At least I now knew Nick hadn’t lied to me. When I’d first told him about the lingerie show in Las Vegas, he asked if I wanted company. He joked about having a flexible schedule, and he said there would be possible leads for him at the accessory shows. All true. It wasn’t like Nick knew everything about my life, so I had no reason to know every detail about his.
“Tell me how you reconnected with Marc,” I said.
“You know I had business trouble.” It was statement, not question.
Yes, I knew. It was over a year ago. An arsonist had targeted Amanda’s runway show. I’d volunteered to help her before Nick and my relationship hit some speed bumps. I would have come out of the situation feeling far superior to Amanda in terms of business acumen and high road taking, but she’d seen me in my underwear and that was kind of an equalizer.
But all things considered, an entire convention center of industry professionals had seen me in my underwear now, so that shaved the edge off Amanda’s high ground.
“I took a year off,” she said. “I applied for a teaching position at I-FAD and sent out resumes to everybody I knew on LinkedIn. Honestly, I thought I was done with the fashion business. Even if I had something creative left to say, my name was a joke. Why would anybody pay attention to me?”
“Did you go to Marc or did he come to you?”
“I saw his name in the alumni magazine. I-FAD is known for being a design school, but Marc is one of our more successful graduates from the business side. The current faculty wants to use his success to recruit more candidates for that major, so there was a profile on him. There I was, sitting in my living room in my underwear asking the universe for a sign. The mail arrived and inside was the magazine with that profile.”
I showed great restraint by not saying a word. I’d been known to look for signs on occasion, so anything I said would have had a pot/kettle/black feeling.
“You called Marc and set up a meeting,” I said.
Amanda’s face softened, and I realized she’d been expecting the very comment I’d kept in reserve. It was an oddly bonding moment.
“I reached out to congratulate him on the article. He’d heard about my business trouble. The next day, he called and said he may have an opportunity for me and did I want to meet to talk?”
“That fast?”
“I asked the universe for a sign. It’s not like I was in a position to ignore him. Even if I didn’t want the job, I probably would have asked him for a loan so I could get caught up on my bills and not have credit problems on top of everything else.”
I hadn’t spent much time thinking about Amanda’s life after her troubles. I’ll admit, I’m the center of my own universe. The problems I have take center stage and the problems I get mixed up in tend to override everything else going on around me. And helping Amanda had led to my own set of problems.
I’d been hospitalized (talk about signs). When I recovered, I vowed to take control of my life. I accepted a job at a local start-up e-zine, which had been acquired by Tradava Department Stores, thus giving me the very financial stability I’d sought when I first moved back to Ribbon. I pushed Amanda out of my mind to keep my eyes on my own paper, and enough had happened since then that I’d never stopped to think about the damage done to her life. Did that make me a bad person? I didn’t think so. But it did make me reconsider any snap judgments over the decisions she’d made.
Amanda was the sort of woman to whom it appeared things came easily. She had naturally sleek and straight hair while I had curls that I fought to tame. She had the figure of a model pre-body positive movement, while I had sandwich rolls around my waist. She had her name on the inside label of the clothes in the fashion magazines I read. The closest I’d come to having my name on a designer label was when my mom wrote “S. KIDD” on the elastic inside my Carter’s cotton briefs.
I’d almost lost everything when I first moved to Ribbon. And Nick had lost everything when his showroom manager had been murdered. But watching Amanda lose everything had taught me a valuable lesson. We are all in control of our own lives, and it’s our responsibility to look out for ourselves. It was after Amanda’s trouble that I got my life on track. In a way, I had Amanda to thank.
“Fast forward. Marc bought and renamed your company and kept you on as an advisor. You’re here to represent the collection. You told Marc about Nick and now he’s here too.”
“I just thought Nick should hear Marc out. Nick has options that I didn’t. He double majored in design and business, and he worked for a bunch of companies before he went out on his own. He could make five phone calls and have a job by the end of the month.”
“But he didn’t. For all I know, while I’m here working the Intimate Mode show—” I ignored Amanda’s raised eyebrow at the word “working”—“Marc is trying to set up Nick as the creative director of one of his companies.”
I glanced at the clock. It was long past visiting hours at the hospital. I didn’t doubt they’d bend the rules for someone of Marc’s financial background—heck, I didn’t even doubt he’d make a generous donation to them on the spot to gain favor. I’d do the same thing if I had his money and Nick was the one in the hospital. No judgment.
But the longer the two of them were gone, the more concerned I became that they were bonding like Amanda and I were. Would Marc offer Nick a job? Would Nick take it? If so, how would that affect Nick’s and my future?
As the night wore on and the champagne bottles emptied, it seemed inevitable that Amanda and my night would turn into a slumber party. Amanda curled up on the sofa and I draped a blanket over her.
“Go to sleep. I’ll set the alarm so you can get to your hotel in the morning before the Intimate Mode show.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice sounding halfway to dreamland. As I reached the door, she spoke. “Samantha.”
“Yes?”
“I never said thank you.”
I smiled, though in the dark she probably couldn’t see. “You didn’t have to.” I picked up a keycard and left.
I had questions. Too many questions to sleep. I wanted to talk them out but there wasn’t anybody around who could help me. I wandered into the casino, hoping to find a distraction. I weaved through the slot machines, barely registering the colors and sounds. Before I knew it, I was out of the casino and headed toward the chapel. I had no idea why.
Yes, I did.
I was troubled, and there was something about the quiet, peaceful zone behind those doors that offered calm. And also, I wanted to find out more about that guestbook.
Tonight, Irene was wearing a light blue straw pillbox hat with netting by her forehead. Her floral dress and short jacket held tones of blue, purple, and green, and her lips were an iridescent shade of coral. She smiled, revealing a transfer of lipstick onto her two front teeth. Involuntarily, I ran my tongue over my front teeth to make sure I didn’t reflect her makeup fail.
“Well, hello there!” she greeted me. “You were here a few nights ago. Has your fella gotten over his nerves yet?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
“I shouldn’t tell you this, but he came back after the two of you left and said you’re the one who’s nervous about getting married. Isn’t that sweet? He wanted to give you some alone time to talk to Chaplain Rick so you felt comfortable before making any decisions. If you ask me, too many people rush into marriage before they’re ready. It’s nice to see you two taking this seriously.”
I knew Nick had come back to the chapel to return the guestbook, but I hadn’t known he’d used our circumstances as his cover. It touched me that Nick had confided in Irene and that he’d shared his concerns that I wasn’t ready to commit.
“Is that why you’re here? To seek counsel?” she asked.
“Actually, I wanted to sneak a peek at the guestbook.” I didn’t know if my request was normal or not, so I added, “It’s comforting to see all those people who are so sure about their decision.”
“Sure, honey. I was just working on it.”
“Working on it how? I would think people sign in and that’s it.”
“Yes, except the other night I spilled my coffee on it and two of the pages stuck together. I tore them out, but it’s a shame not to have a record of those weddings in here. I told Chaplain Rick I’d copy them all in myself.” She opened the book and pulled out two soiled pages. “I’m sure nobody cares about this but me, but it just seems like the right thing to do.”
“May I?” I asked, reaching for the pages.
She handed them to me and I scanned the entries. The pages were wrinkled in the way of wet paper that’s dried. And three-quarters of the way down on the second page was an almost illegible entry: Marc Rico and Chryssinda Sykes.
It seemed the missing pages in the guestbook were a dead end. At least it seemed that way until I spotted the name of the witness for the nuptials: Joey Cheeks.