“Hey!” Jules grabbed her arm. “What was that for?”

“Wake up.” Vivian shoved her arm again. “Julia, I said, wake up.”

She opened her eyes to find that someone had grabbed hold of her shoulder and was shaking her back and forth.

“Wake up,” Vivian’s voice repeated. She sounded pissed off.

Jules blinked and squinted. Someone had turned on the lamp by the door. It must have been Vivian, in fact, who was now sitting on the side of Jules’s bed and shaking her awake. She dropped her hand when Jules opened her eyes and pulled it back into her lap. She was wearing pajamas.

The clock on the nightstand read 5:32 in big red numbers. Jules propped herself up on her elbows, ready to fly out of bed. It had to be an emergency. Something to do with the baby. “What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

“No,” Vivian said coolly. “And neither are you.”

Her eyes were hard. Jules’s sleepiness packed its bags and fled, never to return.

“Right,” she said quietly.

“Is it? I wouldn’t say this is ‘right’ at all. Sit up and pay attention. This is important.”

Jules licked her dry lips. Her mouth felt like cotton and tasted awful. “Vivian, I know…”

“You don’t know half as much as you think.” Her voice seemed to shake on the final word.

Jules’s eyes widened. She must have imagined that. Slowly pushing herself up from her elbows into a sitting position, Jules whispered, “Vivian?”

Vivian lifted her chin and crossed her arms over her chest. “Okay, Julia,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

Chapter 38

Chapter 38

Her reprieve was over. Vivian hadn’t even waited until sunrise.

Jules rubbed her hands over her face with a low sigh. “I’m sorry about what I said earlier. But when you said—”

“You’re not sorry,” Vivian said flatly.

“Yes, I am!” Jules snapped. What, did Vivian suddenly know Jules’s feelings better than she did? “I was mad, but I shouldn’t have lashed out like I did.”

“But you meant every word of it. Me throwing people away and so on.”

What could she say to that? It wasn’t wrong. She might as well cop to it since she was about to get canned. “Yes, I did.”

Vivian looked away, staring at the wall. For the first time, Jules noticed how straight her posture was—rigid, almost—and how tightly she was clasping her hands in her lap.

“I’ll do whatever’s necessary to keep Du Jour the top fashion platform,” she said, still not looking at Jules. “To that end, I will hire and fire anyone I please. No one who works for me is irreplaceable, Julia. Not Mallory, not Lucia—not even Simon. I’ll do what I have to do, and I’ll never apologize for it. Do you understand?”