Laura shot her the dirtiest look she could muster but got up and kissed Mom good-bye.
When they stepped out into the damp December night, she checked her phone and found a text from Jeremy.
—I’m at Narita.—
Ten minutes ago. She could catch him during his layover in the Tokyo airport.
“You coming back with me?” Ruby asked.
They stood at the curb, shuffling their feet in the cold, pulling on gloves and tying scarves.
“I think I’m staying in the city.”
“He’s not even here, so I don’t know why you’d go over there. And I’m awake now.”
“I have an idea. But I have to call Jeremy before he gets on a plane.”
“Fine.” Ruby pointed at a coffee shop across the street. “I’m going in there. Come in when you’re finished.”
Laura nodded and made her call as Ruby walked away. As soon as she heard his voice, she missed him. It wasn’t something she would’ve allowed herself if he hadn’t been on his way home already or if Mom had been well.
“I haven’t been to the office all day,” she said.
“Everything’s fine. We’re on top of it. How’s your mother?”
“I have no idea. The doctors say she’s stabilizing after the surgery, and she seems okay. I mean, she just got out a few hours ago, so she was weak. She talked a few minutes about the Brunican entourage, then she was wiped out.”
“Where are you now?”
“On the curb on the corner of Seventeenth and First. Ruby’s waiting for me. She wants me to go back with her, but I want to go hug your pillow. I miss you. It’s so stupid. Four months ago, it wouldn’t have mattered where you were, and now it’s like I can’t sleep without you. I’m sorry. Am I being gushy?”
“I like you gushy. Fifteen hours and I’ll be home. We can do it different next time. I don’t sleep so great without you either.”
She was relieved to hear it. In all the running around and with Mom sick, she’d managed to cover up the emptiness where he lived in her. His physical presence, his breath on her shoulder at night, his feet entwined with hers, his complaining about the strength of her coffee, and his voice over breakfast as they talked about factories and trims—those were things she owned. And when he was gone, it was as if someone had moved the train station across the street or hid one shoe. She could walk across the street or find a full pair, but it created a skip in her mind, the feeling of something not right, not where it should be. A puddle to be jumped. A broken pencil lead. A tangled bobbin thread.
“Are you going straight to the office?” she asked. “I have a lot to review with you. The missing dress, you know I didn’t keep my hands off it.”
“Of course,” he said with a little laugh. “And have you talked to Barry?” He slipped it in as if it were just another talking point, catching up on a friend’s breakup or a news story about a celebrity, but there was a tightness about the way the question started that told her Barry’s offer had been weighing on him.
She took in a sharp breath, as if she’d been caught at something. “Yeah. Same deal.”
“Okay. We can talk about it when I get back. I’ll call you from JFK. Don’t forget to love me.”
“Couldn’t if I tried.”
**
Laura slid into the booth across from Ruby with her own cup of coffee.
“He’s coming?” Ruby asked.
“At Narita right now.”
“Good. That’s very not-dickey of him.”
“I’ll let him know you spoke so highly.” Laura took a deep breath to let Ruby know she was about to change the subject. “What if I stopped working with Jeremy?”
Ruby picked at her croissant. “What do you mean?”
“If I took a job elsewhere?”
“Like that would ever happen.”
Laura’s silence was heavier than anything she could have said.
Ruby pushed her plate away and leaned forward. “You’re serious?”
“My whole life revolves around him. He was my first boss, my first love. And now he backs my company and runs my days and owns me at night. It’s uncomfortable for me. No, I’m sorry. It’s not uncomfortable. It’s very comfortable. Too comfortable.”
“He’s going to flip out.”
“I know. And here’s what else I know. If Gracie had pulled backing at any point, he would have left her. So I’m scared.”
“If he’d do that to you, Laura, then he’s doing you a favor.”
Ruby was right, of course, because she wasn’t in the middle of it. It was easy to talk about ripping off the Band-Aid when it wasn’t your knee that had been skinned, when the brain was functioning on all cylinders and there weren’t a hundred chemicals in her body saying, Don’t let him go! Don’t let him go!
