He’s a filmmaker, scrawny with red, thinning hair and glasses, perfectly unassuming. We met on the nonexclusive app, the one that anyone can join, postmen and models, bartenders and finance bros. Maybe even murderers. But as we know, those can be found anywhere.

I’m wearing a gray cashmere tank top, since it’s supposed to be a little breezy tonight, black wide-legged jeans, platform sandals, a long, billowy, lime-colored silk Altuzarra overcoat. My first instinct was to try to look as inconspicuous as possible. It’s hard to date when your face is known for so many different things now, splattered on everything from a sleazy supermarket rag to a $500 sneaker. But unassuming is not who I am. That was never who I am.

This date will have to be a brief one, though. Peri and I are starting to dream up the second collection of SEPH and there’s way too much to do. It’s funny what having a career revitalization can do for you. Huda won’t stop calling me to do a collab, but obviously, I’m ignoring her.

When Peri cornered me at my mom’s, she told me that her next venture was art and fashion. That she’d dipped her toes into so many industries, tech and cars and food and oil, but hadn’t discovered the right vehicle to make her dreams of aesthetic dominance come true.

Until she found me.

Peri had modeled in her twenties, but not very seriously, not for high-end designers or labels. When she’d broached the subject of starting a fashion label, of curating an art show, even with her current contact people had dismissed her. She was too low-rent for that, despite her billions. As many times as she re-created herself, she was still a working-class girl from Florida with an ample chest and good hair, who had scrabbled her way into this world by being the escort to a much older man. And besides, she didn’t have the artistic talent.

Fashion, high art, they were the only professions in which people were still looking at her credentials, at her past. And because of this gatekeeping, she yearned even more to break into these fields to prove to everyone that she could smash obstacles, create original, unique products that would sell out in seconds and require waiting lists, that could be the next cultural touchstones.

Peri, armed with my collages, my insider knowledge and my technical expertise, knew she could finally achieve this, that she could launch herself into this world, that people would respond to her with respect and awe. And they did. With her money as a lubricant, my collage work ended up in Salon 94.