Free The Travelers by Chris Pavone Page A

Can I get you something?” He beckons the bartender with no more than raised eyebrows. “This is Marlon, our resident professor of mixology.”
    Marlon nods.
    “I’ll have a Negroni, rocks.” She knows she’s supposed to specify the brand of gin, probably the vermouth too, but she refuses. Marlon, to her relief, doesn’t ask, despite the seriousness of his tie-barred skinny necktie and his sleeve garters and his porny little mustache.
    “Were you always this hot, Chloe Palmer?” Dean meets Chloe’s eye firmly, direct and unambiguous.
    Marlon grins down into his mixing glass, with the look of a man who’s heard something similar before, and not just once or twice.
    “Or is it that marriage to Will has treated you surprisingly well?”
    Chloe doesn’t dignify any of this banter with a response; she knows that Dean doesn’t expect one. He’s just tossing these lines out there, information to be filed away, a port in a storm. But it’s a good compliment to get. As part of her post-
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lifestyle, she has been exercising like a madwoman, and it’s nice for someone to notice, and to say so. Will hasn’t.
    Dean and Will have been friends for a long time, but recently they’d been drifting apart. Chloe didn’t kid herself that it was because Dean had a thing for her—he wasn’t the type. In fact she suspected it was the opposite: Dean resented Chloe for domesticating Will, for absenting him from singles bars and ski weekends and all the other fun that Dean manufactured. As a married couple, they hadn’t socialized with Dean once.
    “So you finally succumbed,” Dean says, “to the inevitability of Brooklyn.” He has the sense to push past his own ridiculous come-ons. “Your parents’ house, is it?”
    “My dad bought it as an investment. But he filled it with a variety of problems that are nearly impossible to get rid of.” The house, like so many other of Chloe’s parents’ pursuits, was not in itself a terrible idea. But they had an uncanny knack for half-assed execution, poor timing, and bad luck. Then her dad died, and Chloe inherited the problems.
    Will was the one who’d been convinced they should fix it up. “We can do this,” he’d said. “We’re good at doing things!”
    “Are we?” Chloe hadn’t been so sure. They were by no means a broadly competent couple. Will was good at a small handful of things, and Chloe was good at most of the same plus a few other skills, none of which had anything whatsoever to do with fixing up a house.
    “We could be!” he’d said. “It’ll be fun.”
    “Are you sure? That’s not what people tend to say.”
    “But”—he pulled her close, kissed her on the lips—“that’s what we’ll say.”
    Will had been confident that they were special, that they’d be immune to the problems that beset other couples, rip them apart. His irrational optimism, his unwavering belief in the possibility of perfection, was one of the things Chloe had loved most about Will, a foil for her own dispassionate pragmatism. Now it has become one of the things that makes her crazy. And although their old apartment on the Lower East Side had been tiny, cockroach-infested, and even dangerous, at least the infrastructure problems had not been their responsibility.
    “The house doesn’t look quite, ah…”
    “Finished? No, it certainly isn’t.” She tries to project that this isn’t the most welcome topic. “Anyway, congratulations! I saw you were at the Oscars. That must’ve been amazing.”
    “I’ve never felt so insignificant in my life. I couldn’t get out of L.A. fast enough. I think I was still plastered when I got off the plane here, and bought this joint to make myself feel better.”
    “And did it?”
    “Tell you the truth, yeah. I feel pretty good, Chloe Palmer. Do you?”
    “In general.”
    “I heard you left
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. Mind if I ask why?” Dean is skimming a lot of topics whose depths Chloe doesn’t want to explore. “Did you have enough