Girl Before a Mirror (13 page)

“You're falling in love with Lincoln?” Sasha downright swoons.

“That's . . . of course that's all you took from that,” I say, turning into the Biltmore's long driveway.

“That and you're not wearing any underpants.”

“I just feel like I'm coming undone and . . . I'm scared,” I say, slowing down behind a white Bentley at the valet of the Biltmore.

“I get that,” Sasha says.

“I know you do,” I say, trying to offer her a consoling smile. The valet opens my door and Sasha and I trudge into the lobby once more. We fall into a contented silence as we ride the elevator up to our rooms. Sasha looks over at me nervously a few times as we walk down the long hallway, and I act like I don't notice. She slides her key into her door and turns around, about to say something. “I'm so proud of you for the Ryder thing,” I say. “That's really huge.”

“Thanks,” she says. A beat. She wants to say something more, but then just smiles. I open my hotel room door and can barely form a thought, I'm so exhausted.

“Lunch?”

“Sure. I'll knock at around one?” Sasha asks.

“Sounds good,” I say.

“Then the meet-and-greet thing?” Sasha asks.

“Oh, that's right. Yes. Okay,” I say.

“The title of Mr. RomanceCon depends on our getting to
know these men, Anna,” Sasha says, trying to lighten the mood.

“I'm sure it does,” I say with a wave. Sasha smiles and my door closes behind me. I begin to shed—purses, workbags, clothes, high heels. I turn on the shower and once it's hot enough, blissfully climb inside. There is something magical about a hotel shower. Maybe it's the water pressure or the promise of not having to clean up after yourself, but I can't remember my shower ever feeling this good.

My mind is blank as I let the hot water pour over me. I am far too exhausted to unpack all the goings-on since I arrived in Phoenix not even forty-eight hours ago. And it's not last night with Lincoln or my emotional download with Helen or my nervous breakdown in the rental confessional with Sasha or even the Lumineux campaign itself.

It's me.

I'm finally changing after whatever this last year was—training montage, Time-Out, hiatus, cleaning house. This is me finally admitting that I have had to change one thing: everything. And that everything changed around me so a life that was once familiar is now . . . completely unrecognizable. I shut the water off. A smile begins to spread across my entire face.

My life is becoming everything I hoped it could be.

As quickly as it came, my smile disappears, and I'm gripped by fear. The quiet surrounds me. Reminds me. Suffocates me.

Such a quiet life. My life, my childhood was so quiet. My mother would go back to her studio and paint and my father was off saving the world in the army. I knew what love was because I could see that they felt it for each other. I'd like to think that I learned not to care, but that would mean I understood what it meant to be loved in the first place.

No, mine was a very progressive freezing over. It just made
sense. We would move every eighteen months, and it wasn't practical to form any attachments. And then that which made sense just became the way life was. The way I was. By the time Ferdie came along, my heart didn't work like that anymore. It didn't swoon. It thought about things. It weighed and measured. It used reason. Because it had to, after having gotten so beaten up in the beginning.

As I grew older I learned that when I fell, I got up. If the wound bled, I washed it and put a bandage on it. I tucked myself in at night and soon came to enjoy the ritual of it all. I had Cheetah the stuffed animal to read to and fell asleep looking at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my bedroom ceiling that I took with me to every new house. I thought I was content. That I'd made a life for myself.

A life lived secondhand with everything at a safe distance.

As the years went on, it was order that I counted on. Control. Things being in their place made me happy. I think about my birthday; my inability to think of something to wish for as that candle flickered. Maybe that was the beginning. The moment the old way was no longer enough.

Over the past year, I've chipped away at the mythology of my beliefs to discover that love is not reasonable or measured. It undoes you. It's in the imperfections in each other, in ourselves, where we find our humanity. It's in our dents and scars where the deepest connections are made. Real love resides in the parts of me I think no one wants to see. And as someone who survived because everything was perfect and in its place, I know it's that fact alone that sends a chill down my spine.

“Broken people make the best heroes,” I repeat to myself as the steam dissipates.

