One by One(19)
“I know, Eva,” I say. My voice is very low. “I know. It’s just… it’s hard.”
“I understand,” she says. She presses my hand again. Her fingers are cold against mine, and very insistent in the message her grip is conveying. “And I know it’s hard. I feel that loyalty to Toph too, of course I do. But I can count on you, yes?”
“Yes,” I say. My voice is almost inaudible, even to myself. “Yes, you can count on me.”
“Good.” She smiles, her wide, beautiful smile. It is a smile that once beamed out from a thousand billboards and catwalks all across Europe. It is like Thank you, Liz, I know what that means. And you can count on me too. We’ll take care of each other, won’t we?
I nod, and she gives me a perfunctory hug and leaves the room.
When she’s gone I open the window to get rid of her scent. I lean out, and I let the anxiety locked inside my chest explode into something huge and almost overwhelming. I imagine the meeting, the vote, me raising my hand in support of the buyout, and the expression on Topher’s face as he registers my betrayal… And then I imagine what will happen if I don’t, and I feel utterly sick.
Because Eva is right. There is only one choice. I know what I have to do. I just have to find the courage.
And once I have made up my mind, a strange kind of peace descends on me.
It will be okay. It will all be okay.
I shut the window. I climb back into bed and I switch off Snoop. Then I lie, quite still, listening instead to the whisper of the snow falling onto my balcony outside. Obliterating everything.
ERIN
Snoop ID: LITTLEMY
Listening to: Snooping ITSSIOUXSIE
Snoopers: 5
Snoopscribers: 7
When my alarm goes off, I struggle up out of a deep, disturbing dream—a nightmare of digging, digging, digging through hard-packed snow, my hands numb with cold, my muscles shaking, hot blood running down my neck. I know what I’m going to find—and I’m both yearning for it and dreading it. But I wake up before I reach my goal.
It’s a relief to open my eyes and find myself in my own little room, my phone alarm screeching into the silence, until I grope my way to the snooze button and shut it off. The clock reads 6:01, and I lie there for a minute, blinking, still half asleep, and trying to throw off the uneasy feeling the dream has left.
Just because it’s a weekend doesn’t mean it’s not an early start. Danny and I swap, so that one of us gets up at six to fire up the coffee machine, get breakfast started, and clear up from the night before, while the other has what passes for a lie-in. Today it’s my turn for the early shift, and I can’t stop yawning as I stumble out of bed and pull on my clothes. Some people find they get insomnia at altitude. Not me. If anything it’s the reverse.
As I pass Topher’s door I pause, trying to hear if he’s inside. Did he get home okay? I didn’t hear him come in, but I left the front door unlocked, and when I came down at midnight to check, there were wet footprints in the foyer.
I stand there, holding my breath, when suddenly a huge snore rips through the silence, and I let out a shuddering laugh. Someone is in there at any rate, even if it’s not Topher.
Downstairs is quiet, last night’s log fire just glowing embers behind the wood burner’s glass door. I open up the vents and stick another log on top of the ashes, and then I begin clearing up the debris of the night before.
Snoop is no worse than a lot of the other groups that stay here, but I don’t know why today I feel particularly jaded as I pour thirty-year-old brandy down the sink and pick melted Camembert out of the dining room rug. Someone has been smoking inside too, in defiance of the rules—there is a cigarette butt stubbed out in a dish of Danny’s painstakingly made petits fours. That’s what sets my teeth on edge, I think. I remember him making those miniature Florentines; mixing them, baking them, carefully dipping each one into precisely tempered chocolate, laying them out to set. Treating them like the little masterpieces they were. And now someone has used them as a makeshift ashtray.
It takes me a while to shake off the cloud of anger, but by 7:00 a.m. my mood has lifted a little. The rooms are clean, the fire is crackling, the oven is on for sausages, and the bircher muesli is standing in a big crystal bowl on the side, along with huge pitchers of fresh-squeezed juices and jugs of milk and cream. There is still no noise from above, which means I can afford ten minutes to sit down with a coffee and my phone. Normally I’d be checking the snow forecast, or scrolling through Twitter—but today I find myself opening up Snoop and idly flipping through lists of my favorite artists, figuring out who’s online, who’s listening to what, as I sip my coffee. There are some amazing people on here, proper celebs mixed with people who are just fascinating personalities, and Danny’s right, there’s something incredibly addictive about pressing play on the song they are actually listening to at this precise moment, knowing that you are beat for beat in sync with each other. It’s midnight in NYC and lots of the people I snoop on are playing late-night come-down music, which is not what I’m looking for at this time of day, but then I hit a cool little vein of British celebrities who all seem to be up and listening. Why are they awake six a.m. UK time? Couldn’t they sleep? Maybe they always get up at this time.
I’m washing up the serving bowls that are too big for the dishwasher, tapping my feet to “Rockaway Beach” by the Ramones, when the sound begins to break up. As I’m digging my phone out of my pocket to check the headphone connection, the song drops out completely. Damn. I stare at the screen. The Wi-Fi is still showing a strong signal, but when I click on the Snoop tab a little pop-up message appears. We can’t get no satisfaction. (Please check your internet connection.)