“Besides all that,” Laura said, “there’s the issue of Sartorial. He loves the line, but if he gets pissed enough and pulls backing, we’re back to square one. And if my new gig makes it hard to manage without his staff—”
“I’m back at Tollridge. Or worse.”
“I’m sorry. We can get Pierre on it.”
Ruby waved her hands and bowed her head. “Stop. Are you leaving JSJ or not?”
“I haven’t decided. And don’t try to do it for me.” Her coffee was cold, and she knew Ruby was going to try to convince her to go one way or the other. Though she was curious what her sister would say, the idea of splitting off from Jeremy was so nascent, she didn’t want to air it out too much. It needed a home in her mind first, as something for her to put in the Accept or Reject pile. The limbo it hovered in was her limbo. She owned it, and she wasn’t going to let anyone batch it for her.
“It’s nine o’clock,” Laura said, picking up the check. She worked twice the hours as Ruby and made three times as much, so she picked up every check. “Can we drop it? Let’s make another little run before we get swallowed up into work tomorrow. It’ll be fun.”
“Fine. I’m awake now. Where are we going?”
“The Iroquois.”
**
The real dress had been in Dad’s storage space, and Jobeth had acquired it, which explained exactly nothing at the moment. But she knew Dad, and that was something. Laura was getting itchy to find him, because as the days went by and the real dress wasn’t found, Jeremy got closer to losing his bond, and her father’s trail got colder.
Ruby wrapped her scarf tightly around her neck when they got to street level. “I think Dad wanted to be high prince.”
“Maybe that’s what the princess wanted, but Dad doesn’t seem like Mr. Alpha. Would he dump everything to marry a person of the wrong gender to be the ruler of a small island nation? Nah. We would have grown up on Park Avenue if he was that type.”
“Wouldn’t you want to be a princess?”
“No way.”
“Normal people wish they were royalty. That’s why they’re royalty. Everyone wants to be them.”
Laura wanted to tell her that argument was falling in on itself, but there was no point. If Ruby wanted to believe Regular Dad aspired to be High Prince Dad, Laura would be happy to play along until Ruby was proven wrong.
They accessed the building the same way Laura had before, through the parking lot and down a hallway. She got lost, found her way, and knocked on the door. When there was no answer, she put her ear close and knocked again. The sound on the other side was hollow and echoey.
“Let’s try the other side,” Laura suggested.
Ruby followed along, padding across the carpet, probably zombied out on the tail end of her second wind. They found 7Da. The door was ajar.
“Not good,” Ruby said, touching the door and pushing slightly. The lights were out inside.
“Maybe she collapsed or something,” Laura said.
“Right.”
With their excuse lined up, Laura pushed the door all the way open. The room was lit by light from the streetlamps coming through the bare windows, making dull trapezoids on the ceiling
s and walls. The moon amplified those shapes by angling them sideways in triangles on the floors. It looked like the inside of a huge kaleidoscope.
“Hello?” Laura called. “Jobeth?”
The closet doors were open, wire hangers left dangling and plastic dry cleaning bags twisted around the poles and bunched on the floors. The kitchen was unchanged, except that every personal artifact had been removed, right down to the garbage pails and drain catch. Ruby called out for Jobeth but received no answer. The place was empty.
“Well,” Ruby said, “this sucks.”
Laura strolled down the hall and found a brown leather shoebox with white topstitching at the bottom of the only hanger-and-plastic-bag-free closet in the apartment. The box sat in the exact center of the doorway, parallel to all sides around it. Not a haphazard placement.
“Ruby!”
Ruby ran around the corner and stopped in front of the closet. “Oh! A vintage Jose Inuego shoebox. Those go for, like, seven hundred dollars on eBay.”
“What if there are shoes in it?”
“No one would leave those behind.”
“I tried on a pair when I was here with her. The princess’s shoes. They were in that box.”
“And you’re staring at it.”
“If there are shoes in there, then she left them for me, which means she expected me. I’m going to feel really toyed with, and it’s going to be very awkward.”
