Callie Court had been a lot of things, but she wasn’t hateful—she was simply trapped by an emotional birth defect, a hole in her heart that she filled unsustainably, with parties, with sloppy, dramatic friends, with drugs. It stopped her from growing up. It had kept her living a decade behind Hutton. I didn’t want a ward, he’d reminded himself, had no desire for a woman who would follow him around like a puppy, who needed to be cared for and monitored and chastised and cleaned up after. He’d wanted a partner. It’s not wrong to want to be with someone who faces the same challenges, he tried to tell himself, repeating the mantra he’d adopted since the night she died. You didn’t betray her. You didn’t abandon her. You moved on. It’s not a crime.
The photos made him deeply sad. In one of them, Callie was doing an exaggerated bend while wearing a rough cloth gown the size of a house, tears streaming down her face. She was positioned underneath the whale that hung from the ceiling in the Museum of Natural History, the background blurred behind her. The next page showed Callie lying practically naked on the floor of the planetarium, fake starlight dotting her skin and a large straw hat covering her torso. The next had Callie jumping from Belvedere Castle, her skirt swirling up around her as two very real-looking firemen stood below with a trampoline. On and on it went, each image more imaginatively implausible than the last.
Halfway through them Hutton felt tremors of grief cross his chest. He closed the laptop and shoved it in his briefcase. He wished the windows opened so that he could throw it out, and he imagined breaking one; saw the cabin depressurizing as his eardrums broke and anything not strapped down was sucked out the insatiable vortex of the tiny window—then blinked his eyes and returned again to the calm, blank space of Premiere Classe, the laptop and its contents corralled only by the thin leather walls of his briefcase.
Envy is the fuel of the capital engine, Cat had told him once over the phone, when he’d asked point-blank how she could possibly take her job so seriously. It’s both literally and figuratively a beautiful woman. You’ll do anything—get a job, wear a suit, take her to dinner—so that you can fuck her brains out. Beautiful women are the fire upon which the world burns.
That’s desire, he’d argued at the time, not envy.
Same difference, Cat had replied.
Hutton grimaced at the memory.
The sun, burning a thin yellow through the quilted gray skies of Paris, was just starting to hoist itself over the horizon. Lou’s phone beeped—time to get up—but she didn’t need the alarm. Every fiber and sinew told her it was time for her morning application. She rolled over toward the opposite nightstand and grabbed her tubes of lotion, squeezing thick white lines onto her legs, arms, hands, and feet, mixing the eucalyptus hand cream and the jasmine lotion, along with a teeny-tiny dose of the juniper night cream on her face, to keep her perfectly balanced. She lay still for a few minutes and waited for it to dry.
Lou stretched her limbs, threw back the scratchy white duvet of her rented apartment with joy, and peered quickly through her binoculars to the Eurydice Suite; the curtains were still drawn. They must be passed out. Perfect. She marched into the living room, temporarily transformed into a closet, where three nearly identical day dresses were draped over the sofa, all of them custom couture that she’d ordered on a whim from the shows last year when she’d still been married to Alexander Lucas and his bank account. For the first time in months she didn’t need to dress down—to look like Lou Lucas, a hardworking mummy doing her best on the alimony she’d been given, for whom any one of these $25,000 dresses would have been an absurd extravagance—no, no, no. Not today. Today she would be Madame Lucas again.
She dragged her fingers over the fabric of each dress: the first, bloodred handloomed silk cady; the second, a virgin-white broderie anglaise cotton; and the third, a flowery 3-D-printed plastic. They were all ladylike, hems dropped below the knee, waists belted appropriately, and sleeves extending below the elbow, but they were varied in tenor. The red silk was fluid and sexy, the white cotton overtly feminine, the printed plastic futuristic and strong. That was the one. She pawed through her suitcase for a high-waisted pair of opaque briefs and matching bra to wear underneath the semitransparent dress.
She selected a pair of ruby suede stiletto boots, their color a perfect match for the smattering of flowers melted through the bodice of the dress, added a huge cuff bracelet resembling a mermaid’s tail, and sighed with satisfaction.
She stopped in the bathroom, brushed her hair, and rolled it up into hot curlers, then walked back into the kitchen, poured herself a cup of strong coffee, and popped open a snack-sized can of chocolate Ensure. A sudden surge of energy gripped her, and she responded to it by dropping to the floor for twenty push-ups and a two-minute plank. When she’d finished, her coffee was the perfect temperature, and she knocked it back while applying her makeup and a light swipe of deodorant, though the sweat glands in her armpits had been surgically removed for convenience.
After completing her face—black liquid liner, tangerine blush, flamingo pink lips—she dressed, stepping into the nude briefs and bra before zipping and belting herself into the plastic dress, its wide skirt undulating in Jetson fantasy waves beneath the 3-D-printed flowers.
All she needed was a handbag. Lou rooted around in her enormous suitcase, throwing skirts and pants onto the floor until she found a circular clutch plated in 14-karat gold, the iguana-leather strap designed to hold the bag in her palm like a discus. She filled it completely with a full tube of the eucalyptus hand cream and walked out the door.
Nestled safely in the backseat of a silver Audi, Lou checked her phone one final time: 9:55 a.m. Perfect. The shoot in the Le Narcisse ballroom should be springing to life at this very moment—and, thankfully, Cat and Bess wouldn’t be anywhere near it.
It was time for Madame Lucas to save the day.
Chapter Twenty-One
Hutton found himself standing inside the lobby of a petite Versailles, waiting patiently for the Poirot-shaped desk clerk to finish a phone call. He shifted his weight and tried to catch the man’s attention, only to receive a raised finger in response; one moment, the finger said. Hutton nodded and forced himself to wait, standing a few feet back from the counter. He looked at Mania again, at the photos of Cat—dirty, thin, wild-eyed, her hair shorn off—stumbling into this hotel two nights ago. She hadn’t appeared on the map for over twelve hours. Though he ached with impatience, Hutton didn’t want to embarrass her any further; he’d done that enough for one year. He tried to remain calm.
Suddenly, a chime rang, echoing loudly off the polished walls and floor. The brass doors of the elevator at the far end of the lobby parted to reveal a dozen shellacked and perfumed sculptures.
Many of them appeared to display a permanent smile, huge veneers glowing ultraviolet beneath the stretched skin of their rosy lips and wet eyes. It was a cluster of statues, he thought at first, until suddenly—one moved, and they all moved behind it. It took Hutton several moments to recognize them as human women, so carefully had they been cosseted and finished.