets up to fetch her a glass of water, but Celeste seizes her by the hand.
"Stay with me? Please?" she sniffs.
"I will, honey," Renata promises. "Let me get you some water first, though. And no pills, okay? You promised the judge you'd turn that around, and goddamnit, if I can make sure that you keep that promise, I will."
In the end, Renata slips under the covers with Celeste and holds the lawyer until her breathing evens into the rhythm of slumber. By this point, Renata has no energy left to make her way back to the guest room, so she falls asleep right then and there, with her arm draped over Celeste and her nose almost touching the back of the lawyer's neck.
When Celeste's alarm goes off several hours later, neither of them says anything more than a brief "good morning," before Renata—her appearance surprisingly gentle without makeup—slips out to get ready for work.
Celeste would have represented Renata in family court, but her California Bar license is suspended for a year for obstructing a police investigation, and for lying on the witness stand. (Celeste thinks it's a miracle that she wasn't disbarred altogether.) The four perjured members of the "Monterey Five" are all sentenced to 300 hours of community service each. Bonnie is sentenced to two years in state prison for involuntary manslaughter and perjury, with the possibility of early release subject to good behavior. Her friends stand and clutch each other's hands when her sentence is announced.
"Jesus," sighs Madeline afterwards. "Poor Bonnie."
"It was her choice," Celeste reminds her.
"Yeah, but two years in the slammer for keeping you from being kicked to death?" Madeline snorts. "Nathan needs to appeal this shit, right now."
"He will," Celeste reassures her. "And whatever lawyer he hires needs to push the self-defense line much harder on any appeal."
The four women stand in silence for a moment outside the courthouse. Renata glowers defensively at anyone who turns to look curiously at the remainder of the Monterey Five.
"Well." Jane raises her eyebrows. "Community service for us, huh? Hope you all saw the look on Quinlan's face when that was announced; she looked like she had just swallowed a lemon."
"Fucking serves her right," Renata snarls.
"Hey." Celeste lays a restraining hand on Renata's arm. "Jane's right, it could be a lot worse. And we never need to worry about Quinlan again, now that this is wrapped up. Let's just focus on supporting Bonnie and Skye and Nathan however we can, and moving on with the rest of our lives, all right?"
"Yeah," Madeline agrees, blinking furious tears out of her eyes. "You're damn right, Celeste."
She hugs Celeste, then Jane, then Renata, and walks to where Ed and Abigail and Chloe are waiting for her by their car.
Jane turns to Celeste.
"You're doing better," she says. It's not a question.
Celeste nods in reply, and Jane hugs both her and Renata before leaving to get back to work. The two older women watch her depart.
"Think she's doing okay?" Renata asks finally.
"Funnily enough, I do," Celeste exhales. "And I think she'd be very honest with the rest of us, if she wasn't. Although, you don't think the Aquarium will fire her for this, do you?"
"If they do, then fuck them," Renata replies venomously. "Let's go home."
Celeste smiles and takes Renata's hand.
"Let's," she agrees.
Jane has some explaining to do at work. So does Renata, who just manages to avoid being removed by her Board of Directors, by what she later learns is a perilously slim margin. Somehow, they both cling to their jobs.
"Thank god," Renata sighs to Celeste that evening, as they split a bottle of nicely aged Malbec on the deck while watching the sun set. "I honestly don't know what I'd do, if I lost that, too."
"You'd manage," Celeste says. "You'd start over. People do it all the time. It might not be fun, but it's the sort of thing that people survive, nonetheless."
"Mmm." Renata takes a sip of wine, then smiles broadly at Celeste. "Well, I'm also glad because I don't want to be in your hair forever. I really can't thank you enough for the past two months, Celeste, but it's been long enough. I'm close to saving enough to rent my own place. We'll let you have your space back."
"No," Celeste says quickly, her hand jerking forward towards Renata's and a slight blush rising on her cheeks. "I mean, I'm happy to have you stay. It's helped me. A lot."
