Chapter 2: Counter Seven
At nine the next morning I was behind counter seven at Halcott’s on State Street, smiling at a woman who couldn’t decide between two bottles of jasmine.
“Spray one on each wrist,” I told her. “Walk around for an hour. The one you keep sniffing is the one.”
She laughed and wandered off toward handbags. I lined up the testers again. My hands had stopped shaking somewhere around three a.m.
Counter seven was my mother’s counter.
In 1994, Elena Mercer sold perfume here in a black blazer and a gold name tag very much like the one in my purse. One December afternoon, the owner’s son came down from the fourteenth floor to buy a gift for his mother. He stayed forty minutes. He bought nothing. He came back the next day and the next, until she agreed to dinner just to make him stop scaring the customers.
That man was Charles Halcott. My father.
My mother died when I was twelve. After that, I was the Halcott girl. The girl at charity lunches. The girl in the society pages. At twenty-three I was engaged to a charming man named Trent, until I found a spreadsheet on his laptop titled L. Halcott — projected. It listed my trust, my father’s age and his heart medication.
I gave Trent his ring back. Then I went to my father and asked him for the only thing I’d ever really wanted.
“Let me be nobody for a while,” I said. “Let me work the floor, like Mom did. Under her name.”
He hated it. He agreed anyway, on one condition: Gloria Banks, his chief of staff, would check on me once a month, and the day I was ready, I’d come up to the fourteenth floor and take my seat.
That was three years ago. I’d stopped taking Gloria’s monthly calls after the first year. I liked being nobody. Nobody gets told the truth.
Then Bradley walked up to counter seven looking for a gift for his mother.
I know. I know exactly how that sounds. A handsome man, a gift for his mother, my mother’s counter. It felt like a sign. He didn’t ask what my father did. He didn’t mind my Honda. He ate drive-through tacos in my car and told me his family was exhausting and that I was the first real thing in his life.
Patricia hated me from the first handshake. She looked at my nails before she looked at my face.
“You’re adorable,” she’d said. “Where did you go to school? Oh. That’s fine.”
I told myself it didn’t matter. I was marrying Bradley, not his mother.
At closing time, the lights in the cosmetics hall dimmed to half. I was wiping down the glass when I heard heels on the marble.
Gloria hadn’t changed. Cream suit, auburn curls, tortoiseshell glasses, a leather folio under her arm. She stopped across the counter and looked at me for a long moment.
“You look like her,” she said. “Standing there.”
“Don’t,” I said. “I’ll cry, and I just did my mascara for nobody.”
She set the folio on the glass and opened it.
“Whitmore Linens,” she said. “Sheets and towels for our home department, for nineteen years. Halcott’s is sixty-one percent of their business. The contract is thirty-eight million a year, and it’s up for renewal. Our merchandising team decides on Monday.”
“And Patricia knows that.”
“Patricia has called Ken Doyle, our vice president of merchandising, four times this month. She’s invited him to an engagement party on Saturday. At the Langford Hotel.” Gloria lifted an eyebrow. “Your engagement party, I assume.”
I laughed. It came out wrong.
“She doesn’t know,” I said. “She thinks I’m a salesgirl who got lucky. That’s the whole point. Bradley doesn’t know either. He loves me without any of it.”
Gloria didn’t say anything.
That was what scared me. Gloria always had something to say.
“Gloria.”
She took a single sheet from the back of the folio and laid it face down on the glass between us.
“Last March,” she said, “a private investigator I’ve used for years called me. He’d been hired to run a background check on a Lena Mercer who works at our State Street store. He wanted to know if she was who he thought she was. I told him to mind his business, and I never asked who his client was.” She turned the sheet over. “Last night, I asked.”
It was an invoice. Family and asset background: Lena Mercer. Paid in full.
The client’s name was typed at the top.
Bradley Whitmore.
The date was March fourth.
He’d proposed on March nineteenth.
“He knew,” Gloria said quietly. “He’s known since before the ring.”
