Raphael and June had shrieked with joy when she’d walked through the Beinecke doors the following day. “We can wig you so much more easily now,” June had said happily. Cat just sighed in reply and tried to get past them to her office, where she’d closed the door and spent the next two weeks prepping content for the December issue.
After the disaster that was October—it had done a mere half-million on newsstands globally after being eviscerated online, and Cat guessed they wouldn’t have anything for November, either, now that the cover girl was dead—Margot had assigned Cat to oversee a photo shoot that Hillary had originally proposed for the December issue, titled Bridle: The Exquisite Ties That Bind. The shoot intended to showcase the nation’s ten best-selling mass-produced wedding gowns.
Hillary had put together a proposal to update those dresses using high-tech, sustainable fabrics whose sheen could approximate that of small-run Italian silk satin or handwoven French lace, with the help of the latest 3-D printing and laser cutting techniques. She’d sourced the quantities needed for the manufacturers in question to update their stock throughout the entire North American retail corridor, including a thirteen-yard-wide section of fabric made from a 3-D printing lab in Los Alamos, which Cat realized must have been the spool of “ribbon” she’d died next to.
Margot had put the shoot on pause once Hillary died, but now that RAGE was focusing on sustainability, it was worth a shot, and so to sweeten the arrangement, Paula had spent the last two weeks directing RAGE’s attorneys and their lobbying firm to negotiate a ten-year import deal with Customs and Border Protection for each of the participating manufacturers. All that was left was the shoot itself, now Cat’s responsibility; it had originally been assigned to Lou, but given the remarkable failure of the October issue, she’d been yanked from the project entirely.
The handmade samples were in the cargo hold below. The shoot was scheduled for two days from now, the last free day before Paris Fashion Week officially started. Bridle: The Exquisite Ties That Bind was a feature that would hopefully prove to be both high-fashion and high-minded. Most importantly, it could break RAGE’s politics into the wedding market for the very first time, an industry so wildly profitable that RAGE had never made an iota of impact. Women everywhere, manipulated by the complex retail politics of “their day,” had always been happy to shell out thousands of dollars for what were, in the end, mostly synthetic rags made in brutal East Asian sweatshops with astronomical profit margins. On lower-and mid-priced wedding dresses, everything from the fabrics to the stitching were usually fabricated by actual children, little girls who must have looked at the plastic lace and faux pearls that they sewed on so carefully with a particularly grotesque sense of fate’s cruelty.
Cat finally understood why those last six months had been so important to Hillary, why her friend had been so concerned about RAGE, about their jobs, about their stability as a team: Hillary had seen that RAGE would need to pivot before anyone else did. Mania’s “proprietary ethical rating” had oversaturated their moral high ground over the last three years, and readers officially no longer cared about the difference between editorial and advertorial, not when they perceived each to hold the same values. It was time to find a new tower to shout from.
Cat had wanted to discuss the shoot with Hutton the moment Paula handed her Hillary’s notes. Her friend had died next to that box of “ribbon,” something so trivial and odd that he’d asked her about it in their very first conversation. No one will know, she’d tried to tell herself, attempting to rationalize violating RAGE’s famously complete non-disclosure agreement. Yet in the end she hadn’t said a thing about the shoot to Hutton—because he’d never called her or texted her again. Detective Mark Hutton had completely disappeared from her life.
When she returned to her seat, Bess was already snoring across the aisle, a sleep mask banded over her eyes, moisturizing gloves and socks on her hands and feet. She must be exhausted, Cat thought. Bess had been handling their appearances for the last two weeks all by herself.
The gamine air hostess was nearly done making up Cat’s lie-flat bed with real goose-down pillows and a puffy, oversized duvet. She smoothed the sheets with a flick of her red-gloved palm, turned down the lights, lightly misted the pillowcases with lavender linen water, and motioned to Cat that it was ready before gracefully moving on to the next berth.
Cat climbed in, eager to get some shut-eye before they landed in Paris for what she hoped would be her final few weeks as RAGE’s very own live-action marionette. Margot had been out of the office for the last week, supposedly meeting with their international editions on a round-the-world tour, so Paula, seated in the next section up in one of the four suites of the risibly lavish Premiere Classe, had been at the helm. Cat had worked up the courage three days earlier to ask her about returning to the office permanently; Paula had put her off. We’ll discuss after Paris, she’d said.
This week would begin with a few events and Hillary’s shoot, followed by nonstop shows and meetings with European brands, mostly in public and always on behalf of the magazine. It was just ten more days, Cat told herself. All she had to do was make it through the next Sunday, and maybe, if there was time, she could go see her parents before flying back home. She slid in a pair of earplugs, popped a Klonopin, washed it down with some white wine that tasted faintly of rancid nail polish, and passed out.
Six hours later a red-gloved hand rested lightly on her shoulder. Cat blinked awake in the still-dark cabin. “Petit déjeuner, madame?” whispered the air hostess; Cat nodded, feeling dazed. “Café noir, double, s’il vous pla?t,” she whispered back before grabbing her toiletries and making her way to the bathroom.
By the time she returned to her berth someone had magically removed all her linens and remade her seat into a chair. The outfit she’d brought had been steamed, pressed, and hung in the narrow cubby above her ottoman, and her breakfast—a perfect double shot of espresso and two plain slices of toast—had been laid out on a table folded down from the wall and covered with a thick white tablecloth and heavy silverware. As Cat settled back into her seat, Bess yawned across the aisle and pulled her sleep mask over her forehead.
“Are we there yet?” Bess asked in a childish singsong, her face still half-smushed into her pillow.
“Forty-five minutes or so,” Cat replied. “Want some breakfast?” Bess smiled and nodded.