Page 4 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“Blah blah.” She blows a raspberry. An actual raspberry, lips and everything, like a woman who did not come here to be reasonable. “I don’t want to hear it, Harper. The car will be here in three hours and you’re not even out of your pajamas yet.”

“I know, Soph, but⁠—”

“Three hours.”

“After everything that’s happened I just think it’s best for me to focus on securing something stable. We said my staying here was going to be temporary but it’s been two weeks already and I haven’t⁠—”

Sophia sets her iced coffee on the dresser with a click that suggests the conversation about this particular subject is over. She picks up a silk wrap dress from the pile on the chair and starts folding it with the brisk, practiced efficiency of someone who has been packing her own luggage since she was fourteen.

“In this job market,” she says, smoothing the fabric with the flat of her hand, “even Hollywood is scraping the barrel for gigs. You’d have to be a Kardashian to get a job in only two weeks.”

I open my mouth to argue and then close it again.

She’s right. I hate that she’s right. The market is brutal right now in a way that feels almost personal, remote work flooding every major city with applicants who used to be priced out by geography, every other listing replaced with something that says AI-assisted coordination experience preferred, as if my entire profession hasn’t spent the last three years watching itself slowly get automated. Luxury hospitality is still mostly human but the entry points are shrinking and the competition for them is not.

I watch her fold a club dress with the kind of focused care I could never replicate under pressure and feel the argument leave me in one slow exhale.

“You shouldn’t be able to fold things that fast.”

“Gift.” She reaches for a pair of linen trousers. “You’re a boss bitch with parasitic bio-donors who should go fuck themselves, which means now is the absolute best time to get away, lounge around, sweat out your blowout, and turn your entire demise into wine by coming with me to Bordeaux.”

She says this the way someone else might say let’s get brunch. Casual, settled, already decided.

And she isn’t wrong about that either. God, she’s annoyingly consistent at not being wrong.

I haven’t been to France since the summer after graduation. Sophia and I did a whole European tour that June, two weeks, seven cities, the kind of trip you take when you’re twenty-two and invincible and convinced that real life starts later. I’d known about her dad’s vineyard out in Bordeaux even then but Sophia had been allergic to anything resembling a family obligation that summer. Amsterdam had been calling her name in neon lights and a vineyard in the south of France, however beautiful, had not stood a chance against that particular siren song. So we’d kept moving. I don’t regret it. But I’ve always been a little curious about the place she’d skip entire countries to avoid feeling obligated to visit.

Sophia opens the large teal case and starts placing things inside with terrifying efficiency. My vintage-style hardshell set has always been one of my better purchases, the kind of luggage that suggests I have my life together even when I absolutely do not, structured cases with brass hardware and a silhouette that belongs in an old black-and-white photograph of a woman boarding an ocean liner. Sophia handles them like she’s personally offended by how long they’ve been sitting unpacked.

“You’re not listening to the part where I actually need you,” she says, flipping open the carry-on case and starting on my tops. “This isn’t charity, Harper. I need help. I need someone in that room with me who has actual industry instincts and enough tact not to let me blow up a business meeting because my dad said something infuriating and I forgot to use my indoor voice.”

I sit up a little. “What business meeting?”

“I’m pitching Dad the flagship physical location for the boutique. I want it at Thorne Estates. The vineyard already pulls the exact clientele I’m targeting and there’s space on the property that’s been sitting underutilized for two years and I have a whole presentation but you know how he gets and I need someone with me who can—” she pauses and tilts her head, “you know. Do the thing you do.”

“The thing I do.”

“The thing where you walk into a room and immediately know what everyone needs to hear and say it without it sounding like you practiced it. The thing that made you exceptional at your job before certain biological liabilities decided to torpedo it.”

I stare at her. She’s moving through my pile of sundresses with the focus of a woman on a deadline.

“Sophia. You don’t need my illuminating wit. You’re perfectly capable of making that pitch on your own.”

“Of course I am.” She doesn’t look up. “But I’m better with you there. And you need France. And France needs you. And the vineyard has a pool and an actual chef and approximately one thousand bottles of wine, and you have been sitting in my guest room in the same pajamas for four days.”

I look down at my pajamas. They are, in fact, the same ones I’ve been wearing since Tuesday.

“You don’t need my illuminating wit,” I say again, with less conviction. “You just need a human shield.”

Sophia grins without looking up. “Luggage ninja says what?”

She closes the large case with a firm click, spins the combination lock, and tips it upright in one motion. I watch her move to the medium case, crack it open, and start on my shoes and casual pieces with the same zero-hesitation energy. By the time I’ve registered that she’s already packed approximately sixty percent of my wardrobe, she’s zipping the second case shut.

I stand up.

I’m not even sure I made a decision. My body just apparently concluded that the argument was over and started moving toward the wardrobe on its own. I grab the rest of what’s left on the bed and start loading the carry-on case. Sophia picks up the large case and the medium one and starts rolling them toward the door.

“That’s what I thought,” she says over her shoulder.