Jade nodded and said, “Your father was very kind to me.”
“Well, he never mentioned you,” Serena said. Her voice was cool and low, like it had just emerged from an ice cave. This casual cruelty—it seemed so practiced; it seemed like it came soeasily—loosened something in Jade. She thought for a fraction of a second about holding back, about disappearing, abouttaking the high road, but she didn’t.
“Oh?” she said. “Did you talk to him enough that he would have mentioned a new friend? I didn’t get the impression that you were close.”
Serena’s shoulders, already set back (Pilates, Jade guessed), moved back even more. Her chest rose a fraction of an inch; her chin lifted. Everything about her said,Who do you think you are?
“Of course we were close. He was myfather.”
“Huh,” said Jade, still stung by the way Serena was looking at her, so, in return, putting out her own stinger. “That is not the picture he painted for me.”
There was a barely perceptible flinch behind those cool gray eyes.
George had told her about Serena and Edward. He’d been in his late forties when he married for the first time, a woman twelve years younger, and he was nearly fifty when Serena was born. The marriage was rocky, the wife, by George’s account, prone to theatrics and instability (“I should have known when I married a Broadway actress”) but it endured for a decade (“There was straying,” George said, without elaborating). By the time of the divorce George hadfallen in love with another woman, who eventually became his second wife and the true love of his life. The second wife was stable and loving; the second wife was a rock and this allowed George to be a rock for her too. Zero drama.
Serena never forgave him for the divorce and the remarrying; she wouldn’t hear that there was another side to the story aside from her mother’s. Five years ago, the second wife died. George tried to reconnect with his children at that point, but by then the harm was done. The myelin that covered the fibers of their relationship had been irrevocably damaged. They would accept his money, it turned out, if not his love. But he was still their father, and a very wealthy man, and when he died, they each received a massive inheritance.
Minus the half a million dollars he left to Jade, with the stipulation that she use it for “expenses directly and indirectly related to the creation of her business.”
George’s children came at her like vipers. Well, Serena did. Edward was a playboy living in South Beach with strategic stubble and a year-round tan, too oblivious to be a viper. Serena contested the will on the grounds that Jade had seduced an old, dying man to get his money. Into the public record went the story of Serena walking in on Jade with her forehead pressed against George’s, her hand on his face, her blouse off. Into the record went an affidavit from Mrs. Sanchez, who said that in the month before her employer’s death she had gone to visit her family in Mexico for one week. When she returned, her employer had “a spring in his step” that had not been there before. Mrs. Sanchez, who had once seemed like an ally, shifted her wheel hard to the left when money was involved. (I’m sorry, thought Juliana, is having a spring in one’s stepillegal?)
Nowhere in the record did it say how lonely George had been in the final years of his life. Nowhere did it note the absence of his children and the fact that the only person he saw on a daily basis, the only person who truly had an idea of the quotidian details of hislife, was on his payroll. Nowhere did it say how all the way to the end George retained an unguarded sweetness, his eyes like those of a Labrador, warm and eager to please.
You know what else wasn’t in the court filings? What a bitch the daughter was.
After a time, Serena understood that she didn’t have the grounds to keep the money from Jade. She could continue trying, if she chose to. But she’d be looking at a pretrial date more than eight months out; a trial could take years, and during all that time Serena’s money would be held up too. Serena didn’t want her money held up (shocker); she dropped the contestation, and Jade’s money came through.
Jade hadn’t done anything wrong. Nothing illegal. Nothing immoral, even. There was nothing she needed to hide from. But it could be a stain on her name, all of those public records of this messy business, and she wanted to start fresh and clean. She wanted to leave behind the girl from Lawrence, the girl from George’s bedroom. She wanted to honor her benefactor. People change their names all the time. You don’t need to explain it to anyone.
Later, in interviews, or when she spoke to business school classes, or when she was invited to join onstage panels with large audiences at conferences for business entrepreneurs, or when she gave her TED Talk, she spoke of the money from an angel that helped get her started.
Friendship, love, money—all of these were vast, complex landscapes that could not be excavated in the course of a single talk or interview. People always assumed that she’d left off a word; of course she must have meant angelinvestor.But she didn’t. She just meantangel.
With the money George left her, Juliana worked full-time on LookBook. She hired three people: a technology developer, a stylist, and a marketer. Anyone else she needed she hired on a contract basis. She rented space in the WeWork building near RockefellerCenter. Five hundred thousand dollars sounded bottomless to someone who had grown up the way Jade had grown up, but it wasn’t bottomless. She had to husband her resources.
(What a strange phrase that was. Why notwifeyour resources?)
Just keep moving, she told herself when she felt unsteady or uncertain or unworthy or scared. Just. Keep. Moving. She looked in the mirror and sometimes she saw Juliana George, but sometimes she saw the girl from Lawrence, the foster kid, the scholarship student, the outsider, always looking in.
Just keep moving.
A year after she got George’s money, LookBook launched. Then they turned a profit. Then the profit got bigger. The company kept working, kept improving the technology, tweaking the algorithm. They had the college students, then they had the post-college crowd, then they had the suburban moms, and, once they had the suburban moms, it felt like they had the world.
But they didn’t have the world yet, not until five years ago, when the luxury brands started coming toher. Everybody had pieces they couldn’t sell! Nobody wanted to liquidate! More negotiations, more meetings. If she got luxury brands on board, she could reach an entirely new consumer. At Fashion Week she had invites to all the shows. She went to as many as possible, to see what the designers were doing. Her wheels were turning. She could feel the momentum building. She networked whoever she could, wherever she could.
Sunday came, the third full day of Fashion Week. Juliana was tired! She’d started at Tory Burch at 10a.m.; by 8p.m.she was toast. But also, she would have killed for some toast. Nobody ate at Fashion Week. At a networking party at Chelsea Piers she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. When she opened them, a man who looked like a model but as it turned out later wasn’t a model remarked to her that the hors d’oeuvres were so small he could hardly see them.
She laughed. “They really are very small.” Then, because she was there to network, she stuck out her hand and said, “Juliana George.”
“David Carr. Nice to meet you.”
Can you fall in love with one handshake? Of course not! That’s absurd. But, maybe. Shefeltsomething. He felt something too. What was it? It was indefinable. They moved to a corner of the room; they talked a bit more. He was there with a friend, a pro golfer, who had already disappeared.
Then Juliana, who had by then learned not to let an opportunity go by, who had learned that fortune favors the bold, gathered her considerable courage, said, “I’m so hungry. Do you want to get some food? Some real food? Like... a burger, or a fourteen-egg omelet?”
She watched him consider this and then watched him say yes. She’d play that over and over again in her mind over the next few years, the indecision, then the moment of decision. Her heart was beating so fast.
“I wouldloveto get some real food,” he said.