Renata thinks about how Celeste has gradually stopped using the sleeping pills and the anti-depressants. About how, during Renata's third week of living at the Wrights', she watched Celeste decisively throw away all of the little bottles in the bathroom drawer.
She recalls how she rushed to Celeste's bedside night after night, those first few weeks, and invariably fell asleep with her arms around Celeste—until, sometime during the fourth week, she simply started sleeping in Celeste's room from the outset, reading a book until Celeste drifted off, reaching out immediately to comfort Celeste when she cried out in the night.
(The first time that Josh wandered into Celeste's bedroom, and found Renata sleeping there, too, he was clearly confused, but not upset. Especially since Renata, sensing that Josh needed a private chat with his mom, quickly departed for the guest room so that Josh could climb under the covers. Celeste explained to Josh that, just like him, she sometimes got nightmares, and it helped to have someone there to scare the nightmares away. "Max and me, we can do that for you," Josh told her, sounding slightly hurt. And Celeste kissed him on the forehead, telling him that she knew that, but that it wasn't his job to scare nightmares away until he had kids of his own. "Renata's had lots of practice being scary for Amabella's sake," she explained; and Josh yawned and said, "Yeah, I'll bet," before falling asleep. By the next morning, all three kids clearly knew about their moms' sleeping arrangement, and none of them seemed to give it a second thought.)
And Renata reflects on how Amabella has stopped looking so drained and anxious all of the time; has started holding her own in the boys' squabbles, and even calmly telling them off when they need a mediator. She considers how the boys haven't quite mellowed, but are less aggressive than when she and Amabella first arrived, have accepted her little girl as a stabilizing third vertex to the quirky triangle of their youthful games.
It appears that—notwithstanding community service and Bonnie being in prison and Amabella's custody still being in dispute—everything is working out, somehow.
"It's helped me, too," Renata says.
Celeste shifts on the deck couch so that she can curl up against Renata, as the twilight sun lances through the branches of the pine trees.
They never quite discuss it, what their arrangement has become. There's no grand declaration, no announcement, no dramatic confessions in the rain. Just the certainty that they'll be able to come home to one another, to their kids, to the unexpected stability of their new normal. That Renata and Amabella belong in Celeste's house, and that they all belong in each other's lives, the way that a matched pair of gloves folds together.
As the custody hearing approaches, all of Renata's most intense doubts and insecurities resurface—over her career, over how the divorce is progressing, over whether Amabella is happy. Celeste doesn't let Renata broodily monologue over a glass of wine while glaring out at the ocean. Instead, she sits her down with a mug of tea, gently encourages the CEO to relinquish her power-posturing, listens patiently and intently while the Medusa of Monterey allows herself to be vulnerable and imperfect and all too human. Renata hasn't let herself have a good cry like that in years. It's just as draining as screaming, but the difference is that she feels infinitely better afterwards. For once, Celeste holds Renata to comfort her.
Renata talks Celeste into returning to her therapist ("I will take time off of work to drive you there myself, if I have to, Celeste; you know that you should be seeing her at least weekly"). And Celeste's nightmares become less and less frequent, until she begins sleeping through entire nights without so much as stirring. But she doesn't ask Renata to leave her bed. From the way that she'll sometimes take Renata's hand as they lie there side by side, Renata infers that Celeste doesn't want her to.
And Celeste gradually remembers how it feels to be close to someone without expecting or wanting an edge of violence to accompany that proximity. At first, it irks her, makes her want to rush off and find one of those impersonal men who will roughly have his way with her in a bathroom stall at her request. But after some time, she stops needing that adrenaline rush, stops itching for danger. Any remaining shivers inspired by Perry and his raw lust and his dark anger fade in the warmth and immediacy of Renata's presence. Renata only touches Celeste gently, would never even think of doing anything else; and after a while, that's all that Celeste really craves.
The Kleins' custody hearing comes and goes. It's brutal, just as Renata expects. Gordon's lawyer milks Renata's infamous temper for all its worth, and by the end of his direct examination, Renata is in danger of turning into the full-fledged harpy that he's made her out to be.
