Chapter 2 The English Opening
“She offered you how much money?” Renata gasps, and that starts the barking up in the living room again. “Rowan! Enough!”
A toddler in a hot-pink Inspector Paws onesie comes trundling into the kitchen.
“That’s not my name,” Rowan growls before dropping onto all fours and blinking expectantly up at me.
She’s going through a dog phase, Renata had whispered when she let me in, and her daughter wound around my legs before going for my shoes.
Before Renata could stop me, I’d made the benevolent mistake of calling Rowan by her “dog name,” Special Agent Beagle.
I stare at Rowan. The curly-haired four-year-old stares back up at me.
“You need to listen to your mom,” I say, because that seems like the thing to say. But when her shoulders droop, I hide my mouth behind my hand and silently add Special Agent Beagle, and then she’s jumping up and running down the hallway, squealing.
“Nice try,” Renata mumbles, going for the half-empty bottle of rosé. “She only listens to you.”
“Because I’m the fun aunt and therefore everything I say is much more exciting.
Also, she’s four. And perfect. Give yourself a break.
” I purse my lips as Renata refills a novelty Halloween mug.
Trick is written on the side in hot pink, with a dog collar below it.
“Do we need to have an Inspector Paws intervention?”
“Jesus, yes. Can you break our TV while you’re here?
Wait.” Renata sets down the mug and leans toward me.
Like her kid, my best friend Renata is 90 percent curly brown hair, 5 percent barely restrained chaos, and the rest pure goodness and love.
She’s also one of the few women I know who’s taller than me, and when she leans, I get to feel like a tiny garden gnome staring up at angry Galadriel.
“Back to you and the bride and this thing you should not do.”
I go for the wine mug. “I might do it.”
“Dude. No.”
“The internship that Maisie wants to do next fall is unpaid. And we’re waiting to hear if Bailey got into that one art school, but I know she did. And then she’s in art school, and I know she’s going to be the next Hilma af Klint—”
“Who?”
“Have her explain it. But they need the money.”
Renata’s brow wrinkles as I swig the lukewarm rosé, like she’s the one boldly trudging through bitter grocery store tannins. “You’re not your sisters’ keeper,” she says.
“I feel like that one book is kind of all about us being our sisters’ keepers.”
“With Cameron Diaz?”
“The Bible, idiot.”
Renata takes the mug from me, then chugs it.
After she swallows—wincing, ha, there’s the tannins—she says, “You’ve never done a job like this.
First of all, you were literally at this guy’s wedding.
That’s way too close. And the bride is asking you to fake-date a professional athlete.
Aren’t people obsessed with Formula 1 drivers’ girlfriends?
Like, to a weird degree? If you even get close to pulling this off, there will be blogs about you, photographs, internet stalkers.
And that’s all before you break up with him. Publicly.”
“Look at you, knowing about sports.”
“Don’t distract me.” She points a finger. “People are going to notice this race car driver is dating the ‘Hilton Heartbreaker.’ ”
“And?” I shrug. “Dating and breaking up with shitty men isn’t illegal.”
“But disturbing the peace is.”
“That was such a stupid case. That judge was biased.” I frown and top off our mug.
“No one’s going to notice. It’s been what, five years since that stupid article?
I’m just some silly fashion influencer who’s going to, woops, stumble into a Formula 1 driver’s life and, bam, make him fall in love with me. This happens every day.”
“Is that what happened to the client?” Renata asks. “Who even is she?”
“Imogen Baldwin, she’s a ballerina at the American Ballet Company.”
“Oh, so she’s a famous athlete, too?”
“She’s a blueprint. The little swan and the big European athlete who swept her off her feet. Come on, you know I can do that.”
When Renata gets irritated with me, like actually irritated, not pretending to be mad so that she can swindle me out of the last mozzarella stick, she grinds her teeth so hard that I can practically hear her dentist’s screams. “Show me the text again.”
Smiling smugly, I unearth the encrypted message I’d received from none other than Imogen Baldwin. Her maid of honor must’ve given her my contact info, and I have to hand it to them; there is something perpetually endearing about being part of women’s whisper networks.
Bernard is about to start the next Formula 1 season, so he will be traveling constantly. But I know people on his current team (Stark-Benzin) and have three job openings I could get you into.
“Paperwork,” Renata hisses. “You can’t be a fake WAG with a fucking paper trail!”
From the living room, Rowan starts to howl.
