Chapter 13: The Fitting

The price tag on the first blouse Mrs. Ruiz handed her said $640, and Rachel said a word her mother would’ve washed out with Palmolive.

“Delia. No.”

“Sí.” Mrs. Ruiz pushed the blouse at her again, ivory silk, a little bow at the throat. “He said work clothes. He said whatever she needs. I heard him. You want me to go home and tell him I didn’t listen?”

“I need black pants. From Target. I need a three-pack of underwear.”

“Underwear is on four.” Mrs. Ruiz was already walking. “Come, mija. Bergdorf’s doesn’t wait.”

Bergdorf Goodman on a Wednesday afternoon smelled like Le Labo and old money and the kind of hush you only get when every customer is somebody. Inside, a saleswoman named Paulette with a jet-black bob and reading glasses pushed up into it took one look at Rachel’s ballet flats, then at Mrs. Ruiz, and something passed between the two older women that Rachel would never be allowed to understand.

“Mr. Cross’s account,” Mrs. Ruiz said.

Paulette’s whole face changed. “Of course. Come with me, sweetheart.”

The fitting room was bigger than the bathroom at Linden Court. Velvet bench, three-way mirror. Rachel stood in front of the mirror in a $640 blouse and black trousers that fit her like somebody had measured her in her sleep, and she didn’t recognize herself, and she wasn’t sure if that was good.

She looked like a woman who’d never washed her hair in a gas station sink.

She looked like a liar.

“Black, navy, gray,” she told Paulette through the curtain. “Four pieces. That’s it. Plain.”

“Plain,” Paulette agreed, in a voice that meant she’d heard that before.

Ten minutes later, the curtain rings rattled and a green dress came through on a hanger. It was anything but plain. Deep green, the color of a wine bottle held up to a window. Long sleeves. A neckline that wasn’t low, just honest.

“Not for work,” Paulette said. “For your eyes. Humor me.”

“I’m not buying…”

“Nobody’s buying. You’re trying.”

Rachel tried. Of course she tried. She was thirty-two and she’d been sleeping on concrete last week and a woman in Bergdorf’s was telling her she had eyes.

The zipper went up most of the way and stuck between her shoulder blades. She twisted, swore, reached, couldn’t. She pushed the curtain aside a few inches, not looking, one hand holding the dress to her chest.

“Delia, can you get the…”

It wasn’t Delia.

It was Julian Cross, standing in the little velvet lounge outside the fitting rooms, coat over his arm, phone in his hand like he’d been about to make a call and forgotten how.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t move. The phone screen went dark in his hand.

Rachel had seen him a thousand ways in eight months. Annoyed at a stain on a shirt cuff. Tired at 6 a.m. with his reading glasses on, which he hated anyone seeing. She had never seen him look at her like this, like he’d walked into a room in his own house and found a window he didn’t know was there.

“Mrs. Ruiz texted me,” he said finally. “Said you were fighting her on the blouses.”

“I was winning.”

“I can see that.”

“The zipper’s stuck.”

He looked at the zipper. He looked at her face. “Do you want help with it?”

She should’ve said no. She should’ve called for Paulette, who was surely right around the corner listening with her mouth open.

“Yeah,” Rachel said.

She turned around. In the three-way mirror she watched him step up behind her, watched him set his coat down on the velvet bench like it was important to do that first. He didn’t touch her skin. He took the little metal tab between his thumb and finger and worked it, patient, until it gave. The zipper went up the last two inches, slow. She felt every tooth catch.

He stepped back.

The room got warmer anyway. Rachel would’ve sworn to that in court.

“It’s not for work,” she said to the mirror. “Paulette’s idea. I’m taking it off.”

“Okay.”

He didn’t leave, though. And she didn’t take it off.

* * *

They walked out onto Fifth with four shopping bags of plain, Mrs. Ruiz ten steps ahead pretending she had somewhere urgent to be, which was a performance so bad it was practically a confession.

Julian’s driver was double-parked at the corner of 58th. Julian didn’t get in. He stood on the curb with his hands in his coat pockets, watching the crowd, the way he always did, like he was counting exits.

“Owen told me about the bank,” he said.

Rachel stopped walking. “Owen wasn’t at the bank.”

“You told Mrs. Ruiz. Mrs. Ruiz told Owen. Owen tells me everything, it’s in his contract.” He didn’t look at her. “A man in a gray suit. Camera. Mustache.”

“He was under the bridge too. Dottie said. He had a picture of me sleeping.” She hadn’t meant to say it out loud, on Fifth Avenue, with four bags of plain in her hands and the green dress back on its hanger where it belonged. “Somebody’s paying him to follow me around. I don’t have enemies, Julian. I have one husband.”

He did look at her then. Gray eyes, flat and careful.

“Then tell me his name.”

There it was again. He’d asked the first night, on the floor of his study, and she’d given him nothing but the lawn and the locks and the rain.

“Rachel. Give me the name and this stops being your problem.”

“That’s exactly why I won’t.” She shifted the bags to her other hand. “You’d make one phone call and fix it, and I’d be a woman who got fixed.”

She hadn’t planned the next part. It came out anyway, right there on Fifth.

“Last spring he had me sign papers at the kitchen table. Twenty-two pages. I counted them and didn’t read a single one. Monday my lawyer showed me a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar refinance with my name at the bottom, and I couldn’t tell her if it was my signature.” She made herself look at him. “That’s how stupid I was.”

“Trusting your husband isn’t stupid.”

“It is when it’s him.”

The corner of his mouth moved. She’d remember later that he didn’t push. That he didn’t look surprised, either, not even at the nine hundred thousand. He just nodded, once, like she’d told him something he already had.

“Fair,” he said.

“Stop saying fair.”

* * *

She found it on her bed that night.

The green dress, steamed, laid out on the duvet like someone had arranged a body for a viewing. She’d left it in the fitting room. She knew she had. She’d watched Paulette carry it away.

A card sat on the collar. Heavy cream stock. Julian’s handwriting, which she knew from a hundred grocery lists and dry-cleaning notes, small and slanted and impatient.

Friday. Dinner here. My CFO, his wife, my board chair. Wear it or don’t, but I want you in the room.