The Revenge Tour

Celina found out about the other woman on a Tuesday. That detail still mattered to her. Not a dramatic Friday night, not a birthday, just a gray Tuesday in October when Reid left his laptop open on the kitchen counter and a message popped up from somebody named Kayla with a heart emoji at the end of it.

She was thirty-four at the time. She had lived with the man for two years. She had picked out curtains with him. So she did what any reasonable person would do. She closed the laptop, sat down at the kitchen table, and waited for him to come home from work so she could watch his face when she asked him about it.

His face did not do anything good. He did the thing where he blinked a lot and said her name twice before the sentence started. "Celina. Celina, let me explain." There was not much to explain. Kayla worked in his office. Kayla had been in his life for about four months, which overlapped nicely with the period where Reid kept saying he was staying late for quarterly reports. Nobody does quarterly reports in July.

She moved out within two weeks. Her sister had a spare room and no pets, which was about the best offer available. Reid cried at the door one time and she had felt bad about that for about a day, and then she remembered the heart emoji and stopped feeling bad.

Here was the thing though. The thing that stuck in her teeth for six months like a popcorn kernel. Three months before the breakup, before any of it, they had booked a trip. Japan. Cherry blossom season. Two weeks, flights and a hotel in Shinjuku, paid on Reid's card, with her half sent to him up front. Two thousand dollars. Her half, which he now owed her, which he had promised to pay back, in writing, in a text message she still had screenshots of.

Then he cheated, she left, and the trip sat there in his account like a stone. He never brought it up. She never brought it up, mostly because bringing it up meant talking to him.

Then in February an email came. Not from Reid. From the airline. Your upcoming trip is almost here, it said, cheerfully. Celina stared at it for a long time before she understood. He had never canceled it. He had changed the name on one of the tickets, that was all. Kayla was going to Japan on the trip they had planned.

Well. Sort of. The money was technically Reid's, the debt was Reid's, but the principle of it was not lost on her. The trip was bought with Reid's card, but she had already paid her half, so he owed her two thousand dollars. The audit trail of a scumbag, she thought, was mostly emails with subject lines like Your Upcoming Trip.

She sat with that for two days. She talked to Mildred about it at work, in the break room, at low volume, because Mildred had worked with her for five years and was the only person in the office who knew the whole saga. Mildred was sixty-two and had been divorced twice and did not consider either of those facts a tragedy.

"You know what I would do?" Mildred said, stirring her coffee. "I would go on the trip."

"The trip is his. He's taking her."

"Take yourself. Book the same flights, the same hotel. Non-refundable, right? Then it's a coin flip whose plans break first." Mildred shrugged. "Or, and I'm just saying, you could let it go and take a cruise to Alaska."

Celina let it go for about nine hours. Then she pulled up the airline site on her lunch break and found the exact same flights, one seat apart in the same row, and booked it before her coffee got cold. Non-refundable. She told herself it was about the money. Two thousand dollars was two thousand dollars, and if she happened to be sitting next to Reid somewhere over the Pacific, that was the universe's business, not hers.

She told Mildred it was a solo vacation. "Just me, cherry blossoms, a lot of ramen," she said. Mildred looked at her over the top of her glasses for a second too long and said, "Sure. Solo. Pack the nice underwear anyway." Celina had thrown a sugar packet at her.

The plan, as far as it went, was not much of a plan. She was not going to key his rental car or put laxatives in anything. She was thirty-four, not fifteen. Her plan was mostly proximity. She would be there. She would be visible. She would eat at good restaurants alone and look fantastic and let him feel whatever he was going to feel when he saw her at the hotel check-in desk in Shinjuku with Kayla's hand in his pocket. Maybe she would say something cutting about the debt in the lobby. Maybe she would just wave. The wave was the centerpiece of the plan, honestly. One slow, friendly, devastating wave.

She also had a folder on her phone with screenshots of the debt text. Just in case there was a moment.

The flight left on a Wednesday in early April. She got to the airport three hours early because she wanted to be at the gate first, wanted to see his face when he walked up and she was already seated, already unbothered, already reading a paperback. That was the fantasy version. The actual version was that she arrived three hours early, bought a magazine she did not read, checked the departures board eleven times, and then saw Reid come around the corner at gate forty-two pulling one suitcase, alone.

No Kayla.

She actually ducked behind a pillar, which she was not proud of. Thirty-four years old, she thought, get a grip. She watched him from behind the pillar like a person with nothing else going on. He checked in at the podium. He stood there with his phone. He looked, if anything, tired. He was wearing the jacket she had bought him for his birthday two years back, which she decided to take as an insult.

She boarded in her assigned group as anyone would and took her window seat, one row behind where his ticket said he would sit, because of course she had looked up his seat when she booked hers. The row across the aisle, one seat back. Close enough to be seen. Far enough to seem accidental.

He never got on the plane.

She kept checking the door of the jet bridge until they closed it. Nothing. Thirteen hours to Tokyo and she spent the first two of them turning her phone on and off in airplane mode like the answers were in there. Maybe he canceled. Maybe he was coming on a later flight. Maybe Kayla had dumped him and he had gone home to sulk, in which case the trip was his and her seat was next to an empty middle and none of this meant anything.

She slept badly against the window and woke up somewhere over the ocean to a meal she did not want and a thought she did want, which was that if he had canceled, she had just spent two thousand dollars to be alone in Japan with a grudge and no target. Mildred would laugh until she needed an inhaler.

Tokyo came up under the wing all gray and glittering. Customs was slow. The train into the city was fast and quiet and full of sleeping businessmen, and she watched the towers slide by and felt, for one unsteady minute, that maybe the trip could just be a trip. Then the thought packed its bags and left and she was back to the wave. The slow wave.

The hotel was the one from the original booking, the high-rise in Shinjuku with the lobby that looked like the inside of a glass harp. She had rebooked the same room category, and the system had allowed it.

The concierge desk was staffed by a small neat man in a suit whose name tag said Stanley. His English was limited and his bow was deep. "Welcome," he said. "Checking in, one guest?"

"One guest," she said. "Celina Paulson."

He printed the key card with great ceremony and presented it on both palms. She asked, in the slow loud voice people use when they think volume is a language, whether the hotel was busy this week.

"Very busy," Stanley said. "Cherry blossom. Many guests."

"Any chance you could tell me if a Reid Heller is checked in? Tall, kind of a dumb face?"

Stanley considered this. "I cannot say about the face," he said, "but I can say the hotel does not share guest information." Then he leaned in maybe a quarter inch. "But the elevator is public. And the restaurant is public. And this evening the lobby is very public."

Celina decided she liked Stanley and that he had earned whatever tip the tip jar produced.

She got to her room on the fourteenth floor and stood at the window looking at the mess of Shinjuku lights while she unpacked. The plan was intact. The plan had survived the flight. Reid was presumably somewhere in this building or arriving soon, and she was here first, established, armed with a wave.

Her phone buzzed. Mildred: Land ok? She typed landed, hotel is nice, sent it, then added, he wasn't on the plane. Mildred replied with a single raised eyebrow emoji and then, alone in tokyo is also a vacation. Go eat something.

Celina looked at the phone, then at the bed, then at the window again. Down there somewhere was a man who owed her two thousand dollars and an apology and probably a few other things she could not invoice. She put on the nice underwear, because Mildred's advice had been half joke and half prophecy and she was not going to take chances either way, and she went downstairs to find dinner in a back alley that smelled like grilled meat and rain.

That was where the whole thing tilted, though she did not know it yet.

She came back to the hotel at nine, full of grilled meat and a small beer, and the lobby was doing exactly what Stanley had promised. It was very public. And there, standing at the front desk in a gray shirt and the jacket she bought him, was Reid.

Celina stopped behind a luggage cart and looked at him for a second. Thirty-seven years old, taller than she remembered, same dumb face. He was asking Stanley about something, gesturing with both hands, and Stanley was nodding with the patience of a man who dealt with confused tourists for a living.

The plan had been to wait. To spot him at breakfast, maybe, or in the elevator, and let the wave happen on her schedule. But here he was, right now, tired-looking and alone, and the wave was already loading in her arm.

She walked over and bumped his elbow with her purse, casual, like a stranger in a crowd. He turned and his whole face did something complicated. Shock first. Then something that looked a lot like happiness, arriving before he could stop it.

"Celina?"

"Reid." She said it flat, then remembered the cover story and softened it into a smile. "Oh my god, what are the odds!"

"What are you," he started, then restarted. "Are you here for the trip?"

"Half of it was mine," she said. "I wasn't going to waste the ticket."

He stared at her. Stanley, at the desk, watched them both with professional interest and gave nothing away. "You're staying here?" Reid asked.

"Fourteenth floor," she said. "You?"

"Twelfth." He ran a hand through his hair. "Kayla's not here. She and I ended things back in November, a few weeks after you moved out, and I never fixed the booking, and then I almost didn't come either, and then I did. I know how that sounds. I'm glad you're here, is the thing. I'm really glad you're here."

*Careful,* she thought. *He's delighted. Use it.* "Well," she said, "small world. We should get dinner sometime and laugh about it like adults."

"Tomorrow?" he said, too fast.

"Maybe. I'll check my schedule." She did not have a schedule. "Goodnight, Reid."

She walked to the elevator feeling his eyes on her back and thought the landing had gone better than planned. He looked sorry. He looked as though he expected to be yelled at, which was convenient, because yelling was step one.

* * *

Step two was the sabotage, and she built it carefully. In the morning she asked Stanley to recommend a restaurant, a nice one, hard to get into, and Stanley recommended one in Ginza and called it himself. Then she found Reid at breakfast, alone with coffee and a guidebook, and sat down across from him without asking.

"I heard about a place," she said. "Tiny, impossible to book. I got us a table for tonight. Seven thirty. It's in Ginza, some back street, you'd never find it." She gave him the address of a restaurant that did not exist at that address. Not that didn't exist at all. One that existed somewhere else entirely, so he would show up, wait, realize the error, and look like a fool in front of whoever he was trying to impress. It was small. It was petty. It was a start.

"That's great," Reid said. "Seven thirty. Should I dress up?"

"Jacket and no tie," she said, which was funny, because the jacket he owned was hers.

She spent the day doing tourist things with a phone full of Mildred's messages and a growing itch under her skin. The gardens were beautiful and she was mad the whole time, which took most of the beauty out of them.

At seven she took a table across the street from the fake address, with a view of the corner, and waited for him to show up and stand around looking confused. At seven twenty-five he appeared, wearing the jacket, checked his phone, checked the address on the building, and then, instead of standing there like an idiot, he walked straight across the street and through the door of the place where she was sitting.

"Hey," he said. "I think there's a mixup. This says the restaurant is here, but it's clearly a flower shop." He looked at her table, at her half-finished drink, and something moved across his face. Not anger. Something worse. Understanding. "Celina. Were you going to meet me here?"

"I was going to meet a friend here," she said.

"At the same address." He pulled out a chair anyway, uninvited, and sat down across from her. "Okay," he said. "Okay. So that's how tonight is