“Nice to see you,” Molly said politely.
“Well.” Her yell became a stage whisper. “Kit-Oh and Boots have a case of the old Mumbai handicap. They’ve sent me to run things in their stead. Girls will be girls, I suppose.” Lou winked one of her starry eyes conspiratorially.
“What?”
“The trots, darling. The scoots. Saltwater cleanse?”
Molly still looked confused.
“Bad tummies, darling. Bit of a party tax.”
“Oh.” Molly blushed. “Of course. I’d better go check on them. Can you keep the models from getting restless?”
“Oh no no no, Beans, you’re not going anywhere. These lazy Gauls will try to knock off at lunch, so we’d better get started. I think the girls need to be a bit shinier. Really gleaming. I’ll order some of the hotel’s moisturizer—it’s simply the best. Bring me the shot list.”
Molly frowned. “Sure thing,” she said. “Let me just pull that up.” As she pretended to search for the shot list, she texted Cat and Bess one more message:
DID YOU SEND LOU?!? SHE’S TAKING OVER!!
Bess, who had watched the entire scene from behind a luggage cart in the doorway, wrote back right away:
We’re fine, but don’t tell anyone. DO tell Lou she needs to check the hem on Alisa and set last looks on Yza.
Molly looked around, dumbfounded, and repeated the message; Bess folded herself between two garment bags and kept watch.
When Cat checked her phone, she found a message waiting from the exact person she’d intended to call: Paula Booth. Come up to the PH, she wrote back before changing into the dress that Molly had marked on her calendar, a calf-length Albert V. with thin straps that crisscrossed her shoulders. When Paula knocked five minutes later, Cat ushered her into the living room. Behind them, a click came from the front door as Bess let herself back into the suite. After seeing Paula, Bess sat quietly in a chair by the door.
“You do realize he’s going to sue you,” Cat said. Paula looked confused, until Hutton waved from the sofa.
“That’s true,” he offered, getting up. “I’m Mark Hutton. Though I imagine that you wouldn’t go to print without approval from Cooper Legal, am I right?”
Standing behind Cat, he towered over both women, yet Paula stared him down with confidence. “That’s correct. Cooper is not particularly concerned with defamation in this case.”
“I’ll try for copyright, then. I know you used Callie’s diary.”
“I see,” Paula responded evenly, looking around the room. She waved her hand toward the sofa and chairs arranged by the window. “Do you mind if I sit down?”
Hutton responded without blinking. “Of course,” he said politely, showing them both to a pair of chairs, though his tone was glacial. “Let’s sit.”
He lowered his frame onto the sofa across from Paula and Cat, who were seated in matching armchairs with a small walnut occasional table placed between them. Paula looked at him expectantly.
“All I’m telling you to do,” Hutton said confidently, “is to cut the text. Obviously, I think the photos are in poor taste, but you’re clearly welcome to publish those.”
“I can certainly appreciate your perspective,” Paula said, “although I’m afraid you may find a copyright suit against a billion-dollar corporation to be…difficult.” She turned to Cat before continuing, her posture tall and firm. “But that’s just my opinion. I’m afraid it’s not really up to me,” she said. “I’m resigning next week. I’m going to work for Mania. And I’m hoping you’ll come with—both you and Elizabeth, actually. I’m not here to fight. I’m here to offer you a very good job.”
Cat’s eyes bulged with shock. “Why?”
“Because they look up to you,” Paula said simply. “You’re very hard workers, Catherine, both of you. I know you’ll do well there. You’ll be their most important employees—‘maniacs,’ I believe, is the term they plan to use. And you don’t have to live in Los Angeles, obviously, or even New York. You could live anywhere you wanted to.”
Cat, openmouthed with disbelief, stared at Paula. “No, I mean, why would I take that job?” Her eyes narrowed.
