She Regrets Nothing

by Andrea Dunlop

  “Wow, I had no idea,” Laila said. The necklace felt different on her skin now. She’d always found it beautiful but had no idea it might also be valuable. “I didn’t realize you knew so much about jewelry.”

  “Vintage jewelry is my guilty pleasure. My . . . our grandfather is a collector, you know? One of Fred Leighton’s best customers.”

  Laila felt her eyes go wide, and she quickly smiled to disguise it. Frederick. Of course.

  “So anyway, sweets, what’s up?”

  Laila regained her composure. Suddenly the pendant felt like a talisman, a weapon, even, and she let it embolden her. She told Liberty about her date with Tom. She’d meant to ask her permission, but now she asked instead simply for her blessing.

  “Laila, isn’t he a bit old for you?” Liberty said, leaning back in her chair, looking dismayed.

  “Not really, no. He’s younger than my ex.”

  “Well, I mean you’re both adults, obviously.” Sort of, she thought. Liberty was disappointed in Tom; the twenty-five-year-old intern? Forget that Laila was her cousin; Tom was becoming a cliché. She’d known him for years and had helped launched his career. She remembered him sweet and dorky and giddy over his first successes. As for Laila, she didn’t seem to understand that this was unprofessional. But then, she had married her former boss.

  “Come on, Liberty. He seems so wonderful.”

  Just at that moment, Kim appeared at her doorway, gingerly opening the door, aware that she was interrupting.

  “Hi, Kim, what do you need?” It seemed she was destined to have nothing but distractions today.

  “I’m so sorry to interrupt you guys. But Cameron Michaels is in the lobby. Does he have a meeting? I didn’t see him in the books; did I make a mistake?”

  Liberty was taken aback, though pleasantly this time. What was Cameron doing here?

  “No, he must just be swinging by. Go ahead and bring him up.” Kim nodded and hurried off, her relief that she hadn’t mucked up the schedule palpable. She supported several of the agents in the office, and though Liberty was always kind to her, the other two could be terrors. One of them, Maryanne, could be heard bellowing her name down the hall throughout the day.

  “Sweets, can we talk about this a bit later?” Liberty said now to Laila.

  “Sure,” Laila said. “It’s not that big a deal. I mean, listen, maybe he just wants to be friends, so maybe it’s not even a thing.”

  Liberty looked up at her cousin, confused by how her entire demeanor seemed to have changed in an instant. A moment before, she’d seemed insistent about going out with Tom. And of course he didn’t just want to be friends; was she that naive? Before she could make sense of it, Cameron appeared in the doorway.

  “Good afternoon, ladies,” Cameron said, delivered by Kim who was nearly losing her composure in his presence. He was wearing a handsome suit that was expertly tailored to his frame, which appeared nearly as athletic as it had in his youth.

  Liberty got up from her chair and, infuriatingly, found her legs felt weak beneath her. Seeing Cameron, she seemed to lose all the years that separated her from her teenage self. There she was once again, sitting in the Michaelses’ vast, sparkling kitchen, watching him raid the fridge after his afternoon crew training, his every pore gleaming with good health. The sensory memories of the long-buried—but apparently still-living—crush bombarded her.

  “Cameron,” she said now as he moved through her small office toward her, his long legs gliding across it in a single step. He kissed her on the cheek. “What brings you here?”

  “Oh, hello, Laila,” he said, as though he’d just noticed her there, and perhaps he had.

  “Hi, Cam,” Laila purred. Oh dear, Liberty thought, maybe Reece was right about Laila’s being into Cameron. She couldn’t keep track. But every woman reacted like that to him, didn’t they? Kim’s concentration would probably be shot for the rest of the day.

  “I was hoping to take you to lunch,” Cameron said, turning back to Liberty. “I was seeing a client in the area.”

  “Oh,” Liberty said, stepping back behind her desk to peruse her calendar. “I would love to, but I’m afraid I have a lunch with an author I’m courting today. She’s that research scientist at NYU who wrote the big article on autism in the New York Times last week; everyone in town is after her.” She realized that she was giving Cameron far more information than he needed. What did she want him to know, exactly? That she was important enough to land a lunch with such a coveted potential client? Or simply that the person she was having lunch with was a woman?