"Your Honor," she says to the judge, in a voice that is just a hair away from becoming a snap, "I work in a field where you have to be tough to be taken seriously. I'm known for being intractable; it's why I'm good at what I do. But I promise you that I have never once turned my temper on my daughter. Never. Every harsh word that I have ever said in her presence has been in her defense, and anybody in this entire city will confirm that."
Renata wins legal and physical custody of Amabella, with full visitation rights for Gordon. ("Well, it's what we expected," sighs her lawyer, a perfectly competent referral from someone at work. "Not great that you both have criminal records, of course, but on balance, this seems about right.") Celeste and the boys are waiting at home with a chocolate cake, and the five of them treat the evening like it's a birthday party—not the crowded, impersonal type of birthday party that Renata would have thrown for Amabella, once upon a time, but something warm and intimate and so much more genuine.
"I swear to god," Renata says, as she crams the last bit of her third slice of cake into her mouth, "a year ago, if you had told me that my life would go the way it's gone—that I'd lose my husband and my house and my things and a good portion of my reputation, and almost lose my kid on top of all of that—I would have jumped into the Pacific, right then and there. I would never have believed that it was possible to be this happy, after everything that's happened."
Celeste sits down next to her on the couch, exhaling slowly, winding down from having just put the kids to bed. Renata has a dab of cake icing at the corner of her grin, and Celeste wipes most of it off with a brush of her finger.
"Yeah," Celeste says, reflecting back on her own past year with some surprise. "Same here."
And Celeste ends up with chocolate icing smudged on her own cheek when Renata kisses her.
When Celeste's legal license is reinstated, she begins looking for a job, and eventually settles in at a small firm in Monterey. She's somehow forgotten how much she missed being a lawyer, even despite those few fleeting moments of revelation over the past few years—questioning Mary Louise in court, and of course that ridiculous time that Madeline roped her into defending the infamous Avenue Q production. She and Renata laugh themselves silly over the latter memory, the evening after Celeste's first day back at work.
"Jesus, what you must have thought of me back then!" Renata sighs.
"I still contend that we were right and you were wrong," Celeste informs her.
"And, much as I truly hate to be on the losing side of an argument, I agree," Renata concedes. "It's really good to see you with this particular bounce in your step, though. Lawyering clearly suits you."
Things are going well at work for Renata, too, but even though she's recouped enough of her losses to afford a down payment on a house of her own, there's really no question of her doing so. Not when Max has declared that Renata packs better school lunches than Celeste does; not when Amabella so loves curling up on the sofa to read chapter books aloud with Celeste; not when the twins have discovered, to their delight, that Renata sometimes is more than willing to chase them and Amabella around the dining room table, shrieking with laughter, while Celeste scolds them all with a smile.
"Is Ziggy my brother?" Amabella asks Renata one day. They’re sitting on a sunny bench along the recreation trail, looking out over the Wharf and the harbor, and eating ice cream cones.
"Ziggy?" Renata asks, confused.
"Well, he's Josh and Max's brother, so that makes him my brother, too, right?" Amabella reasons very seriously.
Renata laughs and kisses Amabella on the top of her head.
"Something like that," she says; and, when she tells Jane, Jane just shrugs and says, "Sure, the more, the merrier!"
That's another amazing thing, that all of their friends have accepted their new status so readily. Renata would have expected Madeline to feel threatened, but the one time she broaches the subject with Madeline, Renata is pleasantly surprised.
"Look, Celeste is and always will be my best friend," Madeline explains, "and I think you know exactly what would happen, if you ever did anything to try to change that."
"So you're not jealous?" Renata asks, amazed.
"Are you kidding?" Madeline scoffs. "Do you think that Celeste is jealous of Ed?"
"Why am I jealous of Ed?" Celeste asks, wandering outside with a cheese plate and some baguette.
"Never you mind," replies Madeline airily.
Celeste looks at Renata and Madeline, sitting side by side and trying to suppress identical conspiratorial grins.
"Have I ever mentioned how glad I am that you two became friends?" she adds.
