October 20
The Present
1:00 A.M.
Michelle Cuzo de Florent-Stinson decided Mish was a stupid nickname. The woman at the modeling agency was the first person to call her by her full name, Michelle, so that most people she met through work or the fashion and advertising world called her Michelle, and then an affectionate roommate from New York called her Ellie, and it stuck. She’d gone by Ellie so long that when Mishon (formerly Shona) Silverstein came back to her life and asked to be called by her real name, she understood. Names reflected where you were in life, marked the people who knew you at certain phases. To her husband, she was Ellie; to Blake, Elle (because he thought it sounded better than “Ellie”); to Leo, she’d been Mish.
Leo, who died at sixteen. She never graduated from high school. She never left Portland. Never left Oregon.
If she’d lived, would Ellie even know her? Would they be friends or would she be one of those people she blocked on Facebook because they knew too much of her past?
Mish—and yes, sometimes she still thought of herself as Mish, especially when Leo came up—felt guilty.
This was the life Leo had dreamed about.
This was everything she’d ever wanted.
“What’s up? You all right?” asked Todd. “Madison says we need to leave now or we’ll miss the entire thing.” They were standing in the middle of the hallway, in front of the pool doors; outside, the party was winding down, almost everyone had left.
“The night Leo died,” she said. “You know how my dad died too?”
Todd nodded. “Murder-suicide or something, right? He killed her and then killed himself?”
“Not quite.” She took a deep breath. She told him what she’d done. How she’d opened the door, how that moment had cost Leo her life. How her dad had shot Leo.
“I know,” said Todd. “You told me this on our first date.”
“Except that’s not the whole story,” she said. She told him the truth. About how her dad chased her, slipped and fell, and hit his head. How they didn’t call the ambulance. How he came to, and how she grabbed the gun and pulled the trigger.
“I was so scared,” she said. She was the one who’d done it. Maybe he would have bled out. Or maybe he would have survived. But she never gave him the chance. She made that decision for him.
“He was dead anyway,” Todd said. “And you did the right thing. Even if it had gone to court, you would have been innocent. You have the right to self-defense.”
“I guess,” she said.
“Well, I don’t guess, I know, and you know what else I know?” he asked gently.
“What?”
“It’s your birthday.”
“Technically, my birthday isn’t till next week,” Ellie reminded him.
“Right. But the party’s tonight. So let’s celebrate.”
She shrugged. “We’ve been doing that all night.”
“Yeah, and it’s not over till the drag queen sings. We’re not even at the first after-party yet, and it’s almost time for the second.”
She felt a small smile forming on her face. “Okay.”
“Okay.” He smiled, and he really was so handsome still, and she thought, no matter what, even with the ten extra pounds, she would always find him handsome, until they were old and toothless and drooling. Wasn’t that worth more than all the money in the world?
The house was almost empty, so it was a surprise when the door opened and one last guest appeared. It was Harry Kim, her would-be investor.
“Happy birthday!” he said.
“Harry! What are you doing here? I thought you said you couldn’t make it. I’ve been texting you all night, begging you not to leave me and telling you I need you, don’t do this.”
Todd raised his eyebrows. Mystery solved. Of course Ellie would only text so passionately to a business partner. It was classic Ellie.
“I was on a plane to come here,” Harry said. “And you wouldn’t let me finish explaining.”
“Explain what?”
“The deal’s off because we want to do a new deal. We don’t want to just own fifty percent of Wild & West, we want to grow it. But there’s a catch: We need to go down-market, sell to the off-brand stores. We have exclusives to Marshalls and Ross Dress for Less. We could make this a hundred-million-dollar business.”
“What?”
“Yes, I had the new papers drawn up. But I didn’t want to bother you on your birthday.”
“Harry Kim!”
“Actually, it was Sanjay’s idea,” Harry said. “When I told him we were buying your company, he said we’d make a killing if we went this route.”
Sanjay. Of course. Friends don’t let friends go bankrupt. Sanjay was the one who had paid the ransom, after all, when she’d been kidnapped in Dubai.
She calculated the risks and benefits; she would be selling her clothes to bargain shoppers, to people who couldn’t afford the good stuff but the facsimile. Then she realized, yes, she would do it—she would do it for the girl she used to be. So rich ladies in Boca would stop buying her outfits, she would stop being invited to Fashion Week, Vanity Fair wouldn’t care about someone who sold clothes to the masses. To the poor.
But she wouldn’t be broke.
In fact, if Harry was right, she’d be richer than she’d ever been. Todd raised his eyebrows. He’d done the same calculations too.
“Go, everyone’s at the club,” she said. “The party bus is still outside. Tell them to wait for us. I just have to grab my purse.”
Ellie grabbed her purse and walked out of the Palm Springs house they would place on the market next month after Todd was diagnosed with dry-eye syndrome and could no longer be in the desert (Sterling would be so excited to flip it!), hand in hand with her husband to the waiting Uber to take them to the weeds-to-shithole restaurant her Parisian designer had retrofitted with more zhush.
She wasn’t broke. She wouldn’t have to file for bankruptcy. Her business would continue, and her family was intact. Her stepdaughter, hopefully, wouldn’t be expelled from Stanford. But even if she was, who cared? There were other schools. And Ellie had never even gone to college, and look at where she was now.
Giggy at least had one good friend, and the twins—well, the twins were the twins.
Tomorrow she would craft a budget, tomorrow she would figure out a new financial plan, tomorrow she would start living within her means.
But that was tomorrow.
Today wasn’t over yet.
Today was still her birthday.