  “That’s too bad. Not about the potential client, of course; that’s fantastic. Look at you.” He sparkled at her, and Liberty felt her spine straighten, felt herself standing to attention. “I would have called first, but if you can believe it, I don’t have your cell.”

  Liberty smiled. Of course, Cameron easily could have gotten her number from Reece or found the agency’s number online. He’d wanted to see her.

  “Well, here,” she said, passing him one of her client business cards, which included every possible way to reach her. “For next time.” Oh, let there be a next time, she thought.

  “Okay,” he said, looking at the card. “Well, I’d better be on my way and let you ladies get back to work. Lovely to see you both.”

  “So . . . Cameron, huh?” Laila said after he’d left.

  “Is an old friend,” she said to Laila, her tone rather stern, “and that is all.”

  “Okay, okay,” Laila said, putting her hands up.

  The two lingered there in a stilted silence for a moment as Liberty riffled through a small stack of papers on her desk. She looked up at Laila, not certain why she was still sitting there. Liberty’s own thoughts had been scattered—for the happiest of reasons—by Cameron’s unannounced visit.

  “I just . . . ,” Laila said. “The thing with Tom.”

  “Oh, right.” So we were back to that again? “Listen, honey, do what you like, but proceed with caution, okay? It’s just a bit delicate.”

  “Okay!” Laila said regaining her cheer. “You got it.”

  The next morning, Liberty woke feeling as though she were at the bottom of a well. She had felt the black dogs—Churchill’s metaphor, which she found so apt—nipping at her heels all throughout the day before but had gone to her regular measures to try to curb them: white tea and no wine; a long yoga class to stop her thoughts from ricocheting in her brain. She’d been distracted by Cameron’s visit and her lunch with the potential new client, which had gone exceptionally well. The client, Victoria Forrester, had seemed to take to Liberty right away. Liberty knew she was the only female agent courting Victoria, but she didn’t know whether this would help or hurt her cause until she’d met her. In the first few minutes of their lunch, she’d known it would be a plus: Victoria was an obvious girl’s girl, with her hug upon meeting her and her “call me Vickie.” This certainly meant that she preferred doing business with other women, as Liberty did; this had been true since her modeling days, where men were unavoidable. It wasn’t like she was never hassled now, but it was mostly women who worked in her industry. She’d cut one male client loose the previous year when his marriage started falling apart and he took to leaving Liberty long, late-night voice mails declaring his love. Liberty had been mortified for him, and baffled. What had she done to make him think she might want to hear these things? Intellectually, she knew that it likely had nothing to do with her, that this was simply him unleashing his tortured ardor on the nearest woman. But it tapped into a deeper shame that could not be so easily reasoned with: the dark suspicion that the way men behaved around her was her fault.

  Liberty’s cat—Catniss Everdeen, drunkenly and shrewdly named in her kitten-hood by Reece for the literary heroine of the moment—jumped up on Liberty’s bed, climbed directly onto her chest, and nuzzled her face. Catniss was a highly empathetic cat and could always seem to sense it when Liberty’s black moods hit her.

  “Good ki
tty,” Liberty said absently, scratching behind her ears as the cat began to purr loudly. Liberty’s limbs were heavy as she dragged herself out of bed and made her way to her small kitchen. Even scooping the beans into the grinder for her French press felt like a substantial effort. She mentally ran through her schedule for the morning; could she afford to stay home? Fortunately, Gerard was usually too busy lunching with all his old-man publishing cronies to much care or notice when she worked from home. She had three new books from clients that she could stay home and read, though that was ordinarily work she did on the weekends. But it was a risk to go into the office like this—feeling as she did, that she was made of glass. The wrong look from a colleague or a too-brusque e-mail from an editor could send her death-spiraling, even just an errant memory that surfaced and flooded her with shame.

