A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

any of them and I come up, maybe you could say nice things about me? And then if I get invited in, I can obviously say all kinds of nice things about you! And then we can be in there together, and it’ll be so fun.” She hadn’t even bothered to ask if I wanted to get inside the inner circle, working under the assumption that all Nevertheless members wanted to be as elite as possible. Still, I wondered why it mattered so much to her. It seemed like she more than just wanted it. She needed it as much as I did.

“I can do that,” I said. “Totally.”

She leaned forward and hugged me with a tight, quick squeeze. “You’re the best!” When she released me, she cleared her throat. “You know, until your sexy chef man gets back in town, if being at home is too unpleasant, you can stay with me.”

“Like a slumber party?” I said, joking.

“Yeah, exactly!” Libby answered.

“I . . .” I hesitated. It wasn’t a good idea to sleep with my sources, literally. But as I looked at her cherubic face, her hopeful smile, a little bud of gratitude and something else—tenderness—took root inside of me. It would be for only a night or two, till Raf got back. “That would be really nice, thanks.”

NINETEEN

So I followed Libby back to her apartment, only a ten-minute walk from the clubhouse. We passed a group of women drunkenly posing for selfies in front of a brownstone. “That’s Carrie’s house, from Sex and the City!” she said with pride, before we turned the corner and entered the doorman building where she lived.

“I was really torn between this place and a brownstone,” she went on, pausing to wave enthusiastically to her doorman, who smiled at her with what seemed like real affection (although maybe he was just good at faking it for his job). “But I think a brownstone will be for when I want to buy.”

When she unlocked her door, I followed her in and then stopped short, staring at her high ceilings. “Libby! This place is huge,” I said, because it was, at least for a single woman in her midtwenties living by herself in New York City. God, her water bottle company must’ve been taking the hydration world by storm.

“Thanks! I never thought of it as being particularly giant,” she said. “But I’m from Texas, so I’m used to everything being bigger.”

A tiny rat dog came bounding into the living room, yapping so hard that I worried it might give itself a heart attack. “Bella!” Libby squealed. The dog rocketed into her outstretched arms and promptly began giving her face a tongue bath. “Jillian, meet my angel baby!”

“Hey, Bella,” I said, holding out my hand to her wet little nose. She gave my fingers a disinterested sniff, let out a fart, and jumped out of Libby’s arms, sprinting back out of the room to do God-knows-what, God-knows-where.

“Bella, come back!” Libby yelled. “Bella?” She waited a second, then shrugged her shoulders. “She’s very independent.” She indicated a gray couch with fuzzy white throw pillows. “That folds out,” she said. “Or I do have a queen-size bed, if you want to share. But no pressure!” We arrived in her bedroom, decorated in pinks and peaches. The bed in question was a canopy, fit for a princess. An open door led to a walk-in closet, stuffed with bags and shoes, an ode to Consumer Culture.

The whole place was a strange mishmash, as if decorated by a girly girl who’d been fed a steady diet of TV shows about women taking New York by storm until she’d decided that she was going to live that glamorous life, goddammit! She had a lot of stuff, but I didn’t see any photos of family or friends. The walls remained conspicuously blank. Perhaps she was an alien in a human suit, trying to pass herself off as a modern woman. Or, more likely, she’d just moved in and hadn’t had a chance to frame anything yet.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked.

“Oh gosh,” she said, wrinkling her forehead. “A little over a year? Let’s find you some pajamas.” She pointed to a dresser drawer right as Bella tore back into the room, an old banana peel in her mouth. “Bella! Where did you . . . ?” Bella wiggled, gnawing on the peel, and then ran out of the room again. “Hey, come back here! Sorry, Jillian, just a minute.”

She disappeared after Bella. I opened the drawer that Libby’d pointed out while I waited for her. In contrast to my pajama repertoire (old T-shirts, boxer shorts), Libby had a plethora of nightgowns, matching shirt-bottom sets in silks and flannels, cute little slips. Not an old T-shirt in sight. I stuck my hand into the mass of fabric. Maybe the old T-shirts were hidden on the bottom. Or maybe it was nightgowns all the way down. I brushed against something harder, colder. A picture frame. I pushed a lacy pink slip aside to find a picture of Libby—a young teenager, her nose slightly bigger than it was now, but undeniably Libby—sitting on a couch next to an older man with a healthy tan who had his arm around her. Her father? Her grandfather? Whoever he was, he looked into the camera stiffly, as if he weren’t quite sure he should be there. Libby’s hopeful smile broke my heart. This was how my father and I posed for pictures, back when we still saw each other. I squinted at the man, who looked familiar.

Right as Libby reentered the room, I placed him: Roy Pruitt. Miles used to rant about him in the newsroom. A Texas billionaire who believed women belonged in the kitchen, who used his vast oil fortune to elect ultraconservative politicians to do his bidding. All the wealth and maliciousness of the two Koch brothers smushed into one man with very nice teeth. Miles had always