Chapter Text
She could not be sure whether it had anything to do with her mood, but the numbers on the elevator display seemed to change at a glacial pace. 14. She shut her eyes and exhaled slowly through her nose. 18. Beside her, Serena tapped her fingernails against her phone screen, a sound that normally would not have bothered her but now made her feel murderous.
“Serena,” she said, as calmly as she could muster, “can you check my diary for me?”
The blonde hummed and scrolled through her phone while Emily kept her eyes fixed on the glowing green digits. 21.
“Meeting on Q2 expectations at 9:30. Video call with the manufacturer in France at 11. Model selection with Federico and Patrice at 12. Lunch,” Serena said. “And Penny added something yesterday at the last minute, apparently. A GQ journalist is doing a piece on Dior and wants to talk to you. Le Bernardin, 3:15. His name is…” She paused. “Joel Rodriguez.”
Fucking fantastic.
The elevator finally arrived at the twenty-third floor and opened unceremoniously onto a white marble hallway. Emily stepped out first, heels clacking over the patterned black Dior logo in the floor, Serena close behind.
Behind the SS26 sunglasses Eliana had slipped her, Emily caught Noah practically ducking behind a bamboo planter as she approached the hallway to her office. A young intern called Sophie, or Sarah, or Sylvie, something beginning with an S, hurried out just before Emily reached the door.
Two junior PR girls flattened themselves against the wall with the same guilty expressions people wore when caught stealing office stationery or eating carbohydrates before noon. Emily noticed one of them had paired patent slingbacks with a linen skirt and decided, charitably, that she had suffered enough.
Her corner office was bright, immaculate, and smelled faintly of a Byredo flagship store. Deliberate. The temperature sat a few degrees above what most people considered comfortable. Also deliberate.
Emily had once read that men tended to tolerate overheated meeting rooms worse than women, and that Angela Merkel supposedly used temperature to her advantage in negotiations. True or not, Emily had instructed facilities to raise the thermostat the very next morning.
The building technician had looked at her like she was insane.
“Can you get me a list of the newest bag models?” She sighed as she took a seat at her desk, flicking through the files the intern had fanned out. “And then send Noah in.”
The blonde hummed and left.
Emily leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. Her lower back ached, courtesy of a reformer pilates class one of her friends had bullied her into the night before. Her ankle still had not fully recovered from misstepping out of a taxi at some launch party the week prior. And the headache she had been keeping at bay since dawn had begun to sharpen ever since Serena had read out the day’s schedule.
Her body, apparently, had decided to become an unreliable employee. It complained, resisted, needed maintenance, and had lately developed opinions about sleep, alcohol, stairs and shoes over three inches. Emily found this insulting. She had built an entire career on ignoring discomfort, and now discomfort had started making calendar entries.
“You wanted to see me?”
Emily adjusted in her chair and looked up at the twenty-something Human Resources had sent to replace Molly. Noah was marginally less incompetent as second assistant and, mercifully, less offensive to the eye, though he seemed perpetually terrified of her.
Emily did not necessarily mind. Fear was a form of respect.
The lack of eye contact, however, bothered her.
And made her think of -
Stop it.
“Yes,” she said sweetly. “Make sure I have the presentation for the Q2 meeting before it starts, including the notes, and -”
“Got it.”
“- And,” Emily said, fixing him with a look sharp enough to stop the apology already forming on his face, “reschedule Federico and Patrice to 12:15. The French will never wrap up their manufacturing call in under an hour.”
He nodded rapidly.
“Speaking of,” she added, crossing her legs and flicking through Sophie’s files, “have Serena catch up with me immediately after that call, I’ll need her to talk me through the model shortlist.”
“Yes.” Noah nodded again, far too enthusiastically. “Anything else?”
“No,” Emily said curtly. “God knows that’s enough on your plate already.” She glanced up from the file. “Go on.”
She watched Noah all but sprint from the office before checking her watch.
9:14
Emily waited less than a minute before an email notification flashed onto her desktop screen.