  She’d only had a panic attack in the office once, two years ago. She’d curled up in the space beneath her desk at once, praying no one would find her and hoping she wouldn’t pass out from the shallow breaths she was taking: these fears only made her worse. She stayed down there for who knows how long. When the panic had exhausted itself, she left the building and hailed a cab home immediately, emailing the office later to tell them she had food poisoning.

  Plenty of New Yorkers wore their neuroses like medals—traded names of therapists as though they were hairdressers, compared meds, and even casually topped each other off if need be—but this was not Liberty’s style. Her armor to the outside world was her very pulled-togetherness. Only Reece knew of her terrors and her insomnia, ameliorated only somewhat by the Lexapro, the Xanax, and the Klonopin for sleepless nights that could otherwise trigger a whole week of imbalance. And only Reece knew what had happened to her, where the trouble had truly begun.

  Once she had her coffee, she returned to bed and curled herself around her cat who was purring loudly. “Catniss, can you get me my laptop? No? Okay, I’ll just e-mail work from my phone, then.” Even opening her e-mail felt exhausting.

  Seeing Cameron the day before had been a happy thing, but she wondered if it also had triggered something. Having Cameron back in her life, it returned her to her younger self, the self that was still untouched, uncorrupted, innocent, and hopeful.

  He’d been at college by the time she was in the thick of her modeling career, which had begun at fourteen and that she’d left the moment she’d gone to Columbia. She ought to have stopped when she was sixteen, after what happened. Even though she’d hired a much more protective team and had never been through anything similar after the disastrous lingerie shoot, she feared that her additional two years in front of the camera had somehow compounded the damage; that what was broken in her when she was sixteen had never properly set. She should never have started modeling in the first place, but the force of her mother’s excitement and pride—both of which felt so much like love, and not the cold, authoritarian kind she’d become accustomed to from Petra—had been too compelling for her. And it offered a chance to feel beautiful, to be beautiful, which was appealing to any fourteen-year-old girl.

  Until James Marsh. He was the biggest name that Liberty had ever been photographed by. The girls in her agency, including Tasha, an eighteen-year-old from the Czech Republic who’d been modeling since she was thirteen and was slated to do the shoot with Liberty, had said that he was “weird” but “fun,” and that, regardless, it was worth it.

  On set, he’d told them to call him Uncle Jimmy. His assistants had all been young, cool twentysomethings who looked like art school grads—or, more accurately, like the actresses hired to play them in a movie—and they were sisterly and warm with Liberty and Tasha. They had made it feel so natural, so expected, that they would strip down to their underwear (Here! Jimmy said, I’ll get naked too!), that they would kiss each other (Weren’t they friends?), that Jimmy would join them. It was an experience so surreal that Liberty left her body as though in a dream; there was no anchor to the real world within this studio. All she saw were smiling faces around her, encouraging her; everywhere she looked, there were subtle reminders that if she said no, she’d be letting them all down. They couldn’t have known that she’d never so much as kissed a boy before. James Marsh, with his thick handlebar mustache and his thinning hair, was not whom she had pictured as her first.

  After, Tasha had seemed more or less unconcerned with what had happened. Liberty wondered if she was overreacting. Then the panic attacks had started. . . .

  Liberty’s phone buzzed.

  Hey you! Nice to see you if only briefly yesterday. There is an event at the 92nd Street Y tomorrow that I was thinking of going to. Margaret Atwood. Any interest?

  Liberty felt her heart lift a little. Had he pumped Reece for information? How would he have known this was one of her favorite authors? Nothing she knew about Cameron led her to think that he was that interested in literature. But it had been a long time since she’d seen him, and perhaps London had left him with new interests; or perhaps he was feigning interest to be able to spend time with her. Either option thrilled her.

  Liberty knew it was magical thinking to imagine that giving her teenage self the thing she wanted most—the highest prize, her best friend’s dreamy older brother—could erase what had been done to her; a thing she intellectually knew she could not take the blame for but nonetheless on some bodily, cellular level, she had, and forever would. Still she found herself craving that feeling of being near Cameron, the heady mix of nostalgia and desire burning, even after all these years. He felt both exciting and safe, and where else would she possibly find that?

