I walk him through. The tiny kitchen where I secretly loved making cheap Top Ramen and mug cakes in the microwave. The bathroom with the mirror I used to practice acceptance speeches in front of—“I’d like to thank the Academy”—because when you’re sixteen and lonely, imaginary audiences are better than no audience at all. The closet, which even then was organized by color, because some things are innate.
And then the bookshelf. The bottom shelf, behind a row of YA mystery novels, is a scrapbook. Thick, overstuffed, the binding straining against years of photos and ticket stubs and dried flowers pressed between pages.
I pull it out and sit on the bed. Saylor sits beside me. Close. Our shoulders touching. The scrapbook falls open to the middle—freshman year of college, the year everything changed, the year I met Whitney.
There we are. Eighteen years old, standing in front of our dorm building, arms around each other, grinning like we’ve just been told the most wonderful secret and are trying to decide whether to keep it. I’m in a skirt I designed myself—asymmetric hem, raw edges, the confident disaster of someone who has talent and no technique. Whitney’s in overalls.Overalls.Her red curls are enormous. Her freckles are a constellation. She’s laughing at something I said, or something I did, or maybe just laughing because that’s who Whitney was—a person who found the world funny and beautiful and worth engaging with at full volume.
“I forgot how lonely I was until I met Whit. I used to spend so much time in here by myself. But after Whit, I was never really alone.”
I turn the pages slowly. Whit and me at a football game we attended for the tailgate and left at halftime. Whit and me at a diner at three a.m. studying for finals with textbooks we weren’t reading. Whit and me at a Halloween party where I went as Anna Wintour and only about four people understood my costume. They just thought I was well-dressed.The drunk simpletons; her bob is iconic and I nailed it. In their defense, I showed up to the party with Whit who went as a crayon because she said she wanted to be “something everybody liked.” I would’ve suggested donuts or a Subway sandwich, but Whitney chose Crayola. We were very confusing as a couples’ costume.
I turn another page and stop.
Whitney in her wedding dress. Just a candid, taken by me, the very moment after she said yes to that dress. We rang a bell and everything. She’s standing by the window and the light is catching the lace at her shoulders and she’s looking at something outside that I can’t see. Her expression is calm. Settled. The expression of a woman whose relationship is about to fall apart and doesn’t know it yet but looks so beautiful in her certaintythat you want to freeze the frame and let her stay there, in the window light, before everything goes sideways.
I wanted to make her dress but she went with Vera Wang in the end, because Eleanor insisted, because Eleanor always insisted. I wasn’t good enough yet to design for her daughter. A silent, bitter seed was planted that season. I made a silent vow to out-Vera the entire wedding industry one day.
“She’s beautiful,” Saylor says quietly. “I didn’t know she got married.”
“She didn’t. About three months before the wedding, she caught him cheating.”
“Shame,” Saylor says.
“Eleanor begged her not to call off the wedding. Joshua came from a really good family, he was going to law school, dead set on a political career.”
“Why would a mother want her daughter to stay with a cheater? All because it looks good on paper?”
I pat his knee. “Now you know the world we come from. Whit’s dad died about ten years ago. He cheated on Eleanor and verbally abused her until his dying breath. He probably used his dying breath to call her fat. That’s the kind of man Whit learned to run from. Joshua was too much like Whit’s father, and she did not want to become her mother.”
“She and Eleanor didn’t get along, even after her dad passed away?”
I shake my head slowly. “It made it worse. All that pity turned into anger. Whit wanted her mom to be strong. Eleanor chose to endure the abuse because living with pretty things was more important than living, apparently.”
“Well, I’m glad Whit didn’t stay. Smart girl.”
I turn the page and a loose picture falls out. Saylor bends over to pick it up and he’s greeted with a photo of me and Greg at senior prom. We’re both smiling. Greg’s smile is the oneI now recognize too well. His smile of overcompensation—too wide, too confident, the smile of a man who is hiding something and practically gleeful he’s getting away with it. That night? It was underage booze. Ten years later? Every woman in Tribeca between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three. My smile is real but small, and I’m not looking at Greg. I’m looking down at the dress. Admiring my own work.
“I wasn’t smart. I chose, much like Eleanor, to see what I wanted to, and not what was real. Greg and I were high school sweethearts,” I say. I don’t know why I’m telling him this. Except I do—because we’re sitting on my teenage bed in my pink room and the scrapbook is now closed and Whitney’s wedding dress is still behind my eyes and something about this space makes honesty feel safe. “We took a break when we went to different colleges. That’s when I met Whit. Two years without Greg were the most creative, most free I’ve ever felt. Then he graduated, came home, and we got back together. He proposed six months later. I said yes because I thought that’s what the story was supposed to be.”
“And then?”
“And then fifteen years.” I pull my legs up onto the bed, cross them beneath me. “Fifteen years of me building a company instead of a family. Fifteen years of him slowly losing interest in me. Not touching me, not talking to me, not interested in me, silently—and not so silently—telling me every day that I was aging out of my worth. At some point, I started believing him.”
Saylor is quiet for a long moment. “He said that to you?”
“Not in those words. Not at first. It started as jokes. ‘My vintage wife.’ ‘The classic model.’ Things you laugh off at dinner parties because the alternative is making a scene, and Celeste Prescott doesn’t make scenes.”
“Prescott?”
“My married name. Don’t get confused. CelesteBrinleymakes all kinds of scenes.” I wink at him before taking a breath. “But the point is, it compounds. Year after year, joke after joke, until one day you look in the mirror and you don’t see a woman. You see what you had and can never have again. You see an expiration date.”
“Celeste.” Saylor’s fingertips trace my cheekbone so delicately it tickles. I lean into his hand for the extra pressure. “I’ll swap out every mirror in this house and the other until you see what I see. Young, old—those are states of mind. But beauty is completely transcendent of numbers.”
My jaw drops. “Transcendent of numbers? What the hell, Saylor? Are you picking these lines up fromBridgertonor something?”
“What? You’ve never seen a farm boy pick up a thesaurus to impress a girl he likes?”
“I thought you put on an apron to impress me.”
