Gala Girl

You wake up on Xio's couch with a crocheted blanket over your legs and the green silk gown hanging on her closet door like a ghost.

For three seconds you don't remember. Then you do.

"Don't," Xio says from the kitchen. She's in scrubs already, her braids piled on her head, pouring coffee into the mug that says WORLD'S OKAYEST NURSE. "I can see you reaching for it. Don't."

Your phone is on the floor, face down, where she threw it at 2 a.m. after the four hundredth notification.

"How bad?"

Xio sets the mug in front of you and sits on the coffee table, knees touching yours. She is the most beautiful person you know and right now she looks like she'd like to commit a crime.

"Eleven million," she says. "Across everything. They're calling you Gala Girl. There's a sound. People are doing the sound."

You close your eyes.

"There's also," she says carefully, "a lot of people losing their minds about the guy who walked out. Half the comments are about him. The other half I blocked. I made a spreadsheet. You'd be proud."

You laugh. It surprises both of you.

"I have a twelve-hour shift," Xio says. "If anyone named Kellaway comes to this door, I've told Mrs. Paredes downstairs to throw her slipper at them. She's got aim, Ava. She's from Santo Domingo."

Rainier comes at eleven.

Mrs. Paredes's slipper misses him by a foot, which means she wasn't really trying. You let him in because there are things you need to say out loud and you'd rather not say them to a door.

He looks terrible in the way handsome men look terrible: hair a little messy, shirt open at the collar, gold stubble catching the light. He has flowers. Peonies, which he knows you love, which means someone reminded him.

"I've been calling all night," he says.

"I know."

"Look." He sits on Xio's armchair and leans forward, elbows on his knees, earnest. You used to love this posture. It's the one he uses in meetings right before he asks for something. "It got out of hand. Torrance went off script. Felicity feels awful."

"Felicity posted it."

"She took it down."

"After it had four million views."

He rubs his face. "Okay. Here's what Mom thinks. And I agree with her. If you post something today, light, funny, like 'I can take a joke, love my new family,' the whole thing turns around. People love a good sport. And then maybe you take a few weeks. Mom knows a place in Arizona, a wellness retreat. Very private. The family would cover it."

You look at him for a long time.

Two years. Two years of Sunday dinners in the house on 72nd Street, of Clementina asking if you were "sure" about dessert, of Felicity tagging you in workout videos with hearts. Two years of telling yourself they were just like that, that it was love in a family that didn't know how to do love, that Rainier was different.

He laughed.

"Did you know?" you ask. "Before. Did you know what the jokes were going to be?"

He hesitates. It's one second. It's enough.

"Felicity ran it by me," he says. "I thought it'd be, you know, lighter. And honestly, babe, you've always been so good about this kind of thing. That's what I love about you. You don't take yourself too seriously."

You take the ring off.

It's a three-carat cushion cut in a platinum setting that once belonged to Rainier's grandmother, and it has never fit quite right. It comes off easily.

You set it in his palm and close his fingers over it.

"I take myself exactly as seriously as I should," you say. "Go home, Rainier."

He stares at the ring like it's a bill he didn't expect. "You're upset. I get it. Let's talk in a week."

"No."

"Ava. Come on. Where are you going to go? You work for us."

As it turns out, you don't.

The call from Kellaway's HR comes at 2:40 p.m. A woman named Ilka, whom you trained on the inventory system three years ago, reads from a script in a voice that keeps cracking.

"Due to a restructuring of the strategy function, your position has been eliminated, effective immediately. You'll receive four weeks' severance contingent on signing a non-disparagement agreement. I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

"It's not your fault, Ilka."

"They're packing your desk," she whispers. "Mrs. Kellaway's assistant is doing it herself."

Eight years. You started in the stockroom at twenty-one, folding cashmere in the basement of the Fifth Avenue flagship, and worked your way up floor by floor until you were the one telling the executives which floors were losing money. You know which elevator sticks between three and four. You know the name of every seamstress who used to work in the closed sixth-floor workroom, because you're the one who wanted to open it again.

They packed it in a box in an afternoon.

The emails start at four.

A morning show wants you to "tell your side" in a segment titled Body Shamed at the Ball. A podcast wants to "unpack the trauma." A brand you've never heard of wants to send you free leggings.

Then one with a subject line in all caps: PARTNERSHIP OPPORTUNITY: YOUR GLOW-UP JOURNEY.

It's from TrimHalo, the meal-replacement company with the pastel billboards all over the subway. Their head of brand writes like she's hugging you through the screen.

We see you, Gala Girl. We want to be part of your comeback. Picture it: one year, one transformation, one massive reveal at next year's gala. We're prepared to offer $250,000 for a twelve-month ambassador contract.

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

You sit with it for a minute. You'd be lying if you said you didn't. It's more than you've ever had. It would pay off your mother's laundromat loan. It would buy you a year.

It would also mean that the Kellaways were right. That the joke was true, and the only way out of it was to become someone they wouldn't laugh at.

You type: No, thank you. There's nothing about me that needs a reveal. You hit send before you can soften it.

Then you sit very still on Xio's couch in the late gold light and let yourself, for the first time all day, feel the whole size of it. The job. The ring. The eight years. The six hundred people laughing, and the one who didn't.

You open your clutch from last night, looking for a lip balm, and find his card instead.

Gavin Iredale. A phone number. Nothing else.

You almost put it back. Then you turn it over.

On the back, in small, sharp, slanted handwriting, in black ink, as if he wrote it at the table before the roast even started:

I read your memo. You were right. G.I.

You stare at it.

There's only one memo he could mean. Eighteen months ago you wrote a forty-page plan to save Kellaway's: close six of the eleven stores, reopen the sixth-floor workroom, rebuild the flagship around made-to-measure. Rainier said it was "too much" and put it in a drawer.

And then, last spring, Rainier went to some meetings with investors. He came home glowing. Told you everyone loved "his" turnaround vision.

You never saw the deck.

Your phone buzzes on the floor. You flip it over.

An unknown number, 212 area code.

Ninefold Capital, office of Gavin Iredale. Mr. Iredale would like to know if you're free Tuesday at ten.