Ruby pushed the box with her toe. It moved. She pushed it again. It moved farther. “I think there are shoes in there.” She flicked her toe upward, and the box lid flopped to the floor. There were most certainly shoes in there—a pair of four-inch Jose Inuego stilettos barely worn by their original owner and worn once in a kitchen.
Laura scooped up the box. The shoes lay inside the linen tissue paper. She searched around the tissue paper and found a fresh round clementine, otherwise known as a Cutie. It could have been one of the little fruits Laura had helped scoop up in the hall, and it was unlikely it had fallen in there by accident.
“If you don’t take them, I will,” Ruby grumbled.
Laura took them. She was, after all, only flesh and blood.
**
According to Jimmy’s voicemail, Mom was going to need breakfast. She was permitted Jell-O and little else. Naturally, the strawberry flavor at the hospital was too tasty for Mom, and Laura and Jimmy had strategized at eleven at night over the phone to mix lemon Jell-O with half-clear gelatin because the woman had to eat. He was a good guy, that Jimmy. It was about time Mom got lucky in love.
At midnight, Laura stood in the middle of Jeremy’s spotless kitchen, trying to figure out if he owned useful things like bowls, mixers, and measuring cups, and if so, where the hell he’d put them. Jeremy wasn’t much of a cook, so his kitchen was always spotless. They made coffee there, drank wine at the table, and stored takeout in the fridge. They’d made love against the counter twice, on the floor once, and started plenty of encounters on the barstools. But the room wasn’t used for much else.
Having located the requisite bowls and spoons, she made the Jell-O without ceremony. No music. No TV. Just her measuring cups, bags of powder, and the faucet.
And of course, a box containing a pair of two thousand dollar shoes lay on the counter. Once the bowl was in the fridge, she took out the shoes. They were every bit as gorgeous as she remembered, and when she slipped them on, she reminded herself that they hadn’t been made for her, nor had they been made for the princess. They were made beautifully, and beautifully made things were made with the illusion that they came off the line for you and you only. The shoes seduced Laura with their touch, their umami smell, and the caress of their curves. The roan color of the leather next to the wood inlay of the soles created a visual, tonal harmony that gave the skin of Laura’s feet a hue that glowed with health. The angle of the heel to the floor elongated her legs, curving her calves in such a way as to fit perfectly in the palm of a man’s hand.
“Nice shoes,” she said as she turned sideways in the mirror. “Really.”
Nice shoes to leave in an empty closet in the hope someone she had met once would stumble upon them. It was something a woman would do if she thought she could buy another pair sometime, because she had so much money she could give such a gift.
Jobeth was set to get the insurance money for the dress, wasn’t she? How many million? On Jeremy’s bond, no less. That was going to hurt him, and he was already stretched thin, with no backing but his own finances.
Had Jobeth heard Laura was trying to find the dress? Had Cangemi mentioned it, maybe? Had Jobeth called the detective about the woman who came by uninvited and asking questions? Was Jobeth trying to buy her silence with a pair of nice shoes? Oh, no. That would not do, not at all.
At the very thought, Laura felt a stickiness of sweat underfoot, and a pinch where leather met toe. The ball of her foot was hot from friction, and she needed nothing more than to kick off the shoes and stuff them back in the box.
**
Laura wore a yellow damask blouse with a mandarin collar and a new closure she and Ruby had developed that zipped up in pure supple silence. The closure tape was forty dollars an inch.
They’d needed Jeremy’s permission to put it on, and when he saw the shirt on Kelly, he touched it and said, “I’d get slaughtered if I put this on my line.”
Laura felt Ruby stiffen at the suggestion that he’d use their development.
He had stepped away and addressed them. “Do this. You have to. Add a short sleeve in this fabric to get you some wiggle room on the price of this one, but do it.”
So Laura wore the yellow short-sleeved sample because he’d recognize it.
She made up her face with utmost care. An infectious smile became mandatory throughout the morning. Jeremy was coming home, and though the circumstances around his early return were less than optimal, he was still going to be back in a matter of hours.
“Don’t you look nice,” Mom said, her head propped on a pillow. “Hot date?”
“Thank you, and yes.”