I desperately try to smooth out the indentations on my cheek from the pillow as we take the elevator down to the lobby. We're venturing out for lunch. Amid all this undoing and breakthroughing, some authentic Mexican food will be just the balm we need. We are going to go to Asadero Norte de Sonora—a little hole-in-the-wall I found online. I plan on eating my feelings with a side of salsa.

Sasha is texting someone as we descend. When I ask if it's Ryder, she says no. And that's that. Her fingers burn across her keyboard. Wait. Then another flurry of texting. A scoff here and a stifled laugh there and I know that whatever conversation she's having is not a good one. I'm beginning to think Ryder isn't the only man in her life. The elevator dings open, we walk out of the lobby, and the blistering-hot Phoenix summer day hits us both like a ton of bricks.

“Oh my God. Oh my God,” I say, shoving my valet ticket into the poor young man's hand.

“It's a thousand degrees—why would anyone . . .” We walk right back into the lobby and watch for our car from the safety
of the hotel's air-conditioning. While I would love to breathe actual fresh air, for a change, I do not want to incinerate my lungs in the process. We're waiting for our car when I see Preeti sitting at a corner booth of the hotel restaurant.

“Isn't that Preeti?” I ask, bringing Sasha's attention up from her phone.

“Huh? Oh . . . yeah, looks like,” Sasha says, her eyes returning to her phone.

“We should probably say hi,” I say.

“Yep,” Sasha says, not looking up. I tell the hostess that we're just going in to say hi to a friend who's already in the restaurant. She is immediately suspicious. We cross the expanse of the restaurant—and as if the patrons weren't loud and distracting enough, there are televisions mounted on every wall, in every corner of the establishment. Baseball games, golf, and shows about baseball and golf drone on in the background as people choose to ignore whoever they're dining with to follow along with the subtitles. We finally approach Preeti's booth over in the corner.

“We just wanted to come say hi, check in on you,” I say, standing at the end of the table. Preeti is just about to open her mouth when the person she's dining with speaks.

“Ah, Anna. So wonderful to see you,” Audrey says, sitting across from Preeti. She ignores Sasha completely, of course. Sasha immediately looks up from her phone and the heat of her laser stare could set the side of my face on fire any minute.

My brain runs through the options:

        
1.
   
Drag Audrey's smug body out of that booth and shove her right out into the Phoenix heat where she'll most certainly burst into flames.

        
2.
   
Lick Preeti Dayal and claim her as mine like I did with my food when Ferdie was slow to learn sharing.

        
3.
   
Grab Sasha and squeeze both of us into their two-person booth come hell or high water.

I take a deep “cleansing” breath—only in quotations because it's the least cleansing breath I've ever taken—and decide on:

“What a lovely surprise.”

“Isn't it, though?” Audrey asks, sipping her white wine. I can feel my shoulders creeping ever higher.

I look back over at Preeti. “Well, we'll leave you to it. Catch up with you at the meet and greet then?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Preeti says. I can't read her. Does she want to be dining with Audrey? And even though I can't believe it, of course Audrey flew out here to piss all over the Lumineux campaign and make it hers. She's got nothing else going on and certainly has no idea how to find her own clients. Before I pass out from the held breath of sheer rage, I say my farewells. I nudge a speechless Sasha out of the restaurant, her phone pinging and vibrating in her hand. We walk right past the hostess, through the lobby, and out into the blazing-hot sun, where our stupid rental car awaits.

“Didn't know if you guys had changed your minds,” the glistening valet says. I tip him some unknown amount of money and then laugh maniacally at his “joke” for way longer than is socially acceptable. He hurries to shut the car door out of self-preservation.

“I can't believe she's here. I can't believe she's here,” Sasha says.

“We still have two hours until the meet and greet. Let's just
stick to the plan and go to that Mexican place I was talking about,” I say.

“Now you're talking,” Sasha says. She texts one final thing and shuts her phone off, throwing it into her purse. I don't know what's going on, but I do know that whatever that moment was, it was a victory for her.