  12

  * * *

  LAILA WAS shocked that Tom Porter didn’t have more money. What did bestselling even mean if not that the author was wealthy? They’d been dating for nearly a month now, and she’d spent as much time at his apartment as she could bear. It was a small, dark one-bedroom with evidence of his scruffy bachelorhood in every corner: from the aging black leather couch to the mismatched silverware to the plain blue coverlet on his bed with its paucity of decent pillows. True, it was in a choice neighborhood, Gramercy Park, conveniently nearby Liberty’s office. Tom would often beg Laila to come over for “lunch,” which naturally meant midday sex.

  Gramercy was the shabby apartment’s saving grace. One of the things Laila had learned in her time in New York was that neighborhood was everything: even odd, little apartments like Tom’s could be worth an absolute fortune if they were in the right location. So perhaps he could do better but just didn’t, out of that particularly male laziness that allows them to live in squalor even when they don’t need to. Perhaps what Tom actually lacked was taste and style. Well, those things Laila could bring him. They could move together toward being the kind of New Yorkers who would fit right in with the Lawrences. Tom brought the intellectual gravitas, and Laila had beauty and youth, a currency accepted everywhere.

  One night in early November, as Laila was getting ready for a date with Tom, she solicited Nora’s opinion about which boots she ought to wear with her sweater dress. Nora collapsed on the chaise to examine the options, all of which she had purchased for her cousin. Laila felt the knowledge of this draped over the two of them like a veil. It occurred to her—and not for the first time—that perhaps these trips to Bergdorf’s were not completely without obligation on Laila’s part.

  “You’re seeing Tom again tonight?” Nora said, raking her hand through her blond hair, which fanned out beneath her on the chaise.

  “He is my boyfriend.” Laila smiled at the word. She had always preferred being paired; when she was not, she felt the negative space radiating next to her like a phantom limb. Her mother had been the same in her youth: a steady boyfriend since the time she was fourteen right up until the day she met Gregory Lawrence when she was an undergrad at the University of Michigan and had deposited all her dreams upon him. Before Betsy had realized that she’d never be able to convince him to return to the life she coveted in New York—the very reason she’d fallen for him in the first pla
ce—she’d had Laila and sealed her future. It left Laila nearly breathless how close she had come to living out the same fate: trapped under the intractable weight of marriage, eventual motherhood, and a mortgage. But she’d been braver.

  “You don’t love me anymore,” Nora huffed accusingly. “You never spend time with me. It’s always Tom or that girl Cece.” She nearly spat the latter’s name. Laila had originally hoped the three of them could all be friends, but though neither would say so directly, Laila intuited that Nora thought Cece was too common to bother with, and Cece found Nora snobbish and bizarre—and, Laila suspected, a little bit stupid. Ever since Nora’s little speech about Laila’s getting a job, she’d been on high alert, though her cousin had not mentioned it again. She suspected that keeping her on her toes in this way might have been exactly the intention.

  “That’s not true,” Laila said. She sat next to Nora on the chaise and reached for her hand. “You’re my sister now.”

  “Everyone abandons me!” Nora said so dramatically that Laila had to close her eyes so that she would not roll them.

  “Why don’t you come with us?”

  “And be the third wheel? No, thank you. Anyway, all Tom does is talk about books I haven’t read and gossip about writers I don’t know of and would probably be bored to death by if I did.” That was true enough.

  “I could see if he has a friend he could bring. Or you could finally call Poor Larry back,” Laila said, smiling at her cousin. Larry, the clothing magnate Oxana had set her up with, was always Poor Larry: Larry who had taken Nora out to one dinner and fallen in love with her, Larry with his lisp and his bad hair and his buckets and buckets of money. “We could double; it would be fun! Oh, let’s.”

  Nora didn’t disguise what she thought of that idea. “Just stay home with me,” she said, giving her face over to a full pout.