Chapter 9 #2
Now she crosses her arms. “Why are you here, Saylor? Is Rina okay?”
The question hangs between us in the glass-walled office, forty-seven floors above a city that keeps moving even when the people in it are standing completely still.
Through the windows, Manhattan does its thing, cabs and cranes and a million people going somewhere, and none of it matters because Celeste is looking at me with those doe-like brown eyes and I’ve forgotten every reasonable answer I rehearsed on the subway.
“I came to see you.”
Her fingers press to her temples as she tilts her head, studying me like I’m a design flaw in an otherwise perfect garment. “But why?”
“You know why.” I beg her to understand the sentiment so I don’t have to awkwardly explain it. But she stands stoically, like she’s frozen in place, waiting to thaw out.
She holds my gaze. I hold hers. The silence is a living thing—it breathes, it expands, it takes up residence between us like a third person in the room who knows more than either of us is willing to say.
I can see her jaw working, the almost-imperceptible clench and release of someone who is deciding, in real time, how much of herself to reveal.
She obviously decides: not yet.
“I don’t know why. It’s why I asked,” she says, but the edge is gone from her tone. What’s left is quieter. Curious, maybe. Or tired of pretending.
I lift the Rolex case. “I only came to return this.” It’s a cop-out, but I’m reading the room. And everything in here is saying I really don’t belong. This was a bad idea. Impulse control is a skill I clearly lack.
“I meant for you to keep it. As a thank-you for being such a lovely date, Saylor. Actually, you were so much more than that. An instant friend and confidant. I appreciate it.”
Damn she built the walls up high in just over a week. I might as well be on my tiptoes trying to look over the Great Wall of China.
“I’d have no use for it besides pawning it. Something this beautiful shouldn’t end up at Fast Jerry’s on Eighth Avenue.”
“Who is Fast Jerry?”
“He’s a loan shark who owns a pawn shop that you should only go to out of pure desperation. He pays decent but you’re lucky to make it out alive.”
Her left eye squints. “What? Do what you please with the watch, Saylor. But please don’t go to Fast Jerry’s anymore. There’s a reputable used jewelry exchanger on Fifth. Very honest and legal. Would you like a card?”
“I can’t accept a gift like this from a client. You know it’s too much.” I hold up my thumb and forefinger, pinching the air. “And it makes me feel about this big.”
“I didn’t mean to—” She sighs. “Just keep it. Please.”
I set the case on the edge of her desk. She looks at it. Looks at me. Neither of us moves it.
“I bet you I’m more stubborn than you are,” I say.
“I highly doubt that—”
A knock on the glass door startles us both.
Through the glass, a woman is pressing her face close to the door with the confused urgency of someone who has just discovered that her own office is locked against her.
She’s young, brunette, holding a smoothie in one hand and her phone in the other, wearing an expression that suggests she’s never encountered a locked door in her professional life and isn’t sure this is real.
Celeste closes her eyes. A deep breath enters through her nose and exits through her teeth in a controlled stream that could strip wallpaper.
She unlocks the door.
“Margot.”
“Hi! Sorry, I was just—the door was locked? I didn’t know it locked. Did you know it locked? I brought you a smoothie.”
“Yes, Margot. I’m aware my office locks. And I didn’t ask for a smoothie.”
“I know, but I passed by this place and stopped for a boba tea. This is way healthier than coffee…”
“Well thank you for watching my waistline, but I specifically sent you out for a cortado. I need a boost. I’m going to be here all night working on the fall line.”
“Which is why this is better. It’s brain food…it’s green…it has spirulina.” Margot holds it out like a peace offering from a country that doesn’t understand the terms of the war. I’m the outsider here, and even I want to tell her to zip her lips and stop digging her grave.
“Did you call the linen mill?”
“I left a voicemail.”
“A voicemail.”
“Two voicemails, actually.”
“And the Bergdorf meeting?”
“Still on the calendar for next Tuesday.”
“Which Tuesday slot? The two o’clock in Midtown or the two thirty in Chicago? Because last I checked, both are on there, and I haven’t yet figured out how to split myself into two separate women, though at this point I’m considering it.”
Margot blinks. Looks at the smoothie. Looks at Celeste. Looks at me, as if I might offer a lifeline. I offer nothing. This is between a woman and her assistant and the deep, abiding chasm between them.
