Beautiful Day by Elin Hilderbrand Read Free Book Online Page A

in the world, and receive these texts and think,
Don’t you understand that I am too busy for this piddly-shit?
    Now, with Edge, Margot would kill for some piddly-shit. She would kill to know what
     he had for breakfast. But he told her nothing. If he was feeling expressive, he would
     text,
In court.
Or,
With Audrey,
who was his six-year-old daughter.
    Margot checked her phone: nothing. It was quarter to six. Maybe Edge was in a meeting
     with a new client; those could take a while. Maybe he was so busy preparing for court—with
     his favorite paralegal,
Rosalie
—that he simply hadn’t had time to check his phone. But Edge checked his phone compulsively.
     Thered light blinked, and he salivated as though the next text or e-mail was going to
     offer him a million free dollars or a house on the beach in Tahiti. With clients,
     he prided himself on responding within sixty seconds. But Margot he let languish for
     days.
    Most of Margot and Edge’s relationship had taken place via text, which had started
     out seeming modern and sexy. They would go back and forth for hours—and unlike in
     actual conversation, Margot could take her time to compose witty responses. She could
     text things she was too shy to express in person.
    But the texting now was frustrating beyond all comprehension. It made Margot want
     to tear her hair out. It made her—late one night when she and Edge had been going
     back and forth and then she texted
I miss u
and heard nothing back—throw her phone across the room, where it, thankfully, landed
     in her laundry basket. She both hated the texting and was addicted to it. She despised
     her phone—the seventy-two times a day she checked to see if Edge had texted were torturous—and
     then if she did have a text from him, she went to absurd lengths to answer it, no
     matter what she was doing. She had answered texts from him under the table in big
     client meetings. She had stood up and left Ellie’s kindergarten play (
Stone Soup
) to text Edge from the school corridor. She had texted while driving, she had texted
     him drunkenly from the bathroom while she was out with her girlfriends, she had texted
     him from the treadmill at the gym. The texting with Edge was keeping her from being
     present in her real life. It was awful, she had to stop, she had to control it somehow,
     to keep it from destroying her.
    Because now, on Thursday, July 18, instead of focusing on her sister’s bachelorette
     party, which she, Margot, had organized and which was due to begin shortly, Margot
     was thinking:
I texted him nineteen hours ago and he hasn’t responded. Why not? Where is he and
     what is he doing? He isn’t thinking about me.
    Margot remembered when she had stood in this very house waiting for the mail to arrive
     because she was expecting a letter from her high school boyfriend, Grady Maclean.
     That had been stressful in the same sort of way, except then all of Margot’s anxiety
     had been focused on one moment of the day, and once she got a letter—Grady Maclean
     had been pretty devoted for a fifteen-year-old boy—she didn’t have to sweat it out
     until the following week.
    At that moment, a text came into her phone, and Margot thought,
There he is, finally!
But when she checked, she saw it was a text from her father. Okay, that was absolutely
     the worst: she had waited and waited for a text, and then a text came in, but from
     the wrong person.
    The text read:
Pauline isn’t coming to the wedding.
    Margot stared at her phone. She thought,
WTF?
Her mind was whizzing now. This was family drama, exactly the type that was supposed
     to happen at weddings. Pauline wasn’t coming!
    Why did this news make Margot feel so buoyant? Was it because deep down she didn’t
like
Pauline, or was it because Margot was grateful for something to think about other
     than Drum Sr. getting married to Lily the Pilates instructor or Edge’s nonresponse
     to Drum Sr. marrying Lily the Pilates instructor, or…