“It’s actually really smart,” I explain.
“Formula 1 travels around the world. The races are basically in new countries every week. Which is why I think it makes the most sense, narratively, to be his new coworker. I take one of these little gigs, magically appear in his life, publicly fuck him over, and vanish into the night. Also, the teams are huge, like nine hundred people. So nobody will even remember me once I bounce. Same with the internet stalkers.”
“I don’t like it.”
Very aware of this. I press on. “If anyone realizes I’m the ‘Hilton Heartbreaker’ ”—I air-quote the stupid tabloid moniker, cringing—“then I look like I’m trying to clean up my act. The paperwork is a good thing.”
Renata is quiet for a long moment. “How do you know this much about Formula 1, anyway?”
I blink, surprised by her question. “Oh. I’ve just seen it around. My dad watched it when it was on.”
This is only partially true. But I haven’t exactly told Renata that Formula 1 was my family’s version of Friday Night Lights.
That despite every odd, my Midwestern mechanic dad caught one of the few American broadcasts and fell in absolute love with it.
He’s the reason we watched Silverstone and Monaco and Monza like other families celebrated the Super Bowl, Crock-Pot queso dip, and canceled plans, Dad pestering the guys from the garage into drinking Budweiser from their work boots whenever Stark-Benzin finished first.
Yup. I used to be a fan of this guy’s team.
Back when Faust drove there, too.
And now I can’t tell Renata any of this, since she’ll think I’m just taking this job for sentimental reasons. Which I’m not. Sentimentality is dangerous in my line of work.
I reach a hand out, and this time, it isn’t for alcohol.
Renata rolls her eyes, acts like she’s debating some grand equation, then winds our fingers together.
I smile at the way our fifty-cent mood rings click.
Hers is always that same deep, dark navy blue.
Mine’s been stuck on black since I accidentally washed it in the pocket of some jeans.
“I miss you,” I admit.
She looks at our rings. Blue and almost blue, or black and almost black, depending on how you look at them.
Half-empty, half-full. “You know I can’t come save you if this shit turns sideways,” she says.
“I’ve got Rowan now, and I still haven’t told Bryce about all this.
He still asks me when I’m going to introduce him to the rest of my modeling friends. ”
Ah, Bryce. The exceedingly average computer programmer who stole my Little John away. “It’s not going to go sideways. When’s he back from his work trip, by the way? I could do a Bryce intervention, too.”
She snorts. “Tuesday. The pink hair will be enough.”
After putting Rowan to bed we move to the bathroom, Renata delicately plopped on the closed toilet lid, Manic Panic jar in her lap, me cracking the window so we don’t asphyxiate. “One of Bryce’s many perks,” Renata says with a smug grin. “He comes from a long line of Astoria realtors.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I mumble, as if I didn’t officiate their wedding five years ago.
I will hand it to Bryce; brushing your teeth while watching lights twinkle across the East River is pretty ideal.
Renata starts spraying down her hair, needing it damp for the dye, and I look out at the skyline as twilight settles in.
This time of year, the waterfront is slushy, painted multicolored by pockets of pale gray ice and deep-blue water and fresh white snow.
It’s my favorite part of the city—like Lake Michigan around the holidays, vastly severe but moving right below the surface.
Even if you didn’t grow up walking around Chicago each Christmas like I did, half-frozen and all-happy, how can you not love the cold?
It’s so alive. Winter is always breaking apart and putting itself back together.
“Aren’t you freezing?” Renata chatters. “Get my hoodie.”
“I’d get bleach on it. And I’m fine.”
“It’s forty degrees and you’re next to an open window.”
“Forty is practically fifty.”
“And fifty is…”
“Practically spring, yeah.” I smile. “I like winter. The air’s spicy.”
We don’t talk about my work or her family for the rest of her hair.
Back when Renata and I used to live together, two aspiring models in a punishingly tiny Bed-Stuy studio, she’d pleaded with our original agency to let her have pink curls.
But they wouldn’t budge, insisting that any future commercial success would be tied to her Ashkenazi ringlets.
Same with me and my natural, stranger-stopping orange hair.
Really, our first agency had been so strict and so anti-Tyra-Banks-makeover, we’d both gone wild at Sally Beauty after we’d quit working with them.
The smell of developer and synthetic fragrance always takes me right back.
“Are you gonna visit Maisie while you’re in town?” Renata asks.