Chapter 1EN PASSANT
NEW YORK CITY
I’m not a good person. What I am, though, is a good woman.
You know what I mean—the difference. There’s an art to being a woman in this world, those little winks, the pencil skirts, the mauve eyeshadow. Saying sorry when you’re not sorry, styling your hair within an inch of its life, choosing silence so you can be invisible, so you can do whatever you want. I think I was fourteen the first time I realized that this body would requirework. My grandma was perched on her restaurant’s fake marble countertop, short legs swinging, the heels of her nonslip shoes banging softly against the purple cabinet doors. I was in front of her, my chin in her hand as she applied eyeliner to my water line.
“This freaking hurts,” I whined.
“I know,” she replied calmly. “If you hand me the makeup remover, I can take it off. Your choice.”
Waterfield High School’s fall dance was that night, and I had adate with a soft-spoken writer in my class who all the guys called Nosferatu. “No. I’m okay,” I promised Grandma, and when she smiled knowingly at me, I felt like I’d made the right choice: getting stabbed in the eyeball by a sharpened pencil so a boy nicknamedNosferatuwouldn’t look away from me. You don’t often notice those rites of passage in the moment, when life dunks into the darkness of one long tunnel before you’re out on the other side, brand-new. But when Grandma let me borrow her stop-sign-red lipstick—Revlon’s Fire and Ice—I felt like I’d just become myself.
And then, at the dance, I learned the second most important lesson of my life. When I overheard Nosferatu trash-talking my handmade dress to his snobby creative writing club friends, I didn’t tell him that it’d taken approximately five thousand hours to painstakingly sew hot-pink sequins to cotton. Or that girls with red hair can wear pink. Or that it’s really shitty to talk about mylack of strong female role modelslike I’m Bambi and he’s a guidance counselor.
I kept my Fire-and-Ice lips slammed shut and walked away, silently. All the way home. He’d hurt me, so I hurt him back, and that felt even better than lipstick.
And now, in a strange way, that’s kind of my job.
“This is ridiculous. How can the hotel cancel our Sugar Scrub Couples Massage? Don’t they realize we’re flying twenty hours to get there?” grumbles my date, Winston. This isn’t new. He’s a grumbler. And he’s been grumbling since he checked his email—during this black-tie wedding cocktail hour, notably. In Manhattan, where you really have to overextend yourself to be noticeably rude. “I’ve had this planned for aweek, Cat. A week! I need to fuckingrelax.”
And if I have to listen to another billionaire monologue about how nobody wants to work anymore, I’ll need to dump my pinotnoir on their head. “That’s a shame,” I start. Just three words, and that low, fizzly excitement is building in my chest, my toes curling as much as they can in my death-trap heels. “But Winston, what if this is a sign?”
It takes a good five seconds for my words to breach his glazed-over face, knock around that big blond head of his, then compute. His eyes flicker nervously between me, his phone, then back to me again. “Do you not want the sugar scrub? We could do just a massage, once the hotel gets off their lazy—”
“It isn’t really that. You agreed that we weren’t a long-term thing.” I’ve dropped my voice to a low, sympathetic register. It masks most of my giddiness. “Maybe it’s our time to part ways?”
Winston’s face has gone pale. “Are you breaking up with me at my best friend’s wedding?”
“Yes, I am.”
“You—you can’t. That is so.” Winston gulps for air. “Bitchy.”
Against all odds, I stop myself from giggling. “Oh, wow.”
Let the record show that the groom, Bernard Baudelaire, isn’t Winston’s best friend. I don’t even think Winston has friends, period. But Bernardisa Formula 1 driver—which would’ve been exciting to younger me, who grew up glued to the television screen on race weekends, a bowl of cereal in my lap, Dad and the guys from the garage yelling happily around me. But to Winston, this is just a public embarrassment. Like his own mother or an honest job, my date hasn’t seen anyone in this wedding since he and Bernard attended some aristocratic French boarding school together. You know, the good old days.
The person whohasseen the happy couple in the last decade is the maid of honor, Prestly, a lovely if not slightly Machiavellian venture capitalist who’d hired me to date and subsequently dump Winston right here. Right now.
Since he’d insisted on coming to this wedding after cheating on her, a member of the bridal party.
I cast Winston a sad look from beneath my heavy black lashes. “I can get my own ride home. Good—”
“But what about the trip?” he says, clearly not ready to call it quits. “It’s over Valentine’s Day, Cat. Who else is going to go with me?”
I drag in a breath. “Winston. Today is Valentine’s Day.”
“It is?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s always on the last day of February.”
“I think you’re thinking about Leap Day.”
“Leap what?”
I give up. “Don’t tell me you’re getting attached.”
