So that’s the kind of salon it is. Three flights up in a building you’d pass a thousand times without once wondering what went on behind its blind windows, one unmarked door, one chair, no name anywhere on anything, and a hush so deep and so deliberate that the whole roar of the city below simply gives up at the threshold and doesn’t follow you in. I’ve been coming for six months. I never booked it and I never found it; my husband put me on a list I never saw, the way he once put me on every list worth being on, back when putting me on lists was a thing that pleased him.
Right now the chair has me, tipped back, a heavy silk wrap knotted at my throat and a tray of little gold pots and pencils laid out at my elbow like surgical instruments, and Loren is standingover me with a brush gone still in her hand and a look on her face I don’t love.
“You’re a little too pale, Mrs. Flint,” she says worriedly, stepping back to take in the whole of my face, which I’m fairly sure she’s about to give up on after several hopeful layers of blush and who-knows-what-else. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m just?—”
Loren gasps. “Oh my gosh, are you pregnant?”
“What? No, I’m not?—”
But she’s already nodding, already smiling that knowing little smile. “Oh, right, you’re not.” Wink wink. “I got it all wrong.” Wink wink.
“Loren, you did get it wrong.”
“I know. Totally wrong.” Wink wink.
Oh, I give up.
She goes back to my face humming, pleased with herself, certain she’s cracked some lovely little secret, and I let her, because Loren has been painting brides and widows and senators’ wives in this chair for longer than I’ve been alive and I’d trust her with anything, including the very wrong hunch she’s so delighted with, which she’ll carry out of here and tell to absolutely no one. I don’t correct her a third time. I don’t tell her that there was a test, that there was a cold morning on cold marble not so very long ago, that the only thing my body has managed to produce lately is the particular ringing silence of a thing that didn’t take. I just close my eyes and let her believe the prettier story while she works, because one of us in this room ought to get to believe a pretty story tonight, and it so plainly isn’t going to be me.
It takes another half hour, and when she finally steps away to admire the whole effect, Loren has done what Loren always does, which is something very close to a miracle.
“You look gorgeous, Mrs. Flint!”
I manage a smile. “Thank you.”
But the smile only has to last as far as the street, and the second the car door seals me into the cool leather quiet of my husband’s limousine, alone, on my way to the Waymakers’ Ball, the whole careful thing slides right off my face.
Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.
I blink hard at the dark ceiling of the car, fighting it, because I cannot undo in ninety seconds what Loren spent two hours building and I do not have another two hours to spare. There was a time I loved this part. I used to love it more than the evenings themselves, the long happy ritual of being made beautiful for my husband, the small private thrill of imagining the exact moment he’d turn and find me across a room and go quiet the way he did, that arrested stillness in him that told me, better than any words he was ever much good at saying out loud, that I’d undone him a little just by walking in. I used to want to be prettier for him every single time. I used to think he found me lovely, and wanting to be lovelier for the one man on earth who looked at me like that was the easiest, sweetest sum I had ever in my life done in my head.
But tonight isn’t a date. Tonight my husband isn’t the man I spent six months being so sure he was. And the woman in the gold pots and the careful blush, the one Loren just called gorgeous, is on her way to the most important night of her father’s foundation entirely alone.
My stomach ties itself into knots, slow and expert, the way it has taught itself to these last weeks. Why does this night feel so, so wrong?
“We’re here, Mrs. Flint.”
I barely have a second to gather myself. Chip is too quick, he always is, one moment behind the wheel and the next already out and around and pulling my door open into a solid wall of noise, so that the only thing left for me to do is summon a smileup out of nowhere at all and wear it as I step down onto the carpet.
The bulbs go off in a storm the instant my shoe touches the red, a hundred small white detonations all at once and near enough to blind me, and my stomach pulls itself into smaller, tighter knots.
I have done this carpet plenty of times before. Never once like this, though. Never once alone. And the press knows it, every last one of them banked behind the velvet rope knows it, and it’s the only thing in the world any of them want to ask me about now.
Where’s your husband?
“He’s um?—”
Why isn’t Mr. Flint with you?
Is it true Trey Flint is now back in a relationship with Ronna Roswell?
“That’s because?—”
“Sorry, I have to go inside.”
I go down that carpet fast, chin lifted, wearing the smile like borrowed armor and pretending with everything in me that I can’t hear a single syllable of it, because honestly, the truth is the plainest and most humiliating thing there is.
