CHAPTER FOUR
Suzanne
Two weeks after Arnold, Suzanne had a new morning routine.
She woke at six. Made herself Lipton tea with two sugars and fresh ginger the way her mother always made it in Lagos, standing at the kitchen counter in her silk bonnet and her old Parsons sweatshirt with the bleach stain on the left sleeve she'd never gotten around to addressing. She drank it standing up, looking out at Fort Greene waking up below her, and she gave herself exactly the length of that cup to feel whatever she needed to feel.
Then she got dressed and went to work.
It was a system. It was working. She wasn't going to look at it too closely.
She was in the studio by seven thirty when Michelle arrived for the campaign shoot. A Tuesday in late October, grey sky, the kind that made Manhattan look like a film still. Suzanne heard her before she saw her, Michelle's energy always arriving slightly ahead of her physically, her voice carrying from the entrance as she greeted the studio assistant by name.
Then she appeared in the doorway and Suzanne looked up from her fabric samples and felt, the way she always felt when Michelle walked into a room, that the room had been slightly incomplete before.
Michelle was tall, close to five eleven, red hair loose this morning and falling past her shoulders, green eyes bright, fair skin clear. She was in a camel coat over a simple white ensemble and white trainers and she looked exactly like someone who had decided that morning who she was going to be and dressed accordingly. She was also carrying two coffees from the place on DeKalb that Suzanne had introduced her to three years ago and that she had since declared the only acceptable coffee in the borough.
She handed one over and studied Suzanne's face with the directness of someone who had earned the right to look carefully.
"You look like you slept."
"Six hours."
"That's almost a normal amount." She shrugged off her coat, draped it over the back of a chair and looked around with the ease of someone entirely at home in this space. She knew where everything was. Which shelves not to touch. Which corner had the best light. "How are you feeling."
Not quite a question. An opening. The kind that could be walked through or left alone.
Suzanne took a sip of her coffee. "I feel like someone with a campaign shoot in two hours and forty samples to approve before then."
Michelle looked at her for a moment. Then she picked up her coffee and said "alright" in the tone that meant I hear you and I'm not finished asking but I'll let you set the pace, and Suzanne appreciated it the way she always appreciated Michelle's particular brand of friendship. It understood the difference between being cared for and being managed.
"Evening pieces first," Suzanne said, moving to the rail. "While the light is still flat. It photographs better for that collection."
Michelle was already beside her, fingers moving along the rail with the assessment of someone who understood garments with her body as much as her eyes. She pulled out a floor length burgundy piece and held it against herself without looking in a mirror. "This one's going to do something excellent."
"That's the third look. Start with the black."
"The black is safe."
"The black is the foundation. You build from the foundation."
Michelle put the burgundy back with the expression of someone conceding a point they weren't entirely conceding and pulled out the black instead. A structured column dress, asymmetric neckline, hand finished edges that Suzanne had spent a full Sunday completing while listening to Burna Boy at a volume her neighbours had feelings about.
"Fine," Michelle said. "Black first. But I want it noted that I was right about the burgundy."
"Noted."
Michelle smiled and disappeared toward the changing area.
The shoot ran from ten to two. Michelle in front of a camera was a different creature than Michelle in conversation, not performing but translating, the same person in a different language. She understood instinctively what a lens needed and gave it without appearing to try, her body finding the angles that served the clothes with a naturalness that made the photographer visibly relax within the first twenty minutes.
Suzanne watched from beside the monitor, second coffee in hand, eyes moving between the screen and Michelle and the way the pieces moved under the studio light. She gave direction occasionally. A shoulder adjustment here. A different quality of stillness there. Michelle received it with the ease of someone who trusted the direction completely.
Between setups they talked the way they always talked, low and comfortable, covering ground without effort. The show. The buyer's card. The New Yorker profile enquiry. Everything around the thing they were both aware of without touching directly.
Then Michelle's phone buzzed on the table and her expression did the thing it only did for one person. Warm and private and entirely involuntary.
She typed something back and set it down.
"King David?" Suzanne said.
"He wants to know if I'm free Thursday." Michelle's mouth curved. "Made a reservation somewhere and won't tell me where."
