Page 35 of The Devil Wears Nada

The arrangement they built has a crack running straight down the center of it now, shaped exactly like me in my black slip and red lipstick.

I did this. I sat there, night after night, and let three best friends fall for me one at a time, and I called it a job I had to do to survive.

I'm supposed to feel powerful. Own them. Bring the masters of the universe to their knees. But I mostly feel like I'm watching something burn down, and I'm the one who lit the match.

"They are being so weird," Sloane says, appearing at my desk with two coffees, and I nearly come out of my skin. She sets one in front of me and follows my eyes to the three shut doors. "Ice-age weird. Nobody's talking. Marta in accounting is convinced somebody's getting bought out."

"No idea," I say. Too fast. Way too fast.

Sloane doesn't leave. She perches on the edge of my desk, which she has never once done, and looks at me until I squirm. Sloane, the only one around who really looks at me instead of through me.

"You'd tell me, right?" she says. Lightly. Too lightly. "If something was going on. With you, I mean."

"Nothing'sgoingonwithme," I blurt, guilty as all hell.

"Mmm." She tilts her head. "It's just, you've been different lately, Agnes. Lighter. Brighter." My whole body goes still. "I notice things. It's kind of my curse. So whatever it is"—she throws me her small, warm smile—"whoever it is. Good for you. I mean that."

She smiles, squeezes my shoulder, and carries her coffee back to her own desk. I sit there with my heart slamming, trying to figure out if that was just a kind woman worrying about a coworker, or a smart one warning me she knows I’m up to something.

Either way, she's looking now. And the entire architecture of my life is built on the promise that nobody looks my way because I’m not worth looking at.

My phone's been buzzing, vibrating on my desk this whole time, and I flip it over to see it’s Birdie. I sneak out to the stairwell because I’m guessing this will be all kinds of personal and can’t deal with anyone else observing what Sloane seems to think is the “new me.”

"Ag! Okay, don't say no yet⁠—"

"I'm at work, Bird. I am having a day."

"This'll fix your day, then. It came to me in the shower. About my candles."

No, please God no, I don’t want to hear about candles right now.

God doesn’t hear me. "Listen, Ag, what if we cross-promoted? Like, what if Diablo mentioned them? You've got a whole audience of rich guys obsessed with you, everybody needs a candle, and I could design a Diablo signature scent, smoky, a little dangerous, ooh, we could call it Court Is In Session."

"Birdie." Everything in me has gone to ice. "Listen to me carefully. You cannot sell candles to my clients. You cannot go near my clients. You cannot say the word Diablo out loud, not on a phone, not in a shower, not to your own reflection, not ever again."

"Okay, wow. Relax. It's not like anybody can hear me. Geez."

Oh no. She didn’t.

"Birdie. Who did you tell?"

Silence. The silence my sister uses when deciding whether to tell me the truth or grace me with one of her dumb-ass lies.

"I told Kayla," she says in a small voice. "But only Kayla. And Kayla's a vault, Ag. She is a total vault."

I lean my forehead against the cold stairwell wall and grab the railing so I don’t keel over. I asked her for one thing when I told her. One. Don't tell a soul. Not a friend, not a barista, nobody. She looked me dead in the eye and swore.

Kayla. Birdie's friend Kayla, whom I have met one time, at a party, where within nine minutes of shaking my hand, she told me and four strangers about her yeast infection.

That is the vault my life is currently sitting in.

So here's where my winning streak stands, as of 9:20 a.m., top to bottom.

Three men who think they own me are at war with each other, and I'm the one routing their calls while they burn a twenty-year friendship to the ground. The one person in this building who actually sees me has suspiciously started wondering out loud whether I'm all right. And my leaky, beloved, catastrophic little sister has handed the one secret that can end my whole life to a woman who announces yeast infections to strangers at parties.

I go back to my desk. I sit down. Three shut doors, one cold coffee, a phone gone hot in my hand.

And I remember how I started the morning feeling like a total boss. Like I was a fucking genius or something, having found a way out of the shitshow that is my life.