Erica #2
“Spending her own money. Buying jewelry. Walking outside. Grieving too visibly, honestly.”
“Okay, but that’s not insanity,” Ivy says. “That’s once a month like clockwork for me.”
“Me too,” Tanya agrees.
“Have you guys seen those lists?” Zoe says. “Reasons women got committed to asylums in the old days.“ She pulls up an image on her phone that looks like it’s from a vintage booklet and starts to read some of them. "‘Feebleness of intellect.’"
“Relatable,” Rue says, immediately.
“‘Female disease.’”
I raise my hand “Guilty.”
Zoe goes on. “‘Reading novels.’”
Ginger snorts. “That’s one point against me.”
“‘Imaginary female trouble.’”
“Imaginary?” Tanya repeats.
"‘Laziness,’” Zoe finishes, and drops the phone into her lap like a mic.
Rue, flat on her back on the counter now, stares at the ceiling. “Well. I’m cooked. Commit me now.”
“Half the people in this room would’ve been committed by Wednesday,” Tanya says.
“Honestly,” Ivy says. “Most of history can probably be explained by the fact that all the big decisions got made by nineteen-year-old men who had wine for breakfast.”
“That tracks,” Suri says, and digs into a bag of marshmallows Rue was previously hiding with her body.
“This is the best tangent,” I say, feeling the room lean fully into a conversation that could, left unsupervised, eat the rest of the night. “And we are absolutely finishing it later, but I need to land the plane.”
I swipe to the next image. A slightly younger woman, sharp-jawed, severe traveling clothes that look like a hundred degrees underneath.
“After Mary was released, she spent four years in France. Her traveling companion was a woman named Eleanor Armitage, from a prominent Lexington, Kentucky family.”
I let it sit half a beat.
“My five-times great grandmother.”
“Shut up,” Rue says.
“While they were in France, Mary gave Eleanor the necklace outright. Partly out of defiance, if you ask me. Her own son had just locked her up thinking his mother couldn’t be trusted with her own jewelry box, and Mary was not about to let that necklace anywhere near his well-lawyered hands.
But mostly it was love for the one person who’d spent four years treating her like a friend.
There are letters that prove it. Mary’s, and Eleanor’s own diary.
Together they show it wasn’t stolen or smuggled.
It was given, on purpose, to spite Mary’s son. ”
“So… it’s your birthright,” Ginger says slowly. “The necklace actually belongs to you.”
“It should,” I say. “In the 1950s, a lending company seized the entire Armitage estate to settle a debt that never actually existed. Land, furniture, jewelry, all of it. The necklace wasn’t even named in their paperwork.
It wasn’t accounted for. It just went out the back door with the rest of the estate and stopped existing on paper entirely. ”
I swipe again, and a newspaper clipping appears with the headline, “History’s Lost Jewels.” “It doesn’t resurface until it turns up at the Bellenden Museum of American History in the early seventies. It was donated anonymously. Nobody’s ever explained where it was, or who had it, in between.”
The room goes quiet.
“So why donate it?” Tanya asks. “When whoever took it could have sold it?”
“Because they couldn’t find a buyer,” Ginger supplies.
“Exactly,” Zoe chirps. “And somewhere in those twenty blank years, somebody decided the cleanest story was that Eleanor stole it herself.”
Ivy lets out a long breath. “Well, I’ll be.”
“My family’s name got dragged through a century of mud for a crime that was never proven,” I say, feeling a bit of emotion wobble out of my shaky voice.
The provenance letters have been missing since the 1950s, but what these ladies don’t know yet is that I’ve spent the past six years searching, and I’m close to uncovering the truth.
Nobody says anything for a second. Rue sets down the Takis bag entirely, which might be the most sincere gesture of solidarity she’s capable of. Ginger’s jaw ticks. Even Ivy just looks at me like she’s recalculating something.
“Okay,” Tanya says quietly. “Now I actually want to hurt somebody, and I don’t even know their name yet.”
“You will,” I say. “Give it a few days.”
I tap the board one last time. A formal announcement for the Stars and Stripes Gala. All red, white, and blue with gold leaf accents.
“On July eighteenth, the necklace leaves the museum for the first time since it’s been at the B-Mah. In celebration for the nation’s two hundred fiftieth anniversary, the Friendship Jewel will be on display under armed guards."
I let the silence hold a moment.
“That night, we’re taking it back.”
For one full second, nobody moves.
Then every hand in the room shoots up at once, and the questions come so quick and so loud and so completely on top of each other that I genuinely cannot tell whose voice is whose anymore. Zoe and I try to address all the questions one by one, but we also have a lot more details to cover.
At one point, I announce, “Those of you staying in the loft, roll out your sleeping bags, because tomorrow, we start pulling off one of the biggest jewelry heists ever.”
Rue slides off the counter, Takis bag held aloft like a torch. “Okay, I just need to say. This is going to be legendary. To the Armitage Seven, woop!”
“To the Armitage Seven,” the other women echo, and my heart is completely full for the first time in a lot of years.
We spend the rest of the night going over logistics and what roles everyone will play, and somewhere in there another wine bottle empties and a fourth or fifth one opens, and somebody produces a box of chocolate-covered pretzels from a cabinet nobody remembers stocking.
Tanya grimaces at the crude shoebox model of the ballroom and offers to make a true scale model of the entire hotel.
Zoe pulls up the gala’s preliminary guest list just to see how bad the security is.
“They’re running last year’s credentialing software,” she reports, delighted, like she found twenty dollars in an old coat pocket. “This is going to be embarrassingly easy.”
“Don’t jinx it,” Ginger says, now laying on the floor, belly full of wine and junk food.
By two in the morning the warehouse has fully surrendered to sleepover conditions. I’m rinsing wine glasses in the world’s smallest sink when Zoe corners me, voice low enough it doesn’t carry past the fridge.
“So,” she says. “Did you land the invite to the gala yet?”
“Not yet. These things take finesse. I’ve got it handled.”
She gives me the look.
“Erica. We are running out of time, girl.”
“I know how a calendar works, Zoe.”
“Do you, though? Gala’s in eighteen days. Last I heard, you had zero invite, zero hockey hunks asking you to be his plus-one, and a whole lot of I got this.”
She’s not wrong. She’s never wrong. It’s honestly her worst quality.
“I suppose,” she says, drawing it out the way she does right before I’m not going to like whatever comes next. “We need to bring out the big guns.”
I stop rinsing. “The big guns.”
“The big guns.” There’s a glint in her eye I absolutely do not trust.
“I have a plan,” Zoe says.
“Not interested.”
“You’re going to love it. Or hate it. Honestly, coin flip.” She’s already backing toward the sleeping bags, grinning the exact grin that guarantees I am, one hundred percent, not going to love it. “Get some sleep, Armitage. We’ve got lots of work to do.”
Big guns. A plan. I already hate it.
Out in the common area, somebody shrieks “PILLOW FIGHT!”
Zoe and I look at each other for a half second.
Then we’re running to join in.