Chapter 3
Celeste
I am going to die on this street.
Not metaphorically. Not in the existential, can’t sleep, lying-in-the-dark-staring-at-my-ceiling-in-silence way I’ve been dying since I found out about Whitney’s passing.
I mean literally, physically, vehicularly.
A woman in a sixty-thousand-dollar car is about to be taken out by a one-way street near Lower Manhattan, and the obituary will be humiliating.
I yank the wheel left to avoid a delivery truck that materializes out of nowhere—I swear they just spawn in this borough—and the SUV lurches onto a street so narrow I can practically read the ingredient labels on the bodega products through the passenger window.
My GPS has recalculated four times in the last six minutes.
Four. I’ve been given the calm, robotic equivalent of are you even listening to me by a machine, and honestly, no.
I’m not. I haven’t been listening to anyone or anything for two days, wildly distracted by my sullen thoughts.
A cyclist flies past my window and screams something I can’t make out but can infer from context.
“I’m trying,” I mutter at no one.
Driving is an act of faith I’ve never possessed.
You have to trust the other cars, trust the lanes, trust that everyone is operating under some shared agreement about physics and turn signals.
I trust none of it. We’re city people. If it’s too far to walk, we don’t go.
I was forced to drive here and there when I was thirty-two because Maddox, my former driver, had a knee replacement and Greg told me I needed to “be less dependent.” This from a man who once called me from our kitchen to ask where we kept the coffee mugs.
I got the license. I have used it exactly nineteen times, and each time has taken a year off my life.
But the alternative was three hours in the back of a town car with nothing to do but think, and I cannot think right now. Thinking is the enemy. Thinking means Whitney, and Whitney means the funeral, and the funeral means this isn’t all a bad dream. She’s really gone.
I spot the building. Green awning. The address Rina texted me after she assured me, as one of my closest friends, I could not handle this alone.
Rina offered from the airport to hustle home and attend the funeral with me but I know what Paris means to her.
I know why she’s there. Looking for him.
The him that’s the entire reason her risqué agency exists.
I don’t want to add more to her mind at the moment.
I considered texting Forrest, who, strangely enough, I consider a dear friend.
But based on how we met, out of respect to the woman he now loves, he can’t be my plus-one anymore.
I’ve met Taio before and he was a darling. And really tall. His frame alone could shield me from the judgmental stares of the people from my past, but apparently he’s jet-setting across the country with the girl they are calling the next T. Swift.
Of Rina’s favorite contractors, that leaves—
Shit!
I aim the car toward the curb the way one aims a prayer toward the ceiling—with great hope and very little precision—and the front right tire connects with something metal.
A trashcan. It topples sideways with a clatter that echoes down the whole block, the lid rolling in a slow, accusatory circle before settling flat on the pavement like a cymbal crash at the end of a terrible performance.
I’m parked, but my foot stays pressed against the brake like it’s the only thing keeping the world from spinning off its axis.
I should get out. Pick up the trashcan. I should do a lot of things.
I should have returned Whitney’s calls. I should have told her she was right about Greg the first time she said it, and the second time, and the fourteenth.
I should have said I’m sorry when there was still a person alive to hear it.
The tears come so fast I don’t even get a warning.
One second I’m staring at a sideways trashcan through the windshield and the next I’m falling apart, my hands still gripping the wheel at ten and two like that’s going to save me.
My chest caves inward around something sharp that’s been lodged there since I opened that damn envelope that left me raw and in denial.
Surely I’ll get to the Hamptons and Whit will be there to welcome me with open arms.
Her phone is only going straight to voicemail because she’s busy.
Not because she’s dead.
My brain scrambles to produce the last real memory I have of my best friend.
The frustrated tears in her eyes. The tiramisu splattered across her red shoes.
The way our shouting was bouncing off the bricks in the alley, echoing our rage.
Never in a million years did I think that would be our last face-to-face conversation.
I press my forehead against the steering wheel and I cry the way I only ever do when I’m alone.
Full body. Graceless. The kind of crying that would make the front page of Page Six and end my reputation as the woman who conducted a company-wide conference six hours after her divorce filing without a tremor in her voice, promising everybody nothing would change.