“This is because of that e-mail about Chuck. She's getting more and more desperate to bring in a big client,” I say, pulling up the address to Asadero Norte de Sonora on my phone. I hand the phone to Sasha and we start on our way.

“But not desperate enough to actually go out and get her own clients, though,” Sasha says, slumping over in the passenger seat.

“No, this is bad. I've never seen her act like this,” I say. Sasha stifles a contemptuous laugh as her entire demeanor changes. Slumped over in that passenger seat, she looks like a tantrumming teenager, telling you juuuuuust leeeet it gooooo, Moooooom. “No. I'm serious. She's always been . . .” I trail off, searching for the right word.

“Bitchy?” Sasha blurts, and then tells me to take a right at the light.

“No, she's . . . imperial. So blue-blooded that her rarefied existence makes it almost impossible for her to understand how anyone—anyone normal, that is—lives. So, how can she advertise products for the rest of us?”

“She can't,” Sasha answers.

“I mean, her idea of ‘keeping it real' was this one traumatic time she had to fly first class rather than take the family's jet. And she talked about that like it was Nam,” I say. Sasha leads me through the streets of Phoenix as I try to figure out where we stand now.

“Where I come from? We call that bitchy,” Sasha says.

“No, this is worse. Bitchy I can handle. I mean, we all survived seventh grade.” Sasha nods. “This is going against everything she's ever stood for . . . Do you know she was the one who saved my job a few years ago?”

“What?”

“I'd finally been promoted to a full-time agent. One of the other ad agents was yelling at me about some messenger he said he'd sent—of course he hadn't. But I was the low man on the totem pole and this was going to be my fault whether I liked it or not.”

“Sounds about right,” Sasha says.

“Audrey glides in and asks the guy to join her in the hall. It was so cool. She politely excused herself and I could hear her giving it to him just outside the office. He hadn't sent for the messenger. He was blaming me. This wasn't how we did things at Holloway/Greene and on and on. He slinked away and she walked back in and I'll never forget, she was wearing this beautiful gray, just-clingy-enough cashmere dress that I didn't even know how someone would dare try on, let alone look as resplendent in as she did . . .” Sasha repeats the word
resplendent
. “Anyway, she came in, stuck her hand out, and said, ‘We haven't been formally introduced. I'm Audrey Holloway.'”

“Wow,” Sasha says.

“I know.”

“So, what happened?” Sasha asks, guiding me to make a left at the next street.

“I guess Chuck Holloway happened,” I say. Sasha is quiet. Shaking her head. A deep sigh. Then—

“What are we going to do?” Sasha asks.

“We land Lumineux,” I say.

“But—”

“It's our campaign. First? We don't forget that.” Sasha nods. “So we continue working. We stay the course. There's nothing we can do about Audrey.” Sasha is about to put up a fight, but I cut in. “There really isn't. In the end, she's our boss. All we can do is make sure that we are an integral part of this campaign and that we continue to make an impression on Preeti,” I say.

“It should be . . . it should be right up here on the . . . right. Right there.” We smell the restaurant before we see it. Wafting barbecued deliciousness. We find parking on a side street in front of an abandoned grouping of buildings behind an archway that says
A LI'L BIT OF HEAVEN.

We walk the short distance, through the makeshift parking lot and into the inconspicuous reddish box of a building with the simple sign that reads
ASADERO NORTE DE SONORA.

“What does it mean?” Sasha asks.

“Barbecue from the North Sonora region . . . ish,” I say, not wanting to get into the complicated translations of the word
asadero
.

“It smells amazing,” she says. We walk inside and seat ourselves at one of the few tiled tables. The waitress comes over and smiles.

“Coke, please,” I say.

“Me too,” Sasha says. The waitress walks off and I let myself inhale. I'm already calming down. Getting out of that hotel was for the best. The waitress returns with two heavy bottles of real Mexican Coke and two plastic glasses filled with ice. She also sets down a basket of chips, a bowl of salsa, a bowl of guacamole, and two other bowls of what look like watered-down pinto beans.

