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

of months ago, when he’d started getting invited to fancy events, but still felt self-conscious and constrained in it. Now he wore only the tuxedo pants and an undershirt, waiting until the last possible moment to put the rest of it on.

“Look at this article,” I said, holding out my phone to him, and he began to read. His undershirt showed off the muscles in his arms. They weren’t large—he wasn’t chugging protein powder and doing dead lifts in the gym—but still, they were sinewy. Solid. Sexy? No!

“This article is happening because of what you wrote?” he asked. Our eyes met as I nodded. “Jilly, that’s amazing,” he said, his face breaking open into a smile, and I felt a weird zing inside of me. Stop that, I told my vagina.

“Hopefully it’ll be enough for the inner circle,” I said, breaking our eye contact, moving away from him. “Okay, I’m gonna put on my dress.”

I emerged from my bedroom a couple of minutes later, struggling with the zipper of an off-the-shoulder floor-length gown. It was black, velvet, and ’80s inspired. Or rather, not ’80s inspired, but actually ’80s, since that was when my mom had bought it. This was the one thing I took with me from her closet. The one thing that still smelled like her. (Even though that must have been just my imagination. She hadn’t worn it in decades.)

“You look . . .” Raf began, then cleared his throat. “You look nice.” He had changed fully into the tux by now. It made him into a man. He came behind me to zip my dress up the rest of the way, and his fingers brushed against my back.

“Thanks. All dress credit goes to my mom.”

“Damn,” he said, stepping back and taking in the dress again. It was fitted around the waist and hips, with a slit to show off some leg. “This was Kathleen’s?”

“Yeah. She wore it to one fancy event in her twenties, and then she saved it forever because it was the nicest outfit she ever owned. Well, besides her wedding dress, but she threw that off a bridge after the divorce.”

“No,” Raf said. “She threw it off a bridge?”

“Yeah,” I said. “At least that’s what she told me. When the divorce was finalized, she drank a bottle of champagne and threw her wedding dress into the river.”

“Kathleen,” Raf said, laughing. He shook his head. “She was the best. And that was her necklace too, right?” I touched the chain around my neck and nodded. His face grew contemplative. “We used to hang out my senior year, when you’d gone off to college. Did you know that? I’d go over to your house on Sunday mornings when my parents were at church, and we’d have breakfast together. She made the strongest coffee I’d ever tasted.” He paused. “It was not good. It was tar.”

“Oh, it was fully disgusting,” I said.

“Yeah, and she didn’t like milk or cream, so she never kept any around the house!”

“When I realized you could add things to coffee to make it taste good, it was a revelation.”

Raf smiled. “Anyway, I thought I was doing her a favor, going over on Sundays. You were gone. She was lonely. It was a way to get my parents to stop bugging me about church. But then when she went out of town for a couple weeks on vacation and we had to skip the breakfasts, I was kinda sad. She was fun. Funny. Just . . . nice to be around.”

I swallowed. “She loved you. She was really proud of you. One of the last things she ever did was hang up your Vanity Fair article on our fridge.”

“Really?” he asked. “That’s nice to know. I miss her. Not as much as you do, I’m sure. But sometimes when I’m lonely, I think about how nice it would be to call up Kathleen.”

I wasn’t going to mess up my makeup for the gala by getting all teary-eyed and sentimental, so I shook my head and said, “Strange, I think about that sometimes too.” I squared my shoulders. “Okay, let’s go. Couple in Love?”

“Couple in Love,” he said.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The gala was on the top floor of a hotel overlooking Central Park. Floor-to-ceiling windows revealed an expanse of dark trees on one side and the lights of Columbus Circle on the other. The red taillights of cars glittered down below. When you were so far above everyone else, even traffic looked pretty.

Caroline had gone for an autumnal theme, with staff tastefully placing bowls of freshly picked apples from Hudson Valley farms on various surfaces. Knobby decorative gourds adorned the tabletops where we would be sitting down to dinner. Everywhere, the well-dressed elite milled around, including a few minor and not-so-minor political figures. Some of the Nevertheless women were there, Iris Ngoza and a couple others whose names I didn’t know. They murmured something to each other and sent approving looks my way. Because of Raf, who had cleaned up so nicely, standing by my side.

Sure enough, Iris turned and made her way over to us. “Rafael Morales? I’m a huge fan of your restaurant,” she said, and then focused on me. “And, Jillian, you’re a writer, yes? I’ve enjoyed some of your work. I’m finishing a book too, nonfiction, a manifesto on body positivity that a publishing company asked me to write. If you ever want to talk shop or have me put in a good word for you at my imprint, please let me know.” She smiled at me and walked away, as if getting a book deal were just that easy, like all one had to do was snap one’s (unequivocally accepted and loved) fingers. So the hum in the air wasn’t all about Raf. People knew about the New York Times.

“I’m going to go check our coats,” Raf said.

“I’ll grab us some drinks.” I held out my hand as if we were in a sports huddle,