“As I said on the phone,” she said, “I’m really just so sorry to be doing this. You can’t imagine.” Her voice was low but carefully modulated so it seemed a casual decision to be speaking this way.
“Please,” Deborah said, “that’s not necessary.” She tugged at the box’s gleaming ribbon.
“It hasn’t been touched,” Suzanne said, a flash of something, like a knife blade turned under a bright sun, in her voice. “I think it’s obvious it hasn’t been unwrapped.”
“Of course,” Deborah replied, and her voice coated the knife in soothing syrup. “I have to inspect the dress, but it’s quite clear you haven’t touched it. It’s for your security as much as for ours.”
Nonsensical though it was, this seemed to mollify Suzanne. She glanced down at her BlackBerry and typed something with her thumbs for a moment, then let out a sudden clucking sound with her teeth and tongue.
“I just hate to be doing this.”
“It’s no trouble at all, as I told you when we spoke this morning.”
“Well, I mean, I feel terrible for your inconvenience, of course, but really I meant for me! Just look at it.”
“It’s a beautiful dress,” the woman said. The water-smooth fabric emerged from the box in folds, a swollen purple. The three of them looked down at it for a moment. Deborah the saleswoman had yet to express any curiosity about Mina’s presence.
“It just seems inappropriate,” Suzanne said. “God knows what this event will be like, coming when it does, it’s just such awkward timing. But it just seemed—I don’t know, really. Wiser. Does that sound so silly to you? God, it must.”
Her eyes moved briefly to Mina’s, then away.
Deborah smiled in such a way that she committed herself to absolutely nothing, then craned her neck over her keyboard, one hand still on the dress.
“Why are you returning it?” Mina said, careful to keep her own voice level, not to raise it any higher than Suzanne’s. “You seem crazy about it.”
“Well, I did discuss it with Bill,” Suzanne said, leaning in so that their three bowed heads formed a tiny triangle. “I know some others have tried to do this in secret, without telling their husbands. But I just couldn’t do that. I know secrecy works for some marriages . . .”
Her eyes flickered in a way Suzanne probably imagined to be just barely perceptible, but which in fact could have been a frame from a cartoon.
“But I just felt I had to tell Bill.”
“Tell him what?”
“Well, you know, we just discussed whether it was appropriate. A new dress for the Robin Hood event next month. He thought—you know, it would be good to seem like a team player. Wear something from last season.”
“Suzanne, I’m here.”
The deeper voice came up behind them, from the direction of the escalator, and Suzanne’s head whipped around on her neck. Her face flinched, a rictus of greeting and pleased surprise.
“Oh,” she said. She turned back to the saleswoman. “Of course you know—”
“Hi, Deborah,” Alexandra Barker said. Mina marveled, not for the first time, at the lime green bow that drew Alexandra’s hair back from her face.
“And I’m Mina,” she said, trying to make eye contact with Deborah, who did not seem to hear her.
“So nice to see you,” Deborah replied to Alexandra, evidently unfazed.
“I told her this was the way to go, and that she could just come to you directly,” Alexandra continued.
“Of course,” Deborah said. The glasses were back on and she was typing furiously at her computer.
“Mina,” Alexandra said, “so nice to see you. I was so sorry to miss lunch.”
Mina said a quick and dirty prayer of gratitude.
“Oh, that would have been nice,” she purred.
“I suppose Suzanne has told you all about this.”
“Well,” Mina said. “I don’t think so, no.”
“Tell us, Deborah,” Suzanne said, seemingly disoriented by the fact that Mina and Alexandra were now both here, though surely she had engineered the entire meeting. Or was it possible Alexandra had surprised her? But what would be the purpose of that? “We aren’t the first ladies in here this week with buyer’s remorse, are we?”
Deborah smiled without looking away from her screen. It became suddenly imperative, in Mina’s mind, that this saleswoman know she was not really friends with Suzanne Welsh. How to communicate this?
“Well, she can’t say, obviously,” Alexandra said, wandering away from the counter and lifting the hem of a dress to hold it up to her face, inspect the stitching. “But believe me, Suzy, you’re hardly the only one. I spoke to my sister this morning—they’re still on Seventy-Sixth—and she was at Bergdorf the other day and said it was a complete mob scene. People couldn’t get the stuff off their hands fast enough. She stopped by Loro Piana on her way home, too, and she had to sit there for twenty minutes before there was even a salesperson free to help her.”
“Other women are doing this?” Mina had decided in that moment to remain silent, to try to catch Deborah’s eye or, barring that, perhaps launch herself far away from this store. But her curiosity got the best of her, she couldn’t help herself.
“And it’s a shame we even have to,” Alexandra replied. “Don’t you think?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Suzanne said, sounding seasick. “I do think it might be for the best.”