Despite Noah’s general air of flusteredness, he usually managed an adequate job when it mattered. Annoyingly reminiscent of someone she had once known. She sighed, clicked open the email, then the attachment.
Sales were up.
Unsurprisingly.
The SS26 campaign had landed exactly where she had expected it to. Accessories ahead of projections, engagement up, wholesale orders healthy. Somewhere across the building, Neil was probably already preparing a PowerPoint explaining success Emily had seen coming six months ago.
“Perfect timing.”
Emily stood as Serena walked in balancing two coffees and a tablet.
“Let’s walk and talk,” she said, taking one. “Neil’s going to be unbearably smug and I need to stay alert for this meeting. I’m trying to squeeze more budget out of finance for the House of Dior on East Fifty-Seventh.”
Neil was, in fact, unbearably smug.
“Of course,” he said twenty minutes later, standing beside slide eighteen as though he had personally invented revenue, “we do have to be careful about vanity spend.”
Emily looked up from the printed deck.
“Vanity spend,” she repeated. “Oh, you are being serious.”
Neil smiled. Poor choice.
“For example, the frontage concept. The artist commission. The private preview dinners. All lovely, obviously, but finance will want to know whether it converts.”
“Finance will know it converts when finance reads slide twelve,” Emily said, tone borderline condescending. “Which shows client acquisition costs down seventeen percent where experiential retail was trialled. Unless finance would prefer to save money by making the flagship look like a duty-free perfume counter at La Guardia.”
There was a small silence.
Serena coughed into her coffee.
A little over an hour later, Emily had reached two conclusions: men and spreadsheets were unbearable in combination, and Neil remained catastrophically overpaid.
He had spent another twenty minutes huffing over her proposed increase in budget, as though Dior had somehow become a charitable initiative overnight, then signed off on it with a dramatic flair that was too much even for Emily.
“I’ve got your conference call with Jacques and Maximilian set up in your office,” Noah said, half-jogging to keep pace beside her as they crossed the hallway back from the boardroom. “We’ve had another press request from Vogue but I told them you were unavailable until Tuesday afternoon, and, uh…”
He glanced down at his tablet.
“Frank called and asked if you were free for dinner sometime this week.”
Emily stopped walking.
“Frank as in my ex-husband, Frank?”
Noah’s already uncertain “uh huh” climbed half an octave.
“Absolutely not.”
She resumed walking.
“Move Vogue to Tuesday morning,” she said. “Morning slots make people feel important and important people give better press. Leak to WWD that Vogue is sniffing around the flagship. See if it starts a bidding war.”
Noah nodded frantically, fingers already moving across the screen.
“And tell Frank,” Emily continued coolly, “that I am tragically overbooked until next month.”
“Yes.”
“Right,” she sighed, pushing open her office door, “close this behind me and call at exactly 12:04 if I haven’t escaped.”
Noah blinked.
“The French, they drone on,” Emily clarified. “An emergency interruption may become necessary.”
He nodded immediately.
“Got it.”
The door clicked shut.
Emily crossed to the mirror and paused.
The headache sat squarely behind her eyes now. Her blouse collar had shifted slightly. She fixed it, smoothed a hand through her hair and glanced at herself for a second too long.
Tired.
Old.
Stop it.
She sat down. Her French was perfect, but she quietly rehearsed a few lines regardless.
“Bonjour, c’est merveilleux de vous parler. Ça fait longtemps.” She practised. “Merveilleux de vous parler.”
Her eyes flicked to the time in the corner of the screen.
11:00
Emily straightened immediately, reaching over to connect the video call.
“Jacques, Maximilian, bonjour!” she smiled brightly. “C’est merveilleux de vous parler. How are we looking for production?”
Jacques began by saying they were looking excellent, which Emily knew immediately meant they were looking appalling. Maximilian then interrupted him to say excellent was perhaps too ambitious a word, at which point Jacques switched to French at a speed that suggested betrayal. Emily watched them talk over each other for six minutes while the shared slideshow remained, untouched and accusing, on the screen.
After an hour and ten minutes, Emily felt mentally drained, physically exhausted and dangerously close to homicidal.
