36. Jenna
Jenna
The presidential suite at the Peninsula currently contains seven women, four robes, two hair teams, a makeup artist named Sasha who works exclusively in silence, and a volume of champagne that Audrey has begun tracking on the notepad by the phone “for science.”
It was Layla’s idea—of course it was—one suite, everyone together, get ready the way you’re supposed to before a night like this.
I budgeted an hour for it and planned to arrive composed and finished.
Instead, I’ve been here since two o’clock in a robe with my hair in rollers, eating room-service fries off Serena’s plate, and I can’t remember the last time I laughed this much.
Possibly never. The committee has stopped keeping minutes.
“Hold still,” Hailey says. She’s cross-legged on the ottoman in front of me, doing my nails herself because she didn’t trust “a stranger with this moment.” Her own hair is already done—old-Hollywood waves that took the hair team forty minutes and made Miranda gasp like a period drama.
“You keep flexing your fingers. It’s like you’re trying to type emails in your head. ”
“I am not.” I laugh.
“It’s like you’re so unaccustomed to having fun that your body is staging a revolt,” she teases. “To whom it may concern. Henceforth!”
“I do not sound like that,” I say, pinching a fry and not acknowledging that I absolutely do sound like that.
“It’s very formal fun, though. Like, you’re making a joke at someone’s request, but you want them to leave a positive Yelp review.
” Hailey blows on my nails, inspecting her precision.
“We should do a bit, J. Pretend we’re someone else for a night.
You be whoever you want. And I’m—I’m Lucy Hartford, the reigning queen of the Chicago Literary Underground, whose expertise is very important. ”
My eyes drift to the closet mirror, where Serena is getting her eyeliner done by Sasha.
“Lucy Hartford?” Serena says. “That sounds made up.”
“And your point?” Hailey grins. “Lucy has a mission. She runs an online library for underprivileged children and occasionally presents at international conferences. She’s a pillar of her local wine bar.
She’s tragically single. She’s not seeking love tonight—just adventure and, ideally, a stranger with upper-arm tattoos. ”
“Let’s make it a double,” Miranda calls out from across the suite.
She and Hailey met at noon and have already achieved the thing I worried about, which is instant, catastrophic friendship.
“I’ll be her cousin, Shonda. I have seven children and a mysterious past. I’m also not on the market, unless the market has a sale on stemless crystal or really good cheese. ”
“Why are we stemless now?” Layla asks, eyeing the flute in her hand.
“Because the stems get in the way when you’re sitting down,” Miranda explains, matter-of-fact.
“One can’t be expected to binge-watch Netflix with a long-stemmed wine glass.
Either your boobs or your belly get in the way.
” She demonstrates with her champagne flute, and I have to admit, I see her point.
“Stemless is the future,” Hailey says, nail brush hovering midair.
“Miranda, I’m prepared to die on this hill for the entire curvy-babes-in-silk-robes demographic.
” She sets the brush down, rotating my hand toward the light with near-religious reverence.
“There. If these don’t bring an investment round to tears, I’ll eat the top coat. ”
“Gorgeous,” Audrey says, dabbing at her lips in the mirror. “I mean, that pink is sending me, but also—” She glances at Hailey. “Wasn’t your interview yesterday? With the Canfield Group?”
Nora’s eyes flick up, clearly interested.
Hailey’s spine goes straight. “It was. Yes.” Her hands fold tightly in her lap, and I catch the micro tremor in her pinky. I know nerves when I see them.
“Tell us,” Layla says, sliding onto the couch with a sweep of her robe. “How’d it go?”
Hailey inhales, and I’m suddenly transported back to the kitchen counter across from her, when I was visiting home and she was seventeen, prepping for a mock debate final with her notes scattered everywhere and a honey-mustard stain on her shirt. Terrified and unbreakable at the same time.
“It was intense,” Hailey says, her voice pitched high.
She tells us how it was a one-on-one interview with Xavier Field, and he never smiled once.
He peppered her with random questions that sometimes didn’t make sense.
Then he asked her to reorganize a hypothetical CEO’s catastrophic Monday in real time, and at the end of it looked at her and said, “We’ll be in touch. ”
Hailey shrugs, but I know the tells—the thumb, the locked jaw, the way she starts organizing anything within arm’s reach.
“He could not have been less readable if he’d tried.
I genuinely cannot tell if this man wants to hire me or take out a restraining order against me.
” She says it lightly, but the way she stares at her nails says she’s still turning it over like a rock in her shoe.
Serena grins. “So, classic executive power move.”
“Classic,” Hailey deadpans. “I’ve read the playbooks. Next, he’ll challenge me to an escape room and then shoot me with a paintball gun.” I see the flash of panic as her eyes find mine, and I quickly place my hand on hers and give her a reassuring squeeze before changing the subject.
“She met Dominic, though,” I say. “They’re official in-laws now.”