Suzanne looked at her. Seven months. She'd watched something happen to her best friend in those seven months that she hadn't seen before. Not just happiness. Michelle was generally happy. This was something steadier than that. Something that sat differently.
"Is he good to you," Suzanne said.
Michelle looked at her. Completely honest. "Very good to me. In ways I didn't know to ask for."
"Good."
"You'll meet him properly soon. He's been asking about you."
"Has he."
"Wants to know the woman his girlfriend talks about more than anyone else." Michelle tilted her head. "I told him you were intimidating and brilliant and not to take it personally if you assess him thoroughly in the first ten minutes."
"That's an accurate description of my process."
"I know. That's why I told him."
Suzanne almost smiled. Almost.
The shoot wrapped at two. Michelle reappeared from the changing area with the burgundy dress over one arm and an expression that had already made its decision.
"I want to wear this to something."
"It's not for sale yet."
"I'm not the public. I'm your brand ambassador and your best friend and I've been standing in this studio since ten."
"None of those things entitle you to unreleased pieces."
"Suzanne."
"I'll think about it."
Michelle hung the dress back with the expression of a woman who understood that I'll think about it meant closer to yes than no and was taking it as a victory. She pulled on her coat, picked up her bag and then stopped.
Turned back.
The particular quality of attention that meant she'd been waiting to say something and had decided now was the moment.
"I've been looking at something," she said carefully. "A trip."
Suzanne looked up. "What kind of trip."
"Russia. Kazan." Her voice had the measured quality it got when she was making a case she expected resistance to. "There's a brewery launch event. MVK Brewery Group. Very glamorous. I've been invited as a guest and I want you to come with me."
Suzanne stared at her. "Russia."
"Kazan specifically. Beautiful apparently. Different from Moscow. More cultural."
"Michelle."
"You need to leave New York." The measured quality dropped. Just direct now because she'd decided the moment for careful was finished. "You've been in this studio or your apartment for two weeks. You're sleeping six hours and calling it almost normal. You went through something and you're processing it the way you process everything, by working through it, and I respect that, it's very you, but you also need air. You need to be somewhere that isn't every street you walked down with him for three years."
The studio was quiet around them. The assistant had gone into the back room. The photographer had stepped out. Just the two of them and the rail of clothes and the grey October light.
Suzanne looked at Michelle for a long moment. Michelle looked back with the steady patience of someone who had made her argument and was simply waiting.
"How long," Suzanne said.
Michelle's shoulders dropped slightly with a relief she was trying not to show. "Two weeks. We leave in ten days."
"I have things to manage here."
"Your team is excellent. You hired them specifically so things could be managed without you."
Suzanne looked at her fabric samples. At the campaign rail. At the grey sky through the window. She thought about Arnold's hallway. The elevator doors closing. Her own face in the mirror.
"Fine," she said.
Michelle's face did something bright and immediate that she contained quickly. "Fine?"
"Don't make it a thing."
"I'm not making it a thing." She was already reaching for her phone. "I'm simply noting that you said fine and that I am pleased about it in a completely calm and reasonable way."
"You're texting someone."
"I'm texting no one." She was absolutely texting someone. "I'll send you the details tonight. Pack warm. It'll be cold."
She kissed Suzanne's cheek and left with the energy of someone who had accomplished something they'd been working toward for ten days.
Suzanne stood in the empty studio after she left.
Russia.
She picked up her fabric sample. Looked at it. Set it back down.
She'd never been to Russia. Never particularly thought about Russia. She thought about it now, briefly, and decided that Michelle was right about the air and the streets and the distance and that was reason enough.
She called her studio manager. Out of the country for two weeks starting in ten days. Full brief on everything in motion by Friday.
Then she put the phone down and went back to work.
That evening she poured herself a glass of red wine instead of tea and took it to the couch with her laptop open to a tab she hadn't looked at yet.
Kazan, Russia.
She looked at it for a while. Then she closed the laptop and finished her wine and went to bed.
She didn't think about Arnold. She was deliberate about that.
She thought instead about her mother's message from two weeks ago. My daughter. Your father would have been so proud. She held that carefully in her chest the way you hold something warm when the room is cold.
After a while she fell asleep.