“Well. That is what I’d like to discuss,” Paula said kindly. “Margot Villiers isn’t coming back to work—not next week and not ever. RAGE Fashion Book, as we knew it, is very much dead. I do realize that allowing Lou to write that article was insensitive. It was probably a mistake. It wasn’t very good, either, though it was—and I do hate this word—titillating. Margot’s judgment has not been the best this year, and while I have to give it to her—she really did pull out all the stops—nothing worked. Margot had a heart attack last week. She’s been unresponsive in the ICU for six days.”
Cat and Bess both gasped. Paula paused briefly to acknowledge their shock, then continued, “I’ve been handling her email. I’ve realized that it doesn’t matter to me anymore if RAGE survives, not if Margot’s gone. I don’t think she’ll be coming out of it.”
“But you took advantage of me,” Cat said quietly in a whisper gilded with contempt. “You used me. And my friends. And you made me become…this.” She gestured at her body, indicating her now-public identity.
“Nobody made you do anything,” Paula replied slowly, genuinely perplexed. “You did all of this”—she pointed to Cat’s emaciated frame and to her cellphone to indicate the Mania map—“all by yourself.”
Cat’s horrified face fell. “But I would have lost my job if I hadn’t done what you asked,” she said. “It was an impossible position.”
“That risk is where the rubber meets the road, isn’t it,” Paula agreed. “It’s hard to know your worth, or what to leverage and when to leverage it.”
“You’re telling me—after all the pressure you and Margot put me under—that I should have just quit if I didn’t like it?”
“Yes,” Paula said, agreeing again, “that is exactly what I’m telling you. It was my job to put pressure on you,” she explained gently. “I’m sixty years old, Catherine. I came up in this business when men called me ‘Sweet Tits’ to my face. I might be tougher than you,” she said, shrugging her shoulders, “and I might play the game a bit harder than you happen to think is fair, but that doesn’t mean you lack agency.”
Cat leaned back in her chair, folding her legs up under her arms and resting her head on her knees. As she looked at Paula’s face—her expression unexpectedly kind and clear—Cat realized how right she was. I should have quit months ago, she thought, should have quit the very second they asked her to write a memorial to Hillary and put their personal photos in the magazine. But she’d stayed, and she’d posed for a million pictures, and she’d let her whole life become a product.
“You can do whatever you want, Catherine,” Paula said simply. “Know your cards.”
“I want…” Cat let the silence hang in the air. “I want that story gone,” Cat demanded. “I want a hundred grand more than I made at RAGE, and I want the same for Bess. And I want my green card sponsored. No more of this H-1B bullshit.” The sentences had come out of her mouth so quickly, and so sharply, that she could hardly believe she’d said them—but looking at Hutton’s astonished face, it was clear that she had. His thick eyebrows were hovering an inch above his eyeglasses in shock.
“Agreed,” Paula replied, smiling. She held out her hand, and Cat shook it.
“I want it done now,” Cat said.
“Do you have a computer?” Paula asked.
Bess dropped her laptop on the table in front of her. Paula logged into the Cooper network with Margot’s credentials, pulled up the November file slated to be sent out to the printers, then handed it to Cat—who deleted every single line of text that had originally accompanied the photos of Callie.
“Don’t delete the photos,” Bess said. “Her family receives payment in full if they run.”
Cat left the images and handed the computer back to Paula, who saved and sent the file out to the printers.
“Done,” Paula
reported. “I feel good about that.”
“I want my deal in writing.”
Paula turned back to the laptop, where she updated the Mania contracts with Cat’s requirements. When she finished, Cat picked up the lobster phone and called down to the front desk. “I’m emailing you a document,” she snapped in rapid-fire French. “I want four copies printed and brought to the ballroom. And pens. Bring pens.” She slammed the phone down and rose from her chair.
“Ballroom?” Paula asked.
“He’s not here for us,” Cat said simply. Paula nodded, and a corner of her mouth pulled back in a kind of smile, but she said nothing. Cat wondered how much she already knew. They gathered their things and headed for the door.
“Can I ask you something?” Hutton asked Paula, taking advantage of the moment as they waited for the elevator.
“Possibly,” Paula agreed warily.
Hutton pulled Hillary Whitney’s note out of his pocket:
the ribbon is the key to everything
“Can you tell me what this means?” he asked.