“I’m not sure if the meeting is at their office or yours.”
Celeste closes her eyes, grimacing like she’s chewing on glass. “Could you find out please?”
“Uh, yes. I’ll…go check on that,” Margot says, retreating with the smoothie still extended, like someone backing away from a bear while holding a picnic basket.
“Margot,” Celeste calls after her. “If the meeting is at their office, can you please arrange my travel?”
“Yes.” She nods enthusiastically. “Totally can do that. Where are you going, and what days?”
Celeste catches my gaze, steam coming out of her ears, wordlessly asking me if I see what she has to deal with.
“You know what, Margot? Don’t worry about it. Just confirm the meeting location.”
Margot sets the smoothie down by the side table toward the front of the office.
Only when she’s on the other side of the door and out of sight does Celeste hurry to the table to collect the smoothie.
“This is art. Hand-sculpted pottery by the apprentice to the pope who said throwing clay is how he has his spiritual epiphanies. This is the last piece he made before he fully joined the church. And now…there is a green smoothie ring on it.”
Celeste stares at the ceiling for a long moment.
When she looks at me again, there’s something almost funny in her expression—the dark humor of a woman who is fighting for custody of an unborn baby, battling her dead best friend’s mother in court, and yet somehow her most persistent daily crisis is a six-figure assistant who can’t operate a calendar.
“She’s my biggest problem,” Celeste says.
“I’m in a legal war with Eleanor Montgomery-Trace, I’m trying to prepare for a caseworker who’s going to evaluate every corner of my life to justify to everyone why I’m not fit to be a mother, my new fall line is refusing to come together even well past its deadline, and somehow the thing that’s going to break me is Margot and her fucking spirulina smoothies. ”
Celeste buries her face in her hands and it takes everything in me not to cross the space between us and wrap her in my arms. I’m not on the clock today. Am I even allowed to touch her anymore?
“What’s she not doing? Besides everything?” I ask.
Celeste crosses the room, sets the smoothie down on a coaster on the coffee table, then sits on the edge of her desk.
The executive posture loosens—just a fraction, just enough for me to see the exhaustion underneath.
“The personal things. The things I can’t delegate to my legal team or my design team.
The things that require someone to actually show up and do the work.
” She rubs the bridge of her nose beneath her glasses.
“The attorney warned me that Eleanor has a strong case. This is no longer about what Whit wanted. This is about what’s best for the baby.
She thinks it’ll help my case if I look less like a Manhattan CEO who lives in a high-rise and more like someone who’s prepared to raise a child.
Eleanor’s already told the court that my lifestyle is incompatible with motherhood.
My apartment is a glass box in Tribeca. It screams ‘childless career woman.’ It doesn’t scream ‘nursery.’”
“So you need a different space.”
“Well I have a different space. My parents left me their house in Westchester when they relocated to Milan. It’s been sitting empty for six years.
It has a yard. It has a neighborhood with good schools.
It has everything a caseworker would want to see.
” She pauses. “It also hasn’t been touched since my parents left.
There are rooms with sheets over the furniture.
The kitchen hasn’t been updated since the early two thousands.
There’s a loveseat in the master bedroom in French Script. ”
“French Script?”
“You know, with all those calligraphy letters printed all over cream linen in no sensical fashion, like a fabric printer’s machine had a nervous breakdown. It isn’t dangerous to a child, but it is miserably outdated. I swear the only thing worse than my mom’s cooking is her taste in textiles.”
I snort, then try to cover it with a cough. “You need someone to fix it up.”
“I need someone to make it look like a home instead of a time capsule. And I need it done before the caseworker’s visit, which is”—she checks her phone—“two weeks away. There’s too much to coordinate, and you know how contractors are.
About five years into our marriage, a renovation nearly broke me and Greg.
” She shrugs. “In hindsight, I wish it would’ve.
I could have saved myself some wasted years. ”
“I can do it.”
Celeste’s eyes snap to mine. “You can do what?”
“The house. I can get it ready in time. I’m good with my hands—I’ve been maintaining a building with a broken lift and a landlord who thinks ‘responsive’ means returning a call within the same fiscal quarter.
Painting, repairs, light renovation, furniture assembly—I’ve done all of it for my apartment and a couple neighbors, too. And I work fast.”