That woman is a performance.
This woman—mascara running, shoulders heaving, ugly-crying in a parked car in front of a tipped-over trashcan in Alphabet City—is much closer to the truth.
Knock, knock.
My head snaps up so fast my neck cracks. I swipe at my face with the back of my hand, which accomplishes absolutely nothing except smearing mascara in a wider radius, and turn to find Saylor standing on the other side of the glass.
Oh.
Oh.
I forget, for one suspended and wildly inappropriate moment, that I’ve been crying.
He’s wearing the suit I sent over. The charcoal Tom Ford, and either my tailor is a genius or God spent extra time on this man’s shoulders, because the jacket fits like it was stitched onto his body.
White dress shirt, no tie—I sent a navy silk tie and he apparently made an editorial decision, which under normal circumstances I would find sloppy, but with the top button undone and the collar open against his neck, I’m forced to admit the edit was correct.
His hair is freshly cut, tapered on the sides, and a leather overnight bag hangs from his shoulder like it weighs nothing.
He stands there with the easy confidence of a man who’s never had to practice his posture in a mirror.
I roll down the window. The warm May air hits my wet face and I feel every inch of the disaster I must look like.
Saylor’s expression shifts as he takes in my face.
It’s a quick read, the kind of adjustment you’d miss if you weren’t watching for it.
But he doesn’t ask if I’m okay. He doesn’t tilt his head or soften his voice into that careful register people use when they think you’re fragile.
He just looks at me like I’m a person having a rough morning, which is the kindest thing anyone has done for me all week.
“Celeste. What a nice surprise. I thought I was meeting you there,” he says, easy, warm, like we’re picking up a conversation from five minutes ago. “I was expecting a driver with a fancy hat. Maybe a little sign with my name on it. Perhaps some champagne in the back of a limo.”
I let out a sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and a hiccup. “Sorry to disappoint.”
He smiles and for a fleeting moment, I feel all right. Not good. Just…sturdier. A touch distracted.
“Are you kidding?” he asks. “This is definitely an upgrade.”
“What’s an upgrade? The Range Rover, or the crying woman driving it?”
“The company,” he clarifies. “We’re headed to the Hamptons?”
“Yes.”
He clasps his hands together with a boyish excitement, grinning from ear to ear. “Please tell me you like road-trip games.”
“I’ve never played one.” I shrug. “To be honest, I didn’t want to sit in the back of a car for three hours alone with my thoughts. I actually hate driving. I risked it out of desperation.”
His eyes slide past me to the trashcan lying on its side by the curb. The corner of his mouth twitches—not a full smile, just the beginning of one trying to escape. “And how’d that go?”
“Don’t start. Believe me, I’m already aware I am a horrible driver.”
“No, I believe you.” Now he’s fully smiling, and it does something inconvenient to my chest—a small crack in the ice, warmth leaking in where I wasn’t ready for it. “You have to watch these trashcans. Vicious little things pop out of nowhere and attack innocent luxury vehicles.”
“Hardy-har-har.”
I want to be annoyed, but the absurdity of the moment is settling over me like a blanket someone draped across my shoulders without asking.
The trashcan. My ruined face. The impossibly handsome escort in his perfect suit, smiling at me through my car window like nothing about this scene is strange.
Yet it’s the first human interaction I’ve had in days that hasn’t felt forced.
He taps the window frame twice with his knuckle. “Unbuckle and unlock the door.”
I do, and he opens it from the outside then offers me his hand.
His fingers are warm, his grip steady and sure, and I let him guide me out of the driver’s seat like I’m being extracted from a small disaster, which I suppose I am.
I’m in heels—black Louboutins, because even in grief I am constitutionally incapable of not dressing like myself—and the pavement is uneven.
Instinctually, his other hand goes to my elbow to keep me from wobbling.
He is tall. I knew he was tall, I registered it when I first saw him at Forrest’s custody hearing months ago, but standing next to him on a Brooklyn sidewalk with my hand in his, it hits differently.
I come up to his chin. I am wearing four-inch heels.
He lets go of my hand, reaches into his breast pocket, and pulls out the navy kerchief I included as an accessory.
“There was a tie that matched this.”