“Looks like you’re the first stop on my route now. She just told me so.”

Her jaw slowly sagged open. “Holy shit,” she said, then, “oh no, you have to get up even earlier? I’m sorry, Ben.”

“Well, it’s not up to us, is it?” he said, but she detected annoyance in his voice anyway.

She closed her eyes. Great. She liked Ben: he’d always been friendly and helpful, and they’d shared a good laugh together once or twice about Vivian’s eccentricities. Hopefully, he wouldn’t resent her for this.

Besides, while the subway was a pain in the ass, it gave Jules time to wake up and get herself together before she had to face Vivian and Du Jour. Now she’d be at Du Jour from the moment she stepped out of the door in the morning to the moment she returned at night.

Maybe she panics when she realizes you’re more than ten feet away.

Jules watched the insides of her eyelids and decided that what she wanted was to go to sleep and wake up to find that nothing was weird anymore. That’d be great.

“She was talking about you yesterday morning,” Ben said.

Jules opened her eyes again.

“About your trip to Givenchy. The second one.”

Her mouth parted.

“Said the way you handled yourself was quite impressive.”

Jules’s mouth snapped shut.

This time Ben’s voice was good-natured when he said, “Keep it up and you’ll be some kind of executive vice president this time next month.”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “I’ll be something all right.”

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

At first, Jules couldn’t help being a little grumpy about the addition to her commute. The subway was faster by thirty minutes, give or take. Now Jules and Ben had a forty-minute drive from Jules’s place on Clinton Street to Vivian’s carriage house on West Seventy-Third. From there, it was another twenty minutes to Koening. She lost a precious half hour of sleep.

After a week, though, she had started to enjoy her job’s latest…perk? Responsibility? New York in December wasn’t a fun place to frolic. It was nice to sit in a warm car with heated leather seats and watch the world go by during the quiet moments.

Before, being quiet with Vivian had meant Jules was always on her toes, awaiting the next instruction, holding her tongue, or trying not to be noticed. Now it just meant…being quiet with Vivian.

Until one afternoon.

“Are the Christmas gifts arranged?” Vivian asked.

“Yes.” Jules had created an email subfolder just to handle the order receipts from various merchants. Seeing the massive cash Vivian dropped on gifts for people she didn’t even like was enough to make Jules advocate for the abolition of money. “I had to get on Simonelli about that espresso machine you’re sending to Mordechai Rubinstein, but other than that, we’re all ready.”