“Right, right.” She gestures at La Mer. “Well, we have a reservation. So…”
“Call me,” Elizabeth says.
“I will!” Marcella wags her fingers, and almost forcibly drags her date inside.
Elizabeth turns away, the warm friendliness gone now. “I hope your schedule’s clear next weekend. If it’s not, clear it.”
“Why?”
“Because”—she shoots me an enigmatic look—“I’m going to show you how I can open doors money can’t buy.”
Chapter Twenty
Elizabeth
“You’ve lost weight.”
I merely smile at the mild rebuke. I know better than to argue with Yu-Jin.
First of all, the woman’s holding some very sharp pins. Second, she’s a genius with alterations, and I need her help.
The little tailor shop is the fruit of her lifelong dream and my investment four years ago. Until then, Yu-Jin worked for Grandma Shirley.
The business started out fairly well, but it skyrocketed when my brother Ryder started using Yu-Jin’s service. Nothing draws customers like celebrity, and Ryder is a huge movie star with an ego and appetite for publicity that’s large even by Hollywood standards. Thankfully, he has a good heart to go with it. Otherwise he would be insufferable.
As Yu-Jin checks the fit again, I start to drift, last night’s conversation with Marcella fleeting through my mind.
“I had no idea you were back with Dominic.”
“We met again at the dinner in the Sterling mansion,” I said, only because I knew it would bother her to know he was there and she wasn’t.
“Oh. I wish I’d been there! Then I would’ve been able to keep him away from you.”
I bit my lip. She wished she were there to hit on rich, unmarried men. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to discover she sleeps with married men so long as they can give her the money to maintain her lifestyle.
“Don’t feel bad. Dominic isn’t your concern,” I said lightly.
“But given what happened before… I mean, he coerced you when you were too young to really consent. And you know, consent has to be the foundation of any relationship. Anything else is patriarchic misogyny. It just bugs me…”
The muscles in my jaw tightened. Marcella is many things, but a true feminist she’s not. It grossed me out to hear her give me the crap she’s read online. True feminism empowers women, gives them agency. Marcella—along with Shirley—took mine away.
“I was old enough to get a fake ID,” I said mildly. “I’m sure I was old enough to consent to sex.”
She’s this blithely arrogant because she thinks I haven’t discovered who ratted me out. But I did, soon after Grandma Shirley told me she would never forgive Dominic…that it was Marcella who betrayed me.
I shed my naïveté fairly quickly and started to see what the people around me were truly like. But Grandma stopped me from confronting Marcella. “No need to antagonize her, Elizabeth. Even cockroaches have their uses from time to time.”
“Tell me how your dad’s doing. Didn’t he start some new venture?” I asked Marcella.
She launched a long whine about how he wasn’t doing well, how it was scaring her because she had expenses. It never occurs to her to get a job and provide for herself.
And it never occurs to her that her father will never do well…because I won’t let him. He encouraged Marcella to sell me out to Grandma Shirley in order to curry favor. Apparently loyalty and friendship mean nothing to the man so long as he can profit. So I’m responding in kind…but without being overt. I can accomplish what I want with a few well-placed words, an obstacle here and there preventing him from meeting the right kind of people in the right kind of setting.
“All done,” Yu-Jin says. She straightens, then places her hands on her hips. “You really shouldn’t lose more weight. Why Americans don’t want to eat, I don’t know.”
“Food allergies?” I joke. The real reason for my weight loss is the lack of sleep, which has the side effect of killing my appetite.
Yu-Jin scoffs.