Page 42 of Dial F for Finance
Audrey’s head swivels. “That is a new necklace.”
“It’s nothing—”
“It’s Art Deco,” I say. “It’s platinum. And she’s blushing.”
“I’m not blushing.”
“You’re the color of Pinot,” Nora says, delighted.
And that’s all it takes. The full weight of the table’s attention swings off me and onto Layla like a searchlight changing targets, and I take a slow, relieved breath.
“OK, so there’s a story about the necklace,” she says, and the booth practically contracts around her.
The story involves a vineyard in the Douro Valley, a locked tasting room, a proprietor with a convenient tendency to disappear, and a husband who had apparently been carrying the necklace in his jacket pocket waiting for—her words—“the right level of golden hour.” There’s a subplot about a rowboat. An incident with a hotel bathtub that makes Nora put both hands over her face and Audrey ask a follow-up question so clinical that Layla chokes on her wine.
“He what?” Nora says, through her fingers.
“Twice,” Layla says, radiant and shameless.
“That’s a structural bathtub concern,” I offer.
“It really was.”
Audrey raises her glass. “To well-installed bathroom fixtures.”
We drink to the fixtures. Our food is delivered. We eat and Layla tells us about the morning Bennett got up at five to learn how the espresso machine worked so she’d wake to coffee, and got it so violently wrong the hotel sent an engineer—and my chest does a tiny, uncomfortable flutter.
I wish I could laugh and mean it. That I could drop a casual “sounds like true love” and clink glasses, but there’s something in my throat that won’t clear. In my head I see Dominic, grinning at me over the divider of a ramen shop, asking if I want to try the spicy tare and not waiting for me to say yes. I see his face in the stupid reflective elevator doors, watching me tie my hair up, and the sound he makes when he pushes my hands away and watches my hair spill freely down my back. The way he looked at me in the mornings, before the world started up, like I was all it took to make his life feel complete.
Maybe that’s all it is: raw nerves, the hangover of intimacy after a lifetime of none. Maybe you don’t get to go from emotional zero to a hundred and expect the transmission to survive.
The check arrives and is dispatched with the usual protocol: Layla tries to pay for everyone, Serena physically restrains her, Nora leaves the tip because she’s the only one who still believes in cash. On the sidewalk there’s the flurry of coats and cheek-kisses and calendar promises. Nora has a staff meeting she describes as “avoidable but politically necessary.” Audrey’s due back at the lab. Layla hugs me two seconds longer than standard and says, into my ear, “You know we love you, right?” which nearly undoes me right there on Rush Street.
“I know,” I say, and mean it, and let her go.
And then they’re gone, scattered to their happy lives, and I’m digging for my phone, finding four unread messages on the screen and a missed call. “Oh fuck.”
“Fuck what?” I’m not alone.
Serena falls into step beside me, hands in the pockets of her red coat.
“Oh. Just a difficult vendor.” I darken the screen. “I thought you had a client meeting.”
“I do. It’ll keep.” We walk half a block in easy silence, our heels striking the pavement in accidental sync. “That was nicely done, by the way. The necklace.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Forty minutes of coordinated interrogation, and you flipped the entire table with one piece of jewelry.”
“Layla’s honeymoon was an objectively more interesting topic than my business trip.”
“Mm.” We stop at the corner. The light is red. She turns and looks at me. “I’m in crisis PR, Jenna. That’s all I’m saying. I know a tactic when I see one.”
My pulse taps, hard, at the base of my throat. “Serena—”
“You don’t have to.” She says it easily, no weight on it at all. “It’s cool if you don’t want it to be everyone’s business. I get that better than anyone at that table, believe me. When Caleb started pursuing me, I hid it like a bad diagnosis.”
“Hid it? From who? Layla knew. I’ve heard the stories.”