“
Frijoles charros
,” the waitress says, responding to my confused look. She then mimes that we eat it like we would any other soup. I smile and she waits, pulling out a pad of paper.

“Are you ready to order?” I ask Sasha. She nods no. The waitress smiles and indicates that she'll be back in a few minutes.

“They don't speak English here?” Sasha whispers.

“Why should they?” I ask, motioning to the pictures on the menu. “We can just point.” I dig into the chips and salsa. Oh my God. Then the
frijoles charros
. The spices and the broth and the flawlessly cooked pinto beans . . . it's just what the doctor ordered. And then I take a long swig of Coke right from the bottle. “Perfection.” The ranchero music blares in the background as people from the neighborhood come in for takeout, their children playing with the vending machines filled with useless toys that seem priceless to all kids everywhere. The faux painted orangish walls are decorated with pictures and randomly hung landscapes of what is probably Sonora. Sasha digs into the
frijoles charros
, and before I check back in with her, she's finished the bowl and is now drinking the last bits of it.

“Oh my God,” she says, swiping her finger on the bottom of the little bowl for anything she's missed. “That? When you're sick? I can't even deal with that right now.” Sasha takes out her phone and snaps a picture of the finished bowl. Then the real Coke in its iconic bottle. Then the restaurant itself. “Smile!” she says. I oblige and she snaps a picture of me. She looks at the photo. “Super cute.” She takes that opportunity to scan her texts. A look of annoyance, then she does that same pushed-back-shoulder thing she did the first day I met her at Holloway/Greene when she strode through the bull pen. She looks up and tucks the phone in her purse with a shake of her head. She takes
a giant bite of the salsa and immediately chokes on the heat of it, desperately gulping down her Coke.

“It's hot,” I say, taking a chip heaped with salsa and happily letting it incinerate my mouth.

“You're not kidding,” Sasha says, laughing. I can't help but join her as Audrey's presence at the Biltmore begins to fade away in the haze of Sonoran barbecue. For now.

The waitress takes our orders and I check the time. We'll make it to the meet and greet at the Irish Cultural Center in plenty of time. We'll let Audrey have her little lunch with Preeti, where she'll no doubt charm her with that patrician air. But she'll know absolutely nothing about Lumineux and the Just Be campaign, and certainly nothing about romance novels and RomanceCon. People need time to reveal themselves, so that's just what I'll give her. Let her hang herself, Anna.

My eyes dart around as I piece things together. Try to figure out Audrey's move. Replay the scene. I'm sure Audrey will just say she's in Phoenix to make sure Preeti knows that she is important and that our agency will do its utmost to serve her and Lumineux. We're all on the same team, I can hear her saying now.

Another swig of Coke. A sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The pieces come together quickly in my mind and the realization hits me.

“Audrey doesn't just want Quincy,” I say, finally seeing her desperation.

“What?” Sasha says, saying thank you in terrible Spanish as the waitress sets down our steaming plates filled with delicious food.

“She wants Lumineux.”

“Yeah, I know,” Sasha says.

“No, she wants Lumineux all to herself,” I say.

“But—” Sasha packs a flour tortilla with carne asada and closes her eyes in ecstasy as she eats.

“Lumineux is right now. Audrey needs something immediately to convince Charlton that she's the right Holloway for the job. Quincy is too far away and still pie in the sky. Lumineux? We've done all the work and it would . . . it could tip the scales. If we stay on the Lumineux campaign . . . it's like what you said. We're not Miss Marple. We're a threat and Audrey knows it. She's got to get us out of the picture as soon as she can so she can hold Lumineux up as her very own hard-won trophy,” I say, shredding my chicken and putting it into a flour tortilla along with some of the salsa.

“But it's not even ours yet,” Sasha says with her mouth full.

“I know. But we have something she never will,” I say. Sasha stops eating. Waits. “It was our idea, so not only do we have the inspiration, we have the knowledge that there's more where that came from,” I say, calling back Lincoln's words.

“We're not just this one idea,” Sasha says.

“No.”

“So we Marple them. Our version of Marpling, anyway,” Sasha says.