"Are we friends, though?" Madeline jokes, tossing a wink at Renata. "What ever happened to 'the lie is the friendship'?"
"'The lie is the friendship'?" Renata snorts and smears some Brie onto a slice of baguette. "What the fuck does that even mean?!"
Renata, for her part, has forgotten how much she loves entertaining. She hesitates, at first, when Celeste urges her to use their space to host, but by now it's common knowledge that, for all goods and purposes, Celeste's house is Renata's house.
Renata throws a lavish party. As expected, half of Monterey turns up to grovel at her feet, as if her months of humiliation never even happened. What sunshine patriots, she thinks to herself, but she puts on a lipstick-red smile for the duration of the evening, and everyone proclaims the party a roaring success (including the kids, who are sated with leftover desserts for the next several days).
Celeste hears from Nathan only a few weeks later.
"Think we're up for a reprise?" she asks Renata.
"Ah, what the hell," Renata replies, still flush with a certain savage victory, now that she has reclaimed her throne within the hierarchy of peninsular socialites. "Let's do it!"
The next party is much, much smaller, and wreathed in solemnity rather revelry. The kids are all wearing their finest, Josh and Max restrained by identical suits and miniature neckties, Amabella in a little velvet dress with tights and patent leather Mary Janes. The others arrive, equally grave. Madeline with her whole family in tow, even Chloe unusually somber. Jane and Ziggy. And Skye with Martin Howard, who seems to have shrunk with age and loneliness since his wife's death.
Everyone waits impatiently as the minutes tick by. Conversations are terse; hors d'oeuvres picked at, rather than enjoyed. Finally, they hear a car pull up in front of the house, and a knock at the door.
Renata gives Celeste's hand a squeeze, and Celeste goes to answer.
Bonnie too looks smaller, as if her slight frame has grown accustomed to taking up even less space than normal. She stares, dazed, at the crowd assembled to greet her, and Nathan puts a hand on her shoulder to steady her. She smiles at him gratefully, and then Skye rushes into her arms.
"Hi, Mama," she whispers.
"Hi, baby," Bonnie whispers back.
And in an instant, the other women have all approached Bonnie, and they're hugging her and laughing and crying, and their kids have rushed forward to join the ritual of welcoming Bonnie back into the world of the living.
"Thank you for hosting all of this," Bonnie says later, when everyone's most heightened emotions have simmered down and she's able to catch a word alone with Celeste in the kitchen.
"Our pleasure," Celeste replies, rummaging around the fridge for more salsa. "You should really be thanking Renata, this was all her."
Bonnie smiles hesitantly.
"Nathan mentioned that you were together now."
Celeste closes the fridge door.
"Yeah," she says with a small smile.
Bonnie bows her head.
"I'm glad to hear that."
"Do you know what you'll do next?" Celeste asks her.
"Who knows?" Bonnie shrugs. "I might leave Monterey for a bit, look after my dad. It'll kill me to not be near Skye, but I can't stay here right now."
Celeste nods.
"Bonnie? Thank you, again. For saving me. I don't know if I can say it enough."
"What are friends for?" Bonnie replies, quirking a trembling little smile at Celeste. When she sniffles, Celeste gathers Bonnie in her arms and lets her cry on her shoulder.
"How did you manage it?" Bonnie asks finally, pulling away a bit. "Beginning again, after everything."
"It wasn't easy," Celeste admits after a moment. "But you keep on going, for your kids, for your friends. You take things one day at a time, one step at a time."
Through the doorway, Celeste can see Renata tossing her head with laughter—Renata, who has clawed her way back to the life that she wanted, inch by agonizing inch, pulling Celeste along with her. Perhaps the CEO can sense that she's being watched, because she turns and then winks at Celeste. And the lawyer's face lights up with a sudden radiance, dazzling as the sun emerging from behind a cloud.
"And sometimes," Celeste adds, "even if you're moving too slowly to see it happening, you stumble your way not only back into life, but also into love."
With that, she hands Bonnie a bowl of salsa to carry, and the two slowly make their way back to the rest of the party, shoulder to shoulder and step by step.