Chapter Text
She wonders if she is hallucinating when she comes to underneath fluorescent lights, and finds Andy Sachs standing at her bedside.
Emily doesn’t remember much. She remembers being on the phone. She remembers being sent flying through the air by a cab, of course. She remembers lying flat on the concrete, her leg bent beneath her at an unnatural angle; she remembers multicoloured scarves falling slowly to the ground, fluttering like birds in the wind.
She does not, however, remember the trip to the hospital. She does not remember who she had told the paramedic to call— the receptionist at Runway, probably, because who else has she got in this godforsaken city? Miranda, who would probably leave the hospital on hold for an eternity? Serena, who isn’t really close enough to be considered a friend? Nigel, with whom she shares nothing but an unyielding admiration for their boss?
Somehow, the receptionist must’ve transferred the call to Andy. Or maybe the receiver on Emily’s Blackberry had somehow managed to capture the screech of tyres against gravel and how the confused shouts of passersby mingled with Emily’s incomprehensible groans of pain. Or maybe, in her haze of distress, Emily had told them to call Andrea Sachs. But regardless of how she had been summoned, Andy is here. There is no bouquet in her hands— not that Emily had expected one, anyway— but she is wearing a floral-print shirt, so Emily supposes it’s close enough.
It is humiliating to look at Andy’s somewhat stylish outfit and remember that she herself is swathed in a hospital gown. Somewhere in the emergency room, a nurse had wiped the makeup off her face; her dress, scraped and torn because of stupid, stupid New York City traffic, had been replaced with a shapeless garment. She is naked and foolish and vulnerable as she lies here before Andy Sachs, of all people, without any of her battle armour.
“Are you alright?” Andy asks. Wooden. Hollow. Dripping with concern that is half-genuine and half-not. This is not the Andy that Emily knows.
“Did you also get hit by a car on the way here? Is there a concussion the doctors don’t know about?” Emily retorts. She looks Andy dead in the eye; the other girl squirms and averts her gaze. “Does it look like I’m alright?” She wriggles her left leg; it’s bruised, but it’s no worse for wear. She then tries moving her right leg. When she finds that she can’t, she bites back a guttural scream when she sees that it is encased in a lumpy cast.
Miranda Priestly’s first assistant cannot go to Paris with a lumpy cast on her right leg. Hell, Miranda Priestly’s first assistant can’t even do half of her daily duties with a lumpy cast on her right leg. She is finished.
There is no beautiful, star-studded Fashion Week waiting for her at the end of this nightmare. There may even be no job waiting for her when she hobbles out of the hospital on crutches. All those salads she’d let rot in the fridge, all those opportunities she’d missed to hang out with Andy Sachs in a deli with a bagel in hand, all the measly cubes of cheese she’d lived off of for the past two months— all of it was for nothing. Ruined, Emily thinks, by a horrible driver in a horrible yellow cab.
“I’m sorry,” says Andy. “I– You’ve had a long morning, Em, and—”
“No,” Emily replies, swallowing to keep her throat from tightening. She reaches up, feels the bandage on her forehead, and pins her arm against her side to stop herself from scratching at it like an irritable cat. “I’m fine. Peachy keen. Couldn’t be better.”
Andy flashes her an awkward smile, then quickly looks down. She’s restless, Emily notices; fidgeting at the clasp on her clutch with her thumb, looking around the room as if there’s somebody else there apart from the two of them.
“Don’t you have to get back to the office?” Emily says, even though a part of her is desperate to keep her one and only visitor in her hour of need. But she cannot let Andy see her like this— halfway on the brink of tears because of Paris, bubbling with anxiety because of the future state of her job, brimming with frustration at the thought of having to coordinate Vivienne Westwood with the plaster prison on her foot— and her pride always, always wins.
“Actually, I— I have something to tell you,” Andy says. “Miranda wanted me to. Uhm. Let you know in person.”
Emily looks up. Andy is different today. There is a conviction in her eyes that wasn’t there at the benefit last night. Her gentle, rounded, genuine smile is gone, replaced with something Emily has seen so many times on the faces of everyone else at Runway: a smile that hides something, like a viper beneath a field of daisies. This is not the Andy that Emily knows.
“I tried telling you on the phone,” Andy continues, “but I didn’t know what to say, and then the accident happened, so I asked Miranda if I could put it off because you got hit by a taxi, but she insisted, so—”
“Just spit it out, Andy.” So she hadn’t come on her own volition, then. Andy is simply here as an extension of her boss: the dutiful assistant, entering Emily’s hospital room not out of goodwill but as a grim, portentous messenger. How ridiculous of Emily to think she had made a friend.
“She wanted me to tell you,” Andy says. She stops, then lets the viper strike, fangs glinting like daggers. “She wanted me to tell you that she was taking me to Paris instead.”
Fool, Emily thinks. She is a fool.
“And you said yes, of course,” says Emily, as if they are discussing the dullest thing in the world. “A million girls would kill for that opportunity.”
“Emily, you don’t understand,” Andy says, but what lines are there for Emily to read between? There is nothing to be explained. She had been blinded by Andy’s smile, shocked by her kindness, and deafened by her words of concern and vapid flattery. Andy had never been nice, or good, or considerate. She had been a snake, just like Emily: just like the rest of them. “Emily, she was going to fire me if I said no. I— I didn’t have a choice.”
She bites back the maniacal urge to laugh; to throw something at the wall, to curse at the universe for twisting nice, good, and considerate Andy Sachs into a mimic of Emily herself. “That,” spits Emily, “is a pathetic excuse.”
A nurse brings her a tray that is painfully reminiscent of the ones she used to get in school— there is a bread roll, a carton of milk, a covered dish, and a small tub of chocolate pudding. There still exists, Emily thinks, small mercies after all.
“Do you know what just… gets me about this whole situation?” she asks, when the nurse has disappeared and shut the door behind him. She digs her nails—filed to a point— into the foil covering the pudding and lets them do their thing.
She closes her eyes, and she is taken back to one of the earliest conversations she’d been roped into having with Andy. They’d been loading the dishwasher in the kitchen, Emily grimacing as her fingers scraped against grime, and Andy had started rambling about how this job was killing her, but it was alright, because Runway was only a temporary gig. The Mirror wouldn’t take anyone without a shred of experience, but a year in hell would be enough to win her a lifetime at any publication of her choice. It all feels like a joke, now; a well-planned, divinely executed joke.
“You’re the one who said that you didn’t really care about fashion. You just want to be a journalist— an honest, upstanding journalist, who doesn’t give a rat’s arse about what she’s wearing. What a pile of bollocks.”
“Emily—”
“And the clothes you are going to wear, and see, and get,” Emily continues; her heart throbs. Andy knows how much Paris means to her. Andy knows, and has always known, because in that same conversation, Emily had been coaxed into blabbing about Paris, how badly she wanted to be among the first group of people to see every new design in the industry, how much she admired said industry, and how desperate she was to make sure that nothing jeopardised this trip for her. Andy had known, and still Andy— honest, upstanding, nice, good, and considerate Andy— had said yes. “You don’t deserve them.”
“Emily, I know you’re mad. You have every right—”
“Don’t stand there and look at me as if you didn’t sell your soul the day you put on those Jimmy Choos.” This— the musk of chocolate and tears mingling in her nose— must be what defeat tastes like. “Just go.”
“Em, I–”
“Go.”
Andy goes. And Emily lies in a hospital room, heartbroken and alone.
***
Emily tries to forget about Andy Sachs. It’s not very difficult; by the time she’s able to haul herself back to the office, Andy and Miranda have just been spirited away to gay Paris, leaving her alone to brood in the bullpen.
She has decided that she will not forgive Andy.
She’s not prepared, of course, for when Andy gets back, decked out in Chanel and Dior and Miu Miu and God-knows-what-else— clothes that should’ve been hers— but she does have a grand declaration outlined in her head.
It’s simple, quick, and to the point. Emily will let her know that they’re not pals, that they had never been pals, and that no, she would not be going on any excursions to any delis with Andy in the near future, because Judas and Jesus had very famously shared a last supper before the former had gotten the latter crucified.
Excised expletives, oaths, and smothered (accidental) confessions aside, it had been relatively easy to compile everything she could say to Andy’s face. It had been much harder, though, to pick up the pieces of her heart from a grubby hospital floor. No attempt to Superglue it together had worked, and no attempt to Superglue it together will likely ever work.
But she carries on anyway, because what else is she meant to do? She’s lucky to have gone without a warning letter for scattering over forty Hermes scarves into dreadful New York City traffic. So she continues consulting Miranda’s schedule, organising meetings with Tom Ford, the head of operations at Chanel, and the Gucci representative that nobody can stand. If the work swallows her whole, then she can pretend as if nothing has happened.
In that hospital bed, Emily had concluded that she had loved Andy once. It is shameful, really, to claim that she had loved Andy Sachs even when the girl had worn her grandmother’s skirt to work. It is embarrassing to admit to herself that the girl who had lain beside her in dreams was the same girl who had smiled when Emily scowled; the same girl who had offered her wadded-up tissues from her clutch. But all of it is recent history, now, a closed chapter that Emily will hopefully never reread.
Sometimes, when it is extra-boring in the office, she’ll close her eyes and imagine what Andy is getting up to on the other side of the world. She is sleeping, probably. Lying in a bed that should’ve been hers, her brunette head curled against a pillow that Emily will likely never feel beneath her head if Andy remains Miranda’s right-hand-woman of choice. And when she wakes in the morning, she will scramble to an effortlessly mysterious cafe, get Miranda an effortlessly brewed coffee, and get croissant crumbs all over whatever couture she’s decided to wear. It infuriates her just as much as it breaks her heart.
It is during one of these rage-fuelled (she insists over and over again that there is nothing else powering her through these daydreams) sessions that Emily’s Blackberry begins to ring incessantly, buzzing against her hip like a wasp about to sting. It’s late— given how Andy is away, it’s now Emily’s job to hang around for European designers who can only take calls at a certain hour— and Emily all but jolts from her stupor.
The call is from Miranda, and Emily immediately knows that something is horribly, horribly wrong.
“Get me someone from French Runway,” Miranda says, before Emily can get a word in edgewise. “I don’t care who it is. I just need someone to hold my coat.”
The line dies. For the first time since she’s been promoted, Emily does not know how to respond to an order from her boss.
Someone to hold her coat, Emily thinks. Unless Andy has fallen ill (or died, a voice inside mumbles), there is simply no reason why Miranda needs an inexperienced blonde girl from French Runway to step into the role of assistant. A tornado of questions sweeps through her head, but she has no time to deal with them. She dials the receptionist at French Runway; she had never been more grateful to her French teacher, who had taught them all to say ‘assistant’ for their GCSEs.
Nigel calls her not long after.
“What has happened to Andrea Sachs,” Emily demands. “It is eleven fifty at night, Nigel, and I am stuck at the office dealing with her incompe—”
“She quit,” Nigel says.
Emily’s blood runs cold. “What?”
“She quit,” Nigel repeats. “Miranda didn’t say much, and Andy has conveniently disappeared from the face of the earth, but from what little I’ve gathered, she just got out of the car and walked away.”
“Walked away?”
“I’m just as surprised as you are,” says Nigel, but something in his tone tells Emily that there’s more to this story than what he’s telling her. “Just— pack her things for her, if you’ve got time. Miranda’s having Roy deliver them to her apartment. And start looking for a replacement.”
Before she can ask anything else, he hangs up.
Here are four things that Emily Charlton knows to be true. Andy Sachs has quit. Her things will be packed and sent to her apartment. Andy Sachs will never step a single foot in the Elias-Clarke building ever again. Emily last saw her in a floral-print shirt, while she herself was infuriated, hurt, and ugly.
HR posts an advertisement the very next day. Emily hires the first girl she sees and tells her that her first job is to clean out the former second assistant’s desk.
***
Three weeks later, the landline on her desk rings.
Miranda has already cleared through four second assistants. It is ridiculous, really, how none of the fashion-forward but frighteningly idiotic girls can order at Starbucks without having a mental breakdown. Emily’s own head has come dangerously close to the chopping block, but she supposes they will all have to keep their heads down and work through Miranda’s simmering rage.
She’s still not too sure of what had happened in Paris. Nigel had been rather reluctant to reveal any details, but news of Jacqueline’s promotion— and Nigel’s rumoured snub— had made their way to her desk anyway. If anything, Andy’s choosing to quit over this betrayal and not another had simultaneously restored and further destroyed what little credibility she had left in Emily’s heart. They had never been friends, and they never will be friends, Emily repeats to herself. She never loved you. She will never love you. Move on.
But there is no time for her to linger in the past; the landline is ringing. Emily steels herself and prepares for another demand from Miranda, grumbled nonsense from Nigel, or some foolish advertiser that just won’t take no for an answer. “Miranda Priestly’s office.”
“Emily? Oh, good. You’re back. It’s Andy. Don’t hang up.”
Andy. It’s Andy. Oh God, it’s Andy. Her voice is a balm against Emily’s ears, a welcome reprieve nestled between the new girl’s whining and Miranda’s imperious cadence.
“I have a favour to ask of you,” Andy continues.
“You,” Emily says. She forces herself to sneer when all she wants to do is rush to a silent, secluded space and process the fact that Andrea Sachs is calling her. “You have a favour to ask of me.”
“Well, I’ve got all these clothes from Paris, and nowhere to wear them.” Andy pauses. Emily forces herself to imagine Andy revelling in her own charity, smugly situated on moral high ground, but she finds that she cannot do it, no matter how hard she tries. “So I was wondering if you’d like to take them off my hands.”
Her first response is to tear Andy apart over the phone, because who in their right mind gives away spoils from the finest city on Earth like that? And does she think Emily is so desperate she’d take her castoffs with open arms? But there is no trace of condescension in Andy’s words, nor is there a veiled attempt to rub Emily’s failure in her face, and Emily is left wondering if there is, perhaps, still some vestige of good left in Andy Sachs.
It’s too late for Emily, as twisted and corrupted as she is by the stab-before-you-get-stabbed culture in this office, but perhaps Andy had saved herself by jumping into the deep end.
“It’s a huge imposition,” says Emily. Control yourself, she demands of herself; she can feel the folds of her throat loosening at the threat of something that resembles an onslaught of tears. “They’d probably drown me, but I suppose I could help you out. I’ll have Roy pick them up.”
“Thank you,” Andy says, and Emily thinks back to how many times she’d repeated that phrase to Andy on that fateful night at the gala, when everything had felt right, for once. If she could bottle that sensation and sell it, she’d make a fortune. “Well, good luck, Em.”
The line dies. Emily wonders when it’ll be her turn to hang up, for once.
Emily shifts her weight once, twice, before dialling Roy and asking him to pick up a package from Andrea’s place, and no, please don’t tell Miranda where you’ve been.
When the clothes come, Emily leaves them as they are, neatly folded in a cardboard box etched with Andy’s familiar scrawl. They are all so beautiful, a medley of Margiela and Tom Ford, of Prada and Dior, made all the sweeter by the knowledge that Andy has worn them all. They still smell like her, too— pageboy hats and those thigh-high boots and a dress so sleek and beautiful, Emily wants to give it back to Andy just so she could watch her take it off.
The clothes are beautiful. They still smell like Andy. Emily leaves them as they are.