Layla raises her brows, as if this is a punchline waiting to be delivered. “Yeah? How’d that go? Was it super awkward, or just regular premium awkward?”
“Hailey was exceedingly polite,” I say, “and Dominic let her win at Connect Four.”
“He didn’t let me win,” Hailey objects, lifting her chin. “He was annihilating me at first, and then I changed my strategy.”
Serena, never one to let a narrative settle, leans an elbow on the vanity and tilts her head. “Is this the same man who threatened a bartender because Logan’s vodka soda wasn’t cold enough that one time?”
“He’s exactly that man,” I say. “But also the one who buys the bartender’s kid a Lego set the next day and leaves a five-star review.”
I don’t elaborate, but it’s true—Dominic’s default rhythm is force followed by untraceable repair, the breaking and mending calibrated for maximum impact.
Hailey looks up at me, her expression a complex braid of admiration, envy, and relief.
“I liked him,” she says. “He was super easy to talk to, made me feel welcome in his big-ass factory house, and best of all, he’s obviously smitten with my big sister and was giving her heart-eyes every time he thought she wasn’t looking. ”
I don’t quite know what to do with the heat that flares up my face, so I chase it with champagne.
“Let’s not make this weird,” I say, but nobody listens because they never do.
Miranda claps her hands, grinning. “I love this so much I could die.”
Serena, always the deadpan assassin, slants me a sidelong glance. “Is that the consensus? Is Mrs. Cruz officially in love? No more maybes?”
“We should probably get into our dresses,” I say, deflecting hard. “Or we’re going to miss this gala completely.”
“Convenient timing,” Audrey points out, giggling.
“OK. Fifteen-minute countdown,” Layla announces, and instantly the room moves as if released by a starter pistol—curlers pop, bodies shuffle, garment bags unzip, and even Sasha blinks in mild alarm.
Typically the shepherd, tonight I’m a sheep, swept into the current of these women in flawless choreography: hair team edits, lipstick swaps, a chorus of perfume mists.
Nora is ready first, her dress a soft green that flows down to her ankles.
Suddenly the principal is a garden party in the best way.
Audrey wears structured plum that Logan has apparently stress-tested for dance-floor mobility.
Serena wears black with a slit she describes as “barely litigious.” Layla’s in a rose-gold gown that Bennett convinced her to model for him the day she brought it home, and “it almost didn’t survive his reaction.
” Miranda’s in emerald, doing a slow spin for her phone camera while narrating to her husband like a QVC host. Hailey in the gold—the gold—backless and blazing and utterly unrepentant, and when she sees herself in the full-length mirror she goes still for the first time all day and whispers, “Oh no, Lucy is going to be a problem,” and Miranda says, “That’s the spirit. ”
Then Sasha unzips the garment bag with my name on it, and everyone stops pretending to do anything else.
The midnight-blue silk I first saw folded inside Willa’s box looks completely different at full length.
On me, it comes alive—almost black until I move, then running with light.
My shoulders are bare, my waist cleanly defined.
There’s no ruching, no camouflage, none of the strategic architecture I’ve spent twenty years requesting from clothes.
This dress has no opinion about what I should hide. It simply assumes I won’t be hiding.
Sasha fastens the hook, and the woman in the suite’s big mirror is nobody I have ever successfully been before.
“Jenna,” Hailey says, voice thick.
“Don’t.”
“I’m just saying—”
“If anyone makes me cry in this makeup, Sasha will kill us all and she’ll be right to.”
The hair team comes at me last, releasing the curlers and positioning my hair around my shoulders in a way that makes me look and feel like a star.
“Dominic is going to lose his mind when he sees you,” Audrey says, bouncing on her toes in a way that makes her curls spiral up and down like springs.
Layla’s phone chimes and she claps twice like a stage manager. “Ladies! The cars are here.”
The elevator disgorges us into the lobby as a single rustling organism—seven gowns, one shared cloud of setting spray—and through the doors I can see the limousines lined up at the curb, sleek and black and ordinary.
And then there’s the other car.
It’s parked at the head of the line like the thesis statement of the evening: a vintage Rolls-Royce Phantom, deep gunmetal, chrome polished to weaponry, older than everyone present and better dressed.
A driver in gloves stands at the rear door.
And leaning against it, in a midnight tuxedo that I realize—with a lurch I feel in my knees—has been cut to match my gown exactly, is my husband, holding a single white peony.
The girls flow past me toward the limos, entirely unsurprised, which tells me every one of them knew, the traitors. Miranda actually pats my arm as she passes and whispers, “Bestie, breathe.”
I cross the sidewalk alone. Dominic watches me come the whole way, and he doesn’t smirk, doesn’t deploy anything, just watches like the walk deserves his complete attention, and my heart is behaving in a manner I would flag if I wasn’t so used to Dominic turning it into a butterfly sanctuary.
“What are you doing?” I ask, doing a terrible job at hiding my smile.
“I’m escorting my wife to the gala.”