Hangry, even.
The call with Jacques and Maximilian had yielded approximately zero answers. Nobody seemed entirely sure who was overseeing production, what leather they had supposedly agreed on last year, or why two middle-aged Frenchmen appeared to be having what Emily could only describe as a domestic dispute over handbags.
At 12:04 exactly, her phone rang.
For one brief, shining second, Emily almost believed in God. Then she excused herself and ended the call, promising to check in again soon.
“I’ve got the model shortlist.”
Serena swept into the office, shooing Noah away before he even managed to open his mouth.
“There are a few good ones in there,” she said, dropping the file onto Emily’s desk, “but so much dead weight. I’m not sure who decided we needed more German girls.”
“Blonde sells,” Emily said absently, flipping open the file. “I might dye my hair again in a month or two.”
Serena looked at her.
“You know,” Emily added dryly, “for morale.”
She flipped another page.
“Anyway, who am I supposed to care about? Federico is inevitably going to try and push that Italian girl again. What was her name? Natalia?”
“Natasha,” Serena corrected. “She’s not on the list. Think she’s got some exclusivity arrangement with Bulgari at the moment.” She leaned over slightly. “Here’s my top five.”
Emily flicked through the pages, rows of impossible bone structure staring back at her.
“This one looks dead behind the eyes,” she said immediately, tearing one page free. “No.”
Another.
“This one could be fantastic if she felt like it, but I think she cried during the last shoot with Ben.”
Another.
“This one photographs expensive but walks like she is being pursued through a car park.”
Serena made a thoughtful noise.
“Accurate.”
Another.
“Oh.”
Emily tapped a photograph with sudden enthusiasm.
“I like this one. Who’s that?”
Serena swiped rapidly across her tablet.
“Eliana. Half Russian, half Italian. Natural brunette, five-eleven, good measurements, worked on the AW23 campaign.” A beat. “Lovely girl.”
“Move her to the top.”
Emily slid another profile toward Serena.
“And get rid of this one. I had better measurements twenty years ago and considerably lower self-esteem.”
Serena gave her a look.
“Times have changed,” she offered carefully. “People are more body-positive now.”
“People also vape and wear Crocs unironically,” Emily frowned. “Not all progress is desirable.”
She stood, smoothing the front of her blouse.
“Come on. Let’s go meet the boys.”
The model meeting was the first thing all day to go remotely according to plan.
Federico and Patrice had each dutifully paraded their favourites in front of her and Emily, equally dutifully, had made a performance of selecting one each. Conveniently, Serena had already cherry-picked both.
Eliana, however, Emily pushed for herself.
Patrice objected immediately.
Too politically sensitive right now. Got a piercing last season. Loud. Combative. Apparently the Russian and Italian stereotypes had collided in one person and unionised.
Emily had stared him down.
Eliana got in.
And, annoyingly, getting her way had improved Emily’s mood.
She thanked the waiter in the executive restaurant when he placed her salad in front of her and even smiled while he unnecessarily explained what was in it. Inefficient, but harmless.
Noah had successfully screened her calls. The model meeting had gone her way. The disaster in France had, at the very least, not become more disastrous.
Against all logic, the day was going rather well.
A good day.
Serena was halfway through telling her about an influencer who had arrived at a gifting appointment with a ring light and a miniature tripod. Emily listened, moved a cherry tomato away from the rest of the salad, and watched a couple two tables over share a dessert neither of them appeared to actually want.
Emily looked away.
“Serena,” Emily dragged out, nudging a crouton to the edge of her plate, “do you think I’m nice?”
Serena paused for just slightly too long.
“I think you’re nice enough,” she said carefully. “You’re definitely nice to people you like.”
Emily raised an eyebrow.
“It’s just,” Serena continued, “you don’t necessarily like that many people, do you?”
Touché.
“I don’t dislike them,” Emily corrected. “A lot of them just get on my nerves.”
“Same thing,” Serena shrugged. “How often do you actually like someone if they annoy you all the time?”
It was almost embarrassing how fast exactly one person came to mind.
