Lethal Love novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Crooked Seams
Oakley refuses to pay for twelve gowns and plays an old video to forty guests, so Jemma steals her face for a dating profile, and the faceless man she catfishes wires $14,000 and asks for a red dress that isn't in any photo.
The night Oakley Halsted refused to pay me, I stole her face.
She did it in her father's living room, in front of forty guests and a string quartet.
Twelve of her friends stood along the windows in the twelve wedding gowns I had sewn.
Fourteen thousand dollars, agreed in writing.
I had the contract folded in my back pocket.
Oakley walked down the line with a glass of champagne, tugging at seams.
She stopped at the third girl and pinched the bodice.
"Oh no," she said, loud enough to stop the violins. "Is this crooked?"
It wasn't crooked.
I had sewn that seam at four in the morning with a steel ruler.
"It's straight," I said. "Measure it."
"Jemma, honey, I can see it from here." She turned to the room. "Can everyone see it?"
Nobody could see it, because it wasn't there.
Somebody laughed anyway.
"The contract says fourteen thousand on delivery," I said. "They're delivered. You're wearing one."
She looked down at the ivory silk on her own body.
"The contract says acceptable work." She smiled at her guests. "Does anybody here think this is acceptable?"
A girl by the piano raised her glass.
"Okay, wait," Oakley said. "You guys don't even know who Jemma is."
She held up her phone and tapped it.
The big TV over the fireplace lit up.
It was me at sixteen.
I was on my knees in this house, in my school blazer, scrubbing the Halsteds' kitchen floor with a brush.
My mother had the flu that week, and I'd taken her shift so she wouldn't lose it.
Oakley's voice came out of the speakers, ten years younger and exactly the same.
"Scholarship girl, part-time maid."
The room laughed.
Not all of it.
Enough of it.
"She's been cleaning up after us forever," Oakley said. "Isn't that cute? Now she does hems."
"Those are my designs," I said.
My voice came out steady, which surprised me.
"You photographed my sketchbook at your fitting in August. Every one of those gowns is in it with a date on the page."
Oakley tilted her head.
"Prove it."
Then she nodded at the man by the door, and he took my elbow.
"Keep the gowns," I said, as he walked me out. "You'll need something to get married in."
"Call it a donