July 2–July 4
Seated in the breakfast nook of her flat in Chelsea, Eloise reads Alice’s text message and sighs with relief. Smiling, she reaches for her demitasse—the white Royal Copenhagen one that Ollie had bought her last year when they’d taken a long weekend in Denmark—and breathes in the nutty espresso.
Ever since calling Claridge’s to pay for and upgrade Alice’s room, she’d been racked by nerves. Ollie had told her that she was worrying over nothing—who wouldn’t be thrilled to discover that she was staying in one of the nicest suites in London, for free?—but Eloise knew not to rest so easily. She remembered her senior spring at Yale, when Alice had e-mailed her a photo of the dress she was planning on wearing to her high school junior prom. Eloise found it charming and admirable (respectable and grown-up were the words she’d used with her sister) that Alice had saved her earnings from the Blockbuster where she worked to buy herself a dress, but the gown itself was less than flattering. It wasn’t a matter of Alice’s taste so much as the quality of the dress itself; it looked … well … cheap. And so, the next weekend, when she and a few girlfriends took the train from New Haven to New York, she excused herself for a few hours to buy her sister a new dress—a gorgeous black A-line. She sent it via next-day Fed-Ex to St. Charles, along with flowers, a silver necklace, and a note, written on her personal stationery, that read You Deserve This!
Ten days later, she received a package from her sister. Inside (without a note) were the necklace and the dress, its twin spaghetti straps snipped in half.
But that was a long time ago, she tells herself now, licking a drop of espresso from her lips. Alice has grown up. She has grown up. It was just like Ollie had said last Wednesday: this wedding, in addition to all of the other things it’s destined to be, will usher in some changes. It will be an opportunity to enter a new phase in her relationship with Alice—and, if he was willing, Paul.
Still awash with relief, still grinning and satisfied, she unfolds her laptop and clicks open her company e-mail. Yesterday, she had set a strict no-work rule for herself; she’s taken these three weeks off to focus on her wedding, because God only knows how much more needs to be done, and how little time she has to do it. And yet, here she is, responding to questions and requests, and it’s hardly nine o’clock. It’s pointless to try to stay away, though, she tells herself; being indispensable means too much to her. That’s always been her problem. She gets so wrapped up in being needed that she forgets to stop and actually consider what she needs for herself. Clicking send on a message, she recalls the fit that her brother had when she took the job.
“A nonprofit that helps children in developing nations by fixing their deviated septums?” he’d said over Christmas dinner. This was three years ago, when he was still speaking to her with semiregular frequency.
“That’s right,” she’d said, proudly. “It’s called Mission: Breathe. I’ll be helping to run their communications department.”
“So you’re doing public relations, is what you’re saying. Public relations for deviated septums.”
She remembers pushing the mashed potatoes to the side of her plate to make room for more salad.
“It’s a terrible condition,” she said. “In fact—”
“Do you know how many children under the age of five die of diarrhea every year?” Paul interrupted her.
“I—no. I don’t.”
“Seven hundred sixty thousand. How many children die from having deviated septums?”
“That’s not the problem. They don’t die from the deviated septums themselves, so much as—”
“Exactly.”
He’d never explicitly apologized, but she forgave him, nonetheless. Paul was na?ve and idealistic, which were two qualities that she adored in him, but which also often prevented him from understanding life’s more nuanced complications. For instance, did Paul know that deviated septums are often the cause of childhood sleep apnea—a condition that, not unlike diarrhea, can also lead to death? Or, did Paul know that septoplasty isn’t as easy a surgery as most people assume it is, and that, in the hands of an unskilled doctor practicing in a developing country, the procedure may put a child’s life at risk? These are just a few of the myriad facts that Eloise has learned since helping to mold the public’s perception of Mission: Breathe—facts that she’s certain would change Paul’s mind about the organization’s worth, if he ever deigned to hear them.
She finishes her espresso and pulls her hair back into a bun. Three new e-mails have just arrived, all of them written in the same panic-stricken tone, a franticness that Eloise has come to expect from her colleagues whenever she’s out of the office. (“What would they ever do without you?” Ollie often says to her. Eloise’s reply is always the same—oh, give it a rest—but really, she had no idea. She expects the whole organization might burn to the ground.) She clicks the first message—this one from her assistant, a sweet but daft girl named Bee, from Essex—and begins to read. In two days, the Daily Mail will publish an online story about London’s “top five most shallow charities,” and Mission: Breathe has made the list. Evidently, some asshole reporter managed to get wind of the organization’s financials and is now planning a story about how more cash is being spent to host lavish galas than to help poor children with deviated septums. Eloise shakes her head and frowns: accusations like this one make her fucking sick. After all, here she is trying to help people, and all this reporter could do was write about numbers.