Laura put a cloth napkin under Mom’s chin and spooned breakfast into her mouth. The gelatin had come out perfect, light yellow enough to be considered white and borderline tasteless. Laura had brought it to the hospital in a little porcelain cup she’d found in the back of Jeremy’s bottom cabinet, and she was feeding it to Mom with a stainless spoon from his drawer. Her mother seemed worse, weaker.
“What are they giving you for the pain?” Laura asked.
“Oh, I don’t want that stuff. It gives me a headache.”
“Mom, really?”
Mom patted her hand. “When it’s too much, I’ll take it. I can manage this.”
“Barney’s sister disappeared,” Laura said. “I mean, I’m sure she’ll turn up when the insurance company needs to write her a check, but I went there last night and poof. Gone.”
“Ruby said you found a bead?” Mom said around the spoon.
“Teardrop cabochon.”
Mom nodded. She’d been intimate with the beads.
Laura asked, “Did you hear what happened to Barney and Henrietta?”
Mom shook her head.
“I’ll tell you, but it’s ugly.”
“I just had my heart cut open.”
“Barney shot Henrietta fifteen years ago, about when Soso came, then killed himself. I’m not trying to dump it on you, but I thought you’d have some insight.”
“Nothing. I feel sorry. That’s all.”
“How do you like your breakfast?”
“Delicious.”
Laura scraped the bottom of the cup. “Aren’t you glad you stopped hanging out with those people? I mean, imagine, you run back to Brunico with Samuel, bringing Ruby and me along, and you might have gone crazy, too. Or be dead. And then what?”
Mom leaned back. She looked tired.
Laura fluffed her pillow and helped her get the bed down.
“Go to work,” Mom said. “You’re making me crazy.”<
br />
CHAPTER 14
The email situation was horrendous. Jeremy must have worked through the night to make up for what Laura had missed while Mom was hospitalized because he’d looked at every one and answered where appropriate. Patterns and orders were shifting over to New Sunny Garments, and there were glitches, delays, and misunderstandings. A typo on an elastic code was going to cost them, as was an Italian interfacing where the EU duty to China hadn’t been calculated. Federated wanted chargebacks on stuff they put on sale a week earlier than they’d been contracted, and there was a delay getting the origin labels into the back necks of blouses.
But Laura’s mood would not be soured. She did what she could and walked to her ten-thirty fitting as if she wore cloud-soled shoes. Her phone rang on the way. “Hi, Barry. I’m walking into a fitting.”
“You want me,” he said. “Let me take you out tonight, and I can give you more reasons why.”
“Dean’s going to get jealous.”
“It’s not Dean you’re worried about, darling.” He changed his tone. “Let’s stop joking. I have to set this thing up. If I’m totally out, just say it. I need to get moving on the IPO.”
Laura stopped outside the fit room door. “No. You’re not out. But Jeremy’s coming back in a few hours, so I can’t meet tonight. Tomorrow. Lunch?”
“Oh, sweet darling, that is just—”
“I haven’t decided, Barry. So don’t get your bra in a bunch. It’s just not a definite no.”
“I like a challenge.”
**
By afternoon, her excitement at Jeremy’s return had abated completely. She sat in the conference room overlooking Broadway, the perfect shine of the table reflecting the dim day outside. Iggy from Theosophy Studio stood on the other side of the twenty-foot long table, showing her geometric prints for next year’s Winter deliveries. Print studios hired artists to come up with patterns based on certain trends or their own inspiration. The hundreds of prints were stacked and placed into a suitcase, and a salesman brought them around town. One print could cost between seven hundred and two thousand dollars. She wanted to see the stacks first, because if she got to the bottom of the pile, she was looking at a bunch of industry rejects. Iggy, who had known Ruby through a mutual friend, always came to Jeremy first. He moved the sixteen-by-twenty sheets like a slideshow on the table as Laura stood over them. One print became another and another; piles became stacks. Laura pulled out the things she liked for either Jeremy or Ruby to sort through and edit. She sipped coffee, chatting about this model and that designer, who was selling and who was selling out.
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