Joey nodded as coolly as she could manage. “Yes.”

Edith placed the stack in Joey’s hands. Joey hadn’t received a paycheck in a year and a half. Her legal savings were nearly fully depleted. Lately, she’d been selling bags and shoes on The RealReal to maintain her equal contribution toward rent and expenses. Not that Grant demanded it. He said his money was hers. But she didn’t want to rely on him. Joey gripped the bills, not ready to part with them for placement in her purse. Not even her astronomic legal salary had yielded this measure of gratification.

“I need it by next Thursday, dear. For the event I trust Lily filled you in on. You have complete reign. Robert there”—Edith indicated the butler—“will let you in day or night. I’ll try to leave you to it, not to interfere. But as the wall lives by my front door, and I do have a thriving social calendar, we may bump into each other from time to time.” Edith began to walk off, necklaces clicking like castanets with each languid step.

“Wait!” Joey called out. “But you haven’t told me what you want. I mean—what you want me to paint.”

Edith turned at the mouth of a hall with walls covered in round, evenly spaced 3-D spheres in pinks, oranges, and yellows. The effect was of life-size versions of old-fashioned candy dots, the kind that tasted partially of sugar and partially of the paper they adhered to.

“I thought I was clear. You believe in you, and thus I believe in you. So put on that wall whatever you like.”

“Seriously? You don’t want to give me any other direction? Color? Scale? Portrait? Abstract? Landscape?”

“No. It doesn’t even have to be evil eyes.” Edith shuffled off. “Just create, my dear. It’s only a wall. It’s only paint.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Joey

Florida
2019

The apartment hummed with the sound of appliances in resting states. Joey went to the kitchen, and a tangle of dirty towels nearly sent her sprawling. She righted herself and remembered that the fridge guy had come to fix the leak. She flung open the freezer and rummaged for the cookie dough she’d buried beneath a bag of frozen corn.

Hello old friend, she whispered, and she was back where she’d been so many times, right there on the edge. Lost, and then found, at the end of a cookie dough tube.

Joey placed the tube on the counter, her heart racing, transported back to when she’d returned from that Leo-less trip to Nice. When she’d flown to her client’s important family office meeting in Baltimore and collapsed in their all-glass-and-chrome lobby. Panic attack, the medic had said, strapping an oxygen mask to Joey’s face.

“It’s okay not to be okay,” Joey’s therapist had told her a few days later, at their first session.