“Enough,” said Sherri Griffin, formerly Sharon Giordano, standing in the dingy kitchen of their tiny half-house the next day. She’d survived a lesser branch of an organized crime unit. She’d sat in the FBI offices and told the agents everything she knew, and then she’d sat in a courtroom and she’d done the same thing. She’d gotten herself and her daughter out of a terrifying situation. She’d taken down men powerful enough that she would forever live with the fear that someone might still be looking for her. She’d changed her hair and her outfits and her address and her last name and her daughter’s school records. She wasn’t about to be done in by a bunch of yoga moms.
Excuse me, pardon me, barre moms.
Sherri had had enough of being meek, and plain, and of wearing unflattering, cheap clothes. She’d had enough of being 100 percent responsible. Careful. Sober. Boring.
“Enough,” she said again. This house wasn’t even theirs; they were renting it, and they shared it with a woman who banged on the wall when Sherri’s child screamed in the night after waking from well-earned nightmares. “Enough,” she said, when she bumped her elbow on the wall of the damp, unfinished, and very likely haunted basement, which absolutely contained mold or asbestos or maybe both. Enough. Enough. Enough. She was going to buy a new dress, and she was going to see if Alexa could stay with Katie, and she was going to go to the party. For one night, just for one night, she was going to be her old self.
While Katie was still at the nature camp sleepover, Sherri drove up to Portsmouth. She found a shop with pretty dresses in the window. The store was called Bobbles and Lace, and she realized after the fact that there was one in Newburyport too. Oh well. It was nice to get out of town, to drive north, to see a different city on a pretty late-August day. Portsmouth looked like Newburyport’s older, slightly more sophisticated sister, with a wider main street and more shops and more tourists but a similar beautiful-city-on-the-water-in-summer self-confidence. The streets were thrumming with activity; she had to circle a bunch of times before finding parking.
She shopped quickly, choosing three dresses off the rack and asking the salesgirl where she could try them on. The salesgirl’s name was Caitlin. She introduced herself when Sherri walked in and then went right back to scrolling through her Instagram feed, smiling to herself.
Into a pile on the dressing room floor went Sherri’s cotton T-shirt, her sensible, ugly, ill-fitting bra, her awful, awful cargo pants. On went the first dress. She didn’t need to try on the second and third dresses. She knew as soon as she put it on that the first one was an instant win.
It was gold. Back in the day she’d always chosen gold for a big night out. It matched her then-hair. “My golden goddess,” Bobby used to call her and, yes, she could admit it, she’d loved it when he called her that. She often painted her nails gold too. Sometimes, gold eye shadow. She wasn’t scared of standing out back then—she liked standing out. Bobby liked it too. He liked for them both to stand out. She even had a gold bikini.
It felt good to be wearing a pretty dress again. No, more than good—it felt amazing. Sherri Griffin took a deep breath and stepped out of the dressing room to access the three-way mirror. Caitlin, who was leaning on the counter that held the register, turned around, put her phone down, and started to look interested. “Wow,” she said. “You look super hot in that dress.” She didn’t even add, for an old person. (At least not out loud.)
“Thanks,” said Sherri modestly, but not too modestly. Because Caitlin was right. Sherri examined her reflection from every angle. The dress clung to her in all the right places. It fell to just above the knee, where it flared out a bit, but before it got there it lay flat against her stomach and hugged the curves of her hips. The dress had two thin straps across each shoulder and took a generous dip between her breasts. Sherri hadn’t worn a dress like this in—well, it had been a long time. It had been so, so long.
She studied her reflection some more. In the beginning of the program, and before that, during the nightmare days of the trial, and before that, during the even bigger nightmare days following Madison Miller’s disappearance, she’d lost too much weight, and her curves had departed without warning, like tired party guests. Her skin had started to sag. But over the course of the summer, ice cream cone by ice cream cone, lobster roll by lobster roll, she’d filled back out. She and Katie had put in enough hours at the beach that her color was good; the gold of the dress made her skin positively glow. And her cleavage! Her cleavage was back, like a dear friend who’d gone on a long voyage but now had returned.
“I’ll take it,” she told Caitlin.
“Uh, yeah!” said Caitlin. “Of course you will. Do you have shoes?”
“No!” cried Sherri, as horrified as if Caitlin had said, “Do you have syphilis?”
“I have the perfect pair,” said Caitlin. “They’re in the back, we haven’t even finished unpacking them.” She glanced knowledgeably at Sherri’s feet. “Are you a seven?”
“And a half.”
“Right back,” said Caitlin. “And then we’ll accessorize.”
The shoes—heels! Sherri was back in heels!—were great, and so were the earrings Caitlin chose, which were long and fringy and felt like friendly little brooms sweeping at Sherri’s shoulders. Sherri loved all of it, and as it turned out, the dress was part of the end-of-summer sale; the charges came only to one hundred and twenty-eight dollars, which, reflected Sherri, wasn’t so bad for a total transformation.
Just past noon, Sherri texted Alexa to see if she was available. The gods of desperation and babysitting were on her side. Alexa was available.
Out on the street, catching her reflection in the shop window, she spotted her remaining problem. Her hair. She could wear it up. She could wear it down. But whatever she did it would still be the same drab color.
She pulled her phone out of her bag. First she called Rebecca to see if she wouldn’t mind picking Katie up from nature camp when she collected Morgan. Of course Rebecca wouldn’t mind—she was still chagrined about mentioning the party to Sherri; Sherri could tell she’d do anything to help. She could have asked Rebecca to change the oil in her Acura or aspirate a cyst and Rebecca would have answered in the same willing, cheerful way. Then she called the salon.
“You’re in luck!” cried Brittany. “There’s been a cancellation! Do you want it? How soon can you be here? How lucky are you?”
“Pretty lucky,” said Sherri. “I want it.” She believed that sometimes you made your own luck but that other times the luck was handed to you, a gift from an anonymous donor with no strings attached. This appointment would put her over her budget, but she’d cut back next week to make up for it. “I can be there in twenty-eight minutes,” she said.