“A voicemail.”
“Two voicemails, actually.”
“And the Bergdorf meeting?”
“Still on the calendar for next Tuesday.”
“Which Tuesday slot? The two o’clock in Midtown or the two thirty in Chicago? Because last I checked, both are on there, and I haven’t yet figured out how to split myself into two separate women, though at this point I’m considering it.”
Margot blinks. Looks at the smoothie. Looks at Celeste. Looks at me, as if I might offer a lifeline. I offer nothing. This is between a woman and her assistant and the deep, abiding chasm between them.
“I’m not sure if the meeting is at their office or yours.”
Celeste closes her eyes, grimacing like she’s chewing on glass. “Could you find out please?”
“Uh, yes. I’ll…go check on that,” Margot says, retreating with the smoothie still extended, like someone backing away from a bear while holding a picnic basket.
“Margot,” Celeste calls after her. “If the meeting is at their office, can you please arrange my travel?”
“Yes.” She nods enthusiastically. “Totally can do that. Where are you going, and what days?”
Celeste catches my gaze, steam coming out of her ears, wordlessly asking me if I see what she has to deal with.
“You know what, Margot? Don’t worry about it. Just confirm the meeting location.”
Margot sets the smoothie down by the side table toward the front of the office. Only when she’s on the other side of the door and out of sight does Celeste hurry to the table to collect the smoothie. “This is art. Hand-sculpted pottery by the apprentice to the pope who said throwing clay is how he has his spiritual epiphanies. This is the last piece he made before he fully joined the church. And now…there is a green smoothie ring on it.”
Celeste stares at the ceiling for a long moment. When she looks at me again, there’s something almost funny in her expression—the dark humor of a woman who is fighting for custody of an unborn baby, battling her dead best friend’s mother in court, and yet somehow her most persistent daily crisis is a six-figure assistant who can’t operate a calendar.
“She’s my biggest problem,” Celeste says. “I’m in a legal war with Eleanor Montgomery-Trace, I’m trying to prepare for a caseworker who’s going to evaluate every corner of my life to justify to everyone why I’m not fit to be a mother, my new fall line is refusing to come together even well past its deadline, and somehow the thing that’s going to break me is Margot and her fucking spirulina smoothies.”
Celeste buries her face in her hands and it takes everything in me not to cross the space between us and wrap her in myarms. I’m not on the clock today. Am I even allowed to touch her anymore?
“What’s she not doing? Besides everything?” I ask.
Celeste crosses the room, sets the smoothie down on a coaster on the coffee table, then sits on the edge of her desk. The executive posture loosens—just a fraction, just enough for me to see the exhaustion underneath. “The personal things. The things I can’t delegate to my legal team or my design team. The things that require someone to actually show up and do the work.” She rubs the bridge of her nose beneath her glasses. “The attorney warned me that Eleanor has a strong case. This is no longer about what Whit wanted. This is about what’s best for the baby. She thinks it’ll help my case if I look less like a Manhattan CEO who lives in a high-rise and more like someone who’s prepared to raise a child. Eleanor’s already told the court that my lifestyle is incompatible with motherhood. My apartment is a glass box in Tribeca. It screams ‘childless career woman.’ It doesn’t scream ‘nursery.’”
“So you need a different space.”
“Well Ihavea different space. My parents left me their house in Westchester when they relocated to Milan. It’s been sitting empty for six years. It has a yard. It has a neighborhood with good schools. It has everything a caseworker would want to see.” She pauses. “It also hasn’t been touched since my parents left. There are rooms with sheets over the furniture. The kitchen hasn’t been updated since the early two thousands. There’s a loveseat in the master bedroom in French Script.”
“French Script?”
“You know, with all those calligraphy letters printed all over cream linen in no sensical fashion, like a fabric printer’s machine had a nervous breakdown. It isn’t dangerous to a child, but it is miserably outdated. I swear the only thing worse than my mom’s cooking is her taste in textiles.”
I snort, then try to cover it with a cough. “You need someone to fix it up.”
“I need someone to make it look like a home instead of a time capsule. And I need it done before the caseworker’s visit, which is”—she checks her phone—“two weeks away. There’s too much to coordinate, and you know how contractors are. About five years into our marriage, a renovation nearly broke me and Greg.” She shrugs. “In hindsight, I wish it would’ve. I could have saved myself some wasted years.”
“I can do it.”
Celeste’s eyes snap to mine. “You can do what?”
“The house. I can get it ready in time. I’m good with my hands—I’ve been maintaining a building with a broken lift and a landlord who thinks ‘responsive’ means returning a call within the same fiscal quarter. Painting, repairs, light renovation, furniture assembly—I’ve done all of it for my apartment and a couple neighbors, too. And I work fast.”
“Saylor, this isn’t a small apartment. This is an entire suburban house. Five thousand square feet. Five bedrooms. Four full bathrooms and two half-baths. An entire backyard with a deck that’s falling apart. It would take a small army to make that house presentable in time.”
I lean against the wall, smiling at her smugly. “You just said you don’t have time to vet contractors and manage a rapid renovation while running a company and fighting a custody battle. But you’ve got me. And I’ve got nothing but time and a really strong opinion about wallpaper.”
