“Josie?”
I rip my gaze off Camila and look at Gio.
“Hmm?” I mumble.
She gives me a knowing look. “You’ve been in your head all morning.”
I wince. “Sorry.”
“Work stuff?”
“Kind of,” I admit, trying to keep my eyes off Cami.
Gio nods. “I’m sort of amazed you pulled this off.” She gestures around.
It was a huge time suck; I won’t deny it. I felt more and more guilty with every hour I spent planningthisinstead of doing productive work to bolster Revenant’s bottom line.
Maybe that should tell me something. It probablywouldtell me something if I paused long enough to let it.
“Do you think it’s weird,” I ask, “that she wantsmeto be her maid of honor? Over all six of her sisters? And the cousins?”
Gio leans toward me, lowering her voice. “She picked you to be her maid of honor because other than David, she’s closest withyou.You’re the one who supported Camila when she was stressed out of her mind back in college. Remember all those times you took her clicker to classesyou weren’t even registered for,just so Cami could get attendance points while she was dealing with some new brand of family drama?”
“It wasn’tthatoften.”
She gives me a look. “You’re a different kind of family to her, Jo.”
Cami certainly feels like family tome.She feels so much like family I don’t know how to manage without her.
How thefuckam I going to manage without her?
Where is she going? Why is she leaving? Is there a widespread corporate problem I’ve overlooked? I’ve made the most conscious effort I can possibly imagine to keep her happy. To make her stay. Camila’s happiness is my pulse check. If she hasn’t lost her faith in me, in Revenant, I’m still doing all right.
But if shehas—lost her faith, that is—what do I need to do to restore it?
For the twentieth time today, I rack my brain, looking for some explanation as to why she’d want to leave. And for the twentieth time, I come up short.
I push down the tears threatening my eyes and take a glug of my espresso martini, polishing it off. Then I twist open one of the airplane shots, swallow that, too.
I hail our waiter and say, “I’ll have a margarita next, and can you make it a double?” And when he brings it, I suck it down in record time.
The other women follow my lead, and before I know it, I’m halfway to drunk, and we’re done with lunch, heading to midtown to find some live music.
There’s a rooftop we’ve rented—a surprise for Camila. When we show it to her, dousing her in a champagne shower, she comes up and hugs me, screams, “Best MOH ever!” before she proceeds to twerk down at all the ordinary bar-goers on the floor below us.
“Plebians!” Mariana shouts.
“You wish you were us!” Jane shouts.
“Hey, those are the girls from the party wagon!” someone shouts.
There is an exact relation between the way the sun is slippinginto the horizon beyond us and the feeling of my veins loosening, of my inhibitions letting go. Who cares about Revenant? Who cares about work? What if we all stayed drunkall the time?
Cami invites the band upstairs to drink with us during a break in their set. The guitar player—a tall, slender guy with a lazy grin that feels practiced in the mirror—latches onto me the second our eyes lock.
“You look familiar. Are you a model?”
I shrug. “You’ve probably seen my face in a fashion magazine.”