Emily pushed the thought down immediately.
She laughed, perhaps a touch too quickly.
“You’re right,” she said, picking at her salad again. “Never happens.”
The drive to Le Bernardin was tedious. New York City traffic had always been a nightmare, despite the fact she’d been used to London up to her late teens. Somehow it had become even worse in recent years, bad enough that Emily occasionally caught herself thinking she could never fathom living here past the age of fifty, a sentiment twenty-two-year-old Emily would have considered ludicrous at best and batshit insane at worst.
Her driver took a route that seemed to involve every red light in Manhattan and at least one cyclist with a death wish. Emily reviewed the GQ briefing on her phone, skimmed the journalist’s name again, and decided Joel Rodriguez sounded like a pedantic wannabe. She already disliked him.
The car pulled up outside Le Bernardin on West 51st Street and Emily swiftly got out, sliding her sunglasses back on and crossing the pavement without making eye contact with anyone. The doorman opened the door at precisely the right moment for her to walk through and she acknowledged it with a soft smile before slipping her sunglasses off again in front of the maître d’.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Charlton,” the man greeted politely. “Have you got a reservation with us today?”
“Hi Andrés,” she said, equally polite. “It’s business, not pleasure, I’m afraid. I’ve got a meeting with a Joel Rodriguez at 3:15. He’s probably here already unless he got stuck in the same awful traffic as I just did.”
“Ah yes,” Andrés nodded enthusiastically. “If you’d like to follow me, Ms. Charlton. This way, please.”
They walked through the restaurant, further toward the back.
The room was all low voices and pale linen. Emily took in the flowers, the glassware, the table spacing. Expensive without shouting about it. Good. She preferred places that understood restraint, even if the men who requested interviews in them rarely did.
“Here we are,” Andrés said cheerfully as they approached a table where a long-haired woman sat with her back to them. “Allow me.”
He moved to the other side of the table and pulled the chair back.
Emily felt a chill settle in her veins.
The irony, of course, was that she had spent the entire morning willing the day to move faster, and now, inexplicably, she wanted the room to stop moving altogether, just for one blessed second longer, please God.
Naturally New York was full of women with hair that shade of deep brunette. She saw it every single day. Models’ portfolios landed on her desk with brown hair Federico referred to as espresso, glossy chocolate, or mocha-chestnut scribbled on Post-it notes.
This shade, though.
Mahogany.
With just a hint of -
The woman must have caught movement from her peripheral vision because she shifted her chair back a couple of inches and rose from her seat.
Don’t, don’t, don’t.
“Emily,” she said, and something twisted sharply in the pit of Emily’s stomach, “oh my god, hi!”
Too flabbergasted to fully process what was happening, Emily stood motionless as the brunette pulled her into a hug. The scent of Tobacco Vanille filled her senses, dread tightening suddenly in her chest. She weakly patted her on the back and tried to ease herself out of the embrace.
“Sorry,” the woman continued, seemingly unbothered by Emily’s silence, “sorry, I’m just so excited to see you. How long has it been? Must be close to twenty years now, surely.”
Nineteen years, ten months and one day.
“Where is Joel?”
“Ah.” The woman glanced down at the white linen tablecloth as Emily sat. “Yeah, that’s a bit dicey actually. Joel had to do this op-ed on some politician caught up in fraud and whether it’s going to force him out before the midterms, you did not hear that from me. So they sent me instead. I’m working with GQ now as some sort of in-between job, you know? I was in Sudan for a while with the Post, then wrote for the Times for a bit, but that never really felt like my thing. Sorry, god, I’m rambling.” She laughed nervously. “How have you been? Obviously well, Dior exec. Sorry. How have you been?”
She swallowed, still looking at the tablecloth.
Emily waited.
Waited for brown doe eyes to finally look up and meet hers, something she wasn’t entirely sure which one of them dreaded more.
The woman, mere months older than her, visibly swallowed again.
And Emily?
Emily looked straight at the woman who had broken her heart in the summer of 2006.
“Quite busy, Andrea.”