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It's Saturday afternoon. Somewhere out there, people are at farmer’s markets and brunches and their kids' soccer games, living the regular lives I used to watch out my window and tell myself I didn't want. And I'm down here on my linoleum, twenty-eight years old, with a phone that isn't going to ring, because over the course of twenty-four hourse, I have gotten rid of every last person who might call it.

When I can move again, I do something you’re not supposed to, which is pick at the scab. While there's no bank statement that details my debt because loan sharks don’t do paperwork, after Friday night at the diner, I sure as hell know down to the dollar where I stand with Sal.

One payment left. One. A number so reasonable I could almost cover it with a couple paychecks from Ardent Capital, if I were still employed by them. Or anyone.

I can’t blame anyone but myself for this mess. Another one of Birdie's beautiful disasters and the debt she left parked on my chest. One more payment, give or take, and it's gone, wiped, my name finally clean.

I burned down my job, my secret, my sister, and the only three people who ever once made me feel like I was actually in the room, and in exchange, I get to almost finish a loan for a business that was going to teach yoga on a ranch, with goats scattered around for scenery.

Winning.

I pick up my phone. I have Birdie's name pulled up and half a text typed, Bird, I didn't mean—, before I stop, because the ugly truth is, I did mean it. Every word. Some things you just can’t un-say, especially if they’re freaking true. I delete my text one letter at a time and set my phone face-down.

This is my life as of Saturday, at four-thirty in the afternoon.

No job. No Diablo. No Birdie. No men. No cover.

And the strangest part, the part I can’t stop thinking about as the light fades across my ugly linoleum, is that I'm not even sure who's sitting here, right now, in my skin, and in my crappy little apartment. My whole life, Agnes has been head down, careful, creeping along the sidelines, taking up as little room as a person can and still exist.

I was Diablo for just a few weeks. All red lipstick, not afraid of a damn thing. She was the most alive I have ever been, which pretty much says everything I need to know about the other twenty-eight years of my life.

And here’s what I’m finally looking at, head-on. They were both costumes. I knew Diablo was one because I painted her on every night. But Agnes? Small, useful, invisible Agnes, forever mopping up after everybody so nobody would think to ask what she needed? She was a costume too. The oldest one. The one I wore so long, and so well, that I forgot there was anything else I could be.

So who's left, when you take both these off?

I wish I knew. It feels like the worst thing to come out of all this, even worse than the men, and way worse than Birdie's face when I told her off.

And then, because a girl can stay at rock-bottom for only so long, something changes for me.

I remind myself there's no boss to disappear for. No whales to be brave for. No sister to be the strong one for. For the first time since I was a kid, there isn't a single person on this earth who needs me to be anything at all.

Except me, of course.

I keep waiting for this to lighten my load. Maybe cheer me up a bit. But it doesn't. I’m still enjoying my own private pity party.

But hey, I'm still here. Scraped hollow, nine hundred years old, sitting on the floor, but still here. And the part of me that doesn’t know to quit is digging at the wreckage of my life, poking around, muttering, okay, what’s next bitches?

’Course I have no answer for this. I’ve got no plan, nor the faintest idea what this coming Monday might look like.

I get up anyway. My knees crack. I wash my face in the kitchen sink because it's closer than the bathroom, and I catch my reflection in the faucet.

She’s someone I haven't quite met yet.

Well hello.

16

BECK

I've been working rooms since I was a kid. Everybody alive is walking around wanting something they're too polite or too scared to say out loud, and I hear it the way other people hear music or birds or traffic. Then I decide whether to hand it over or make them work for it. Either way, by the time I leave, the room is mine.

If that makes me sound like a dick, I suppose it’s because I am. After all, I’ve closed deals that made grown men cry, and I have never wanted a thing I couldn't get.

So somebody explain to me how I've spent four days now in a ten-million-dollar apartment, not eating, not sleeping, unable to close the one thing I have ever actually needed because she walked out of that conference room and took the deal with her.

Yeah, I know it’s my own fucking fault. I did this, and I want that on the record.

I told everybody, especially myself, it was a rescue. Three rich men helping a girl out of a hole, like she was a charity case and we'd earned a medal for it. And then, because I can never leave a comfortable lie alone, I stood in my own office and told Theo the uglier version, that three men found a woman we could own. I said it like it was wisdom.