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And I really did need sleep. In seven hours I’d need to plaster on a servile smile for my boss, Vivienne. Yes, I’ll unredact her name now. Vivienne Blaire. Ex-runway model and wellness entrepreneur. Greatest achievements: persuading women they needed two-hundred-dollar gua sha tools and remaining a size zero at forty-five.
Before I brushed my teeth, I checked Instagram. No one had replied to my comment.
As I grabbed a glass of water for my nightstand, I saw the tin Damian had handed me sitting on the kitchen table. I unscrewed it. It was filled with a strange medley of herbs that smelled terrible.
Nope, not drinking that funky tea, I decided, because I had no idea how much I needed to drink it.
I typed: What’s actually in this tea? Deleted it. Then I typed: Why do you care whether I drink it? I deleted that too, because that was really asking a third question I wasn’t going to send a man I’d known for a day, at midnight, from my kitchen.
Chapter Eight
Iwoke up groggy after a restless night interrupted by a dream in which I was sitting on a bench in a carpentry workshop, my legs around Damian’s waist, his hand gripping my thigh, holding me flush against him. He’d kissed his way down my neck, his hand tracing the hemline of my underwear. Right as my back was arching, my thighs spreading under the pressure of his fingers, the faint noise of Bram’s bell tinkling, somewhere above my head, had made me sit up straight in bed, the lust drowned by the thud of my heart.
I dressed in a hurry and made coffee from muscle memory, my mind trying to stop the dream from sliding off the edges of my mind. The group chat was already busy.
Callie: OMG he stayed over
Callie: falling for him. he just ran out for lattes and cinnamon rolls. he called me a goddess and spent like an hour with his face between my legs
Priya: jesus christ Callie
Callie: sorry TMI
Jess: guess you got your twin flame. that was quick
Callie be careful, I wrote.
Callie: trying and failing
After one long glance at my conspiracy board, I shut the door and drove through congested traffic to Vivienne’s house.
The house sat above the bay like it had been airlifted there from Southern California and dropped, confused, into Eureka. Vivienne had moved back here to be closer to her mother after a hideous divorce.
Everything about her house, including the exterior, was aggressively curated, in part thanks to me, who had sourced her front-porch furniture over a weekend from hell driving to every showroom within a hundred-mile radius.
The Japanese cedar siding was weathered to an exact shade of driftwood gray. No one used the enormous pivot front door, because Vivienne preferred “arrivals” through the kitchen courtyard. She always had bowls of lemons lying around—organic, of course—grown in a greenhouse tended by someone with a trust fund and a podcast.
I parked by the three-car garage and walked inside, where it smelled of the reed diffusers from her own product line: amber, bergamot, and something she called “coastal resin,” which was a blend of cedar oil and marketing copy.
I put my purse on a breakfast bar stool in her obscene kitchen and let out a controlled sigh. Every surface in her house was expensive and uncomfortable. Bouclé chairs no one sat in. Cream-colored sofas that her guests nervously hovered around. Her coffee table books were arranged by emotional tone. That was me, too, following orders, executing them with Claude.
“Vivienne?”
“Marlowe!”
Her voice rang out from her office, which overlooked Humboldt Bay through forty feet of glass.
“Darling, come here, please!”
I kicked off my shoes, which I was supposed to do immediately at the door, and found her wrapped in an alpaca poncho. I couldn’t yet tell if it was going to be one of those days when she told me that “the bay teaches us to surrender,” or if she’d scream because Sofia, her housekeeper, had brought her matcha in ceramic instead of glass.
“Could you bring me my supplements, please?”
Not “hello.” Not “Did you enjoy your weekend?” Not “How was the horror show I sent you to?”
But she also didn’t hiss it or howl it, so the day was probably going to be tolerable.
I went back to the kitchen and found her six-hundred-dollar collection of medicinal mushrooms, which sat on walnut trays, next to a tea cabinet I’d organized under intense duress.
