In a New York Minute(60)

“Cool. I actually ran into her in Central Park the other day.” She nodded, a polite smile on her face. “Small world.”

“She also broke up with me the second I got here,” I said, leaning toward her with a smile, hands in my pockets.

“Shut up!” Franny’s arm flew to my chest this time, giving me a small shove. “Oh my god, who does that?”

“It’s not nearly as scandalous as it sounds,” I said with a small laugh. “It was completely mutual. But, yes, she ended things.”

And then I noticed: Her hand was still there on my chest. Almost instinctively, I reached up and covered it with my own, holding it there before my brain jolted awake. I realized what I was doing, and I dropped my arm back down to my side.

“Well, I’m sorry, even if it wasn’t that big of a deal.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest, then dropped them, then clasped her hands. “I dated this guy once who told me he didn’t want to be exclusive while we were—” Her eyes shifted to mine and then she blinked, recalibrating. “You know what, never mind.”

“What?” I asked. I liked how she did this, spilled too much info and then tried to backtrack. Her brain and her heart were always so wide-open, for everyone to see. I was dying to know what she was about to say.

She shook her head. “It’s TMI. And I’ve told you too much about myself already.”

“You mean the Saint Marks story?” I said, chuckling as I remembered everything she’d said that morning on the subway.

She gently smacked her forehead with her palm. “I had sincerely hoped you’d erased that from your memory.”

“Never,” I said. “Anyway, I’ll let you get back to your not bidding on things.”

But she didn’t move. Instead, we just stood there staring at each other.

I kept talking, unsure of what to do next. “And I’ll see you next week, right?”

Did I sound too hopeful? Too eager? I didn’t know how to juggle the feelings sizzling inside me, mixed with the need to hide them from her, lest she think me desperate, or boring. Or maybe she already thought those things. It was possible she didn’t enjoy my company at all. My brain was on fire.

But then she smiled.

“Definitely.”





Chapter Seventeen

Franny



I hustled as fast as I could in heels toward Cleo, to give her the details of my latest interaction with Hayes. I found her next to her brothers, Sam and Wes, identical twins, standing in a circle of partygoers on the edge of the dance floor. Sam kept his hair longer and slicked back, and Wes never went anywhere without his thick black glasses, so it was easy to tell them apart.

Cleo looked elegant and classic as always: Her hair was sleek and straight, and her dress, short-sleeved, tight, and navy, draped every curve of her body just so. She’d picked it because it was impossible to stain and she could wear her regular bra with it—in which she’d tucked a crystal to bring her calm throughout the night. Even in her stunning black-tie best, Cleo was both pragmatic and otherworldly, as always.

“There you are!” she said, wrapping an arm around my waist. Her brothers greeted me with sheepish college-boy waves.

“I need to talk to you,” I whispered in her ear, but before I could elaborate, her mom pulled me in for a hug.

“Franny!” Miriam said as she kissed me on the cheek. “Let me introduce you to everyone. The twins you know, of course.” I gave a nod in the direction of Sam and Wes, who were seniors at Brown and the University of Virginia, respectively, and starting to look like actual grown-ups in their tuxedos.

“Franny, Sam has an internship in the city coming up, and he’s looking for a sublet, if you hear of anything,” Miriam continued. “He doesn’t want to live at home with his mama. Imagine that.”

“Mom, you know I love you even if I don’t want to be your roommate,” Sam replied with a bashful grin. Wes grabbed him by the shoulder and they headed in the direction of the bar. Miriam turned back toward me and Cleo.

“Franny is an interior designer who just launched her own business,” she announced to the group. “And she’s incredibly talented.”

Miriam offered me a proud smile, and my posture straightened under her gaze. She’d always treated Lola and me like daughters, welcoming us into the Kim family and home as awkward new-to-New-York college kids. The Kims lived just north of the city, in Rye, and we’d escaped to her house numerous times over the years.

Cleo had filled her in on my new business, and my need for clients, and she now began pointing around the group, ticking off names and job titles, which I tried to retain.

A woman named Ellen, with crystal-studded glasses and a martini in one hand, leaned in for a handshake with the other. “I saw you on New York News,” she said knowingly. “I met my husband when I was getting on the A train on Forty-Second Street. He accidentally stepped on the heel of my shoe—some atrocious loafer; it was the seventies, after all—and he kicked it onto the subway tracks. He tied his sweater around my foot so I could get home, and the rest is history.”

“Oh my goodness!” The silver-haired woman next to her who had introduced herself as “Catherine Ratcliffe but everyone calls me Duffy” laughed. “I had no idea Bobby was that romantic.”