Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
I carry it back to the office, because the office is the one place left where the wanting can be put to some use, and I arrive just in time, as it happens, because Raymond Glasgow has chosen this particular day to be exactly the species of fool I always took him for. He’s convened a quiet little meeting to plot me off my own board, and he has chosen to convene it inside The Res, in a back room of the building I control right down to the wiring threaded through its walls. The man tried to unseat me with a folder of photographs, and it seems never to have crossed his mind that a building this size has cameras tucked into every corner of it, and that every last one of them answers to me.
I turn up the volume on the feed from the second-floor laundry room and sit back to listen to my enemies conspire against me in real time.
“I have it on good authority the couple aren’t doing at all well,” Raymond is saying, smooth and enormously pleased with himself. “They’ve been sleeping in separate rooms for weeks.”
My jaw locks. Separate rooms. That is a fact known only inside the walls of my own home, which means exactly one of three things, and not a single one of them is good. Either Raymond has bought himself a source somewhere in my household, one of my own staff quietly selling him the inventory of my private misery. Or my wife is feeding it to him herself. Or Barrymore is, with whatever she pours into his ear across those café tables in the grey coat I paid for. I file all three possibilities away to hand to Nolan in the morning, and I keep listening, and the cold that started in me this morning at a bathroom door finishes setting at last into something hard and clear that I can actually use.
I call Bills in.
“Tomorrow’s fundraiser,” I tell him. “I need you to send a VIP invitation to one more guest.”
I tell him who. His eyes go wide, and to his lasting credit he gets no further than “Sir—” before he catches whatever is sitting on my face and thinks better of the rest.
“Just do it.”
His shoulders drop the particular way they drop when I’ve handed him something he would rather not carry across the building. “Yes, Mr. Flint.”
Thirty minutes later I have my confirmation, and it comes not from Bills but from the woman herself, because a woman like the one I’ve just had invited does not receive a VIP invitation to an event like the Waymakers’ Ball without telling the entire watching world about it inside the hour. The video is already climbing the charts by the time I find it, one of the most photographed faces on the planet beaming directly into her own front-facing camera.
“Oh my gosh, you guys, this is the most amazing surprise. I just scored an invite to the Waymakers’ Ball.”
And underneath it, already, stacking up faster than the counter can total them, the thousands of comments doing exactly the work I sent them out to do, every last one of them some version of the same three questions, the whole city’s appetite waking up and stretching right on schedule.
Isn’t that your ex’s company?
Wait, is he separated from his wife??
I KNEW you two would find your way back to each other.
Chapter Nine
There’s no sign on the door. No website either, no little dot on any map, no number a person could call unless somebody already deemed worthy had first leaned in close and given it to her like a sacrament, and the single time I made the mistake of asking how you even find a place like this, the woman who’d brought me only smiled and told me you don’t, darling. It finds you.
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 standing over me with a brush gone still in her hand and a look on her face I don’t love.