Elizabeth. Fucking. Taylor.
I look up at Saul. “Is this a joke?”
His brow furrows slightly. “What do you mean?”
“Elizabeth Taylor.” I hold up the license. “You’re making me Elizabeth Taylor?”
He blinks. “It’s a common name. Good for blending in.”
“Elizabeth Taylor was the most famous woman of the twentieth century.” My voice is climbing toward hysterical and I can’t stop it. “She was married eight times. She had violet eyes. She was impossible to ignore.”
Saul’s expression changes as understanding hits.
“I’m supposed to be invisible,” I snap. “And you’ve named me after Cleopatra’s horny ghost.”
I laugh, and it sounds unhinged even to me. “I spent my whole life feeling like nobody saw me. Like I was wallpaper. And the universe decides my fake name should be the one woman everyone looked at?”
I drop the license on the table. Press my hands against my eyes.
“Beth,” I say. “I’m supposed to go by Beth. Like Elizabeth Taylor’s sad cousin who sells insurance and once got fingered behind a Chili’s.”
Saul blinks. Possibly rethinking his career.
“That’s actually perfect,” I whisper. “That’s exactly right. Not the real thing. Just close enough to remind you what you’ll never be.”
The room is quiet.
Then Saul’s hand is on the table near mine. Not touching. Just there.
“For what it’s worth,” he says slowly, “I don’t think you’re forgettable.”
I look at him. At those soft-worn eyes and scarred hands. He’s probably got a dick that could split a woman in half emotionally and physically. I want to climb into his lap and see if kindness breaks me faster than his cock would.
“You don’t know me.”
“I know you’ve been sitting in this building for hours watching your whole life get erased, and you haven’t fallen apart once.” His voice is steady. Certain. “That’s not nothing.”
I want to tell him I’m falling apart right now. That I’ve been falling apart since Dario smiled at me in that restaurant and I smiled back and everything after that was just a slow-motion catastrophe.
But I don’t.
I just look at the documents on the table. The driver’s license with my new face and my impossible name.
Elizabeth Taylor.
Beth.
I pick it up. Study the blonde stranger in the photo.
“Hi Beth,” I say quietly. “Nice to meet you.”
She doesn’t respond.
Just stares back at me with those empty bitch eyes like she’s waiting for someone else to show up and do the life part.
She looks like she eats salad by choice.
I fucking hate her.