Paula read it, then passed it to Cat. “It’s about the shoot that Catherine is working on today. Hillary sourced a synthetic, nontoxic fabric that can be 3-D-printed up to thirteen yards wide; in the manufacturer’s parlance, thirteen yards is a ribbon. That’s a huge leap for the garment industry—to have safe, cheap, easy manufacturing on such a large scale. Margot rejected the proposal the morning Hillary died. She was, at the time, afraid of running up RAGE’s resource bill any further. I think that rejection…well, it pushed Hillary over the edge.”
“Why’d she mail it?”
“That, I don’t know.”
“I do,” Cat said. “It’s something we did in boarding school. We sent postcards with inside jokes, quotes, things like that, to each other’s houses so we could read them at the end of the year. To remember what mattered.”
The elevator’s golden doors opened, and they walked out into the lobby.
Hutton trailed behind Cat and Paula as they strode toward the ballroom. The two women were opposites: one of them was tall, young, and nearly bald; the other, sixty, with her white hair in a conservative bun, but they had the same look in their eyes—determination. They were well matched, he thought, whether Cat knew it or not.
He’d been appalled when he first walked into the suite. Though he’d always thought of Cat as slender, in the last two and a half months her body had faded away, dissolved. She looked like she belonged in hospice somewhere as she stared at him, holding her coffee in her twiggy little hands, her clothes baggy on her bony frame. Still: he wanted her. Fat, thin, didn’t matter. Her attitude was endlessly appealing.
The odd part, as they walked through and around a fresh horde of overpainted young women—though it could have been the same horde from earlier, Hutton realized, he could hardly distinguish one girl from the next—was that nobody else looked at Cat like she was sick. Instead they looked at her with obvious approval, at the pointed bones of her shoulder blades and hips with plain, unvarnished envy. He felt it wash over the both of them, the glow of approval, of worship.
She marched them to an opulent ballroom. There were models everywhere, wearing wedding dresses and hanging from scaffolding all around the room, and a passel of pointy-faced older women stood in the corner drinking coffee. A teenage girl dressed like a mechanic ran over to them. “Cat, heyyyy,” she said anxiously. Cat held a finger to her lips. They walked past, to Hutton’s surprise, several large posters from Callie’s Valentino campaign.
Lou Lucas stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by RAGE employees, models, assistants, and photographers. Sausaged into a weird plastic dress, she was anxiously rubbing her hands together like an insect cleaning its antennae. As the group—Hutton, Cat, Bess, Paula, and Molly—descended upon her, Lou’s face went dark. The RAGE staffers, sensing the discomfort of one of their own, fell silent and turned to watch. A mixture of delight and confusion appeared on their faces as the tall, handsome police officer held up his badge and showed it to Lou Lucas.
“Hello, I’m Detective Mark Hutton, NYPD,” he said pleasantly, looming over her.
She looked up with shock. “Hello,” she replied uncertainly.
“I know about Lilac Futures,” he said. “I found the money.”
She moved quickly, trying to slip past him, and he grabbed her arm. Cat and Bess stepped around him, blocking access to the lobby.
“I’m going to take you back to New York,” Hutton announced to Lou, “and you’re going to turn yourself in.”
Lou snorted. “Why would I do that?” she asked.
“You will,” he said plainly before taking out his phone to show a picture of her daughter, Jane Lucas, walking into school on the Upper East Side, her face cheerfully oblivious to the undercover NYPD officer taking her photograph from across the street. “You registered Lilac Futures in Jane’s name. We can arrest and charge her. It’s…unusual to have a six-year-old in juvenile detention, but it does happen.”
“You’re not going to jail a child,” Lou replied flatly, though she was clearly panicking. Her skin was turning bright red beneath the plastic dress.
“We can and we will,” he said, as honestly as he knew how. “If you don’t come back to New York, we have the ability to keep her in juvenile detention for up to three weeks. The facilities are…brutal. Whatever happens to her will absolutely, one hundred percent be your fault.”
Lou stared at the floor. “Why are you doing this to me?” she asked before looking at him with hatred. “All I did was tell the truth about you.”
“This has nothing to do with the magazine,” he continued. “As the primary shareholder of Bedford Organics, you financed and conspired to distribute Schedule I narcotics, resulting in at least one fatality. Possibly two. We’ll be looking further into Callie Court’s death.”
Cat noticed a tiny ripple of terror passing through RAGE’s staff. In a fraction of a moment, Constance emitted a strangled noise, Rose stared hard at the ground, and Janet bit her lip with enough force to draw blood.
“Those bitches are not on me,” Lou snapped, referring to Callie and Hillary with unvarnished contempt. “They were adults. Americans. They had total control over their own lives.”
“You’re certainly welcome to argue that in a court of law,” he said. “Here’s what’s going to happen: I will escort you back to New York, right now. You will turn yourself in. That gives you roughly ten hours to figure out how to tell your children and arrange their child care after your arrest, not to mention contact your attorney. That’s much more than most people get.”
“If I don’t?”
“Your daughter will be taken to juvenile detention.”
“My husband will stop that,” she insisted.
“I’m afraid not,” he said, holding up his phone again and showing her Alexander Lucas’s Photogram account: #betterthandavos, it said beneath a picture of him toasting champagne with two former United States presidents on the deck of a sailboat. “He’s somewhere off the coast of Greece. We can be back in New York tonight.”
Lou opened her cellphone to dial her attorney, but Hutton used his huge hands to pry it easily from her bony fingers.
“You can have it back once we’re sitting on the plane,” he said.
“Fine,” Lou hissed, her eyes darting around the room as she obviously strategized ways to get away from him—but Hutton reached over and zipped a cable tie around her wrist, connecting it to one on his own, before she could stop him.
“You can pretend we’re holding hands,” he said, smiling.
Lou looked like she was about to cry. “No, that’s not okay,” she pleaded. “I…can’t.”
“You mean because of the story?” Hutton stepped back to let Paula, Cat, Bess, and Molly move into the foreground. The three young women looked at Paula expectantly. Constance Onderveet and the rest of the RAGE staff had gathered behind them and could hear every word.
Paula opened her mouth b
riefly, and then turned to Cat. “Go on then.”
“Lou, your November story is dead,” Cat said, “and you’re fired.”
“You ungrateful scabs!” Lou replied defiantly. “You’ve all used me. All you little strivers. I can’t believe I fell for it. Well, you can keep your tacky magazine! You’ll certainly be hearing from my attorney.”
Constance, Rose, and Janet’s faces turned bright red.
“Nobody used you,” Constance insisted, unconsciously scratching her arms, while Janet and Rose stood trembling behind her. “We have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re just some crazy woman we should never have let into our lives.”
“You killed Hillary Whitney,” Cat added firmly, rising to her full height. “I think you killed Callie, too. And I know you tried to poison us. I’ll be pressing charges.”
“Bloody little addicts,” Lou hissed. “Pills to stay thin, pills to be smart, pills to sleep, injections, bootcamps, surgeries. It’s a wonder there weren’t more corpses at the rate you lot were going. The office smelled like a bleeding perfume counter.”
At that moment, the twitchy concierge appeared, with a handful of pens and four printed copies of Cat’s and Bess’s contracts.
“Madame?” he offered. Grabbing the papers, Cat turned on her heel and walked to the craft services table, sweeping a basket of croissants out of the way as she signed her two copies and passed them back for countersignature. Paula signed them before turning to Bess, who didn’t move a muscle. Cat looked at her friend expectantly.
“I can’t,” Bess said. “I don’t want to work at Mania. Sorry. I couldn’t get a word in earlier. I hope that doesn’t mess things up.”
Unexpectedly, Paula smiled at her. “That’s okay,” she told Bess. “Do what’s right for you.”
Cat felt all the blood draining from her head—felt her fingers and toes go slightly numb. She stared at her friend. It had never occurred to her that Bess wouldn’t always want what Cat wanted.
“I’m not the same as you,” Bess said gently. “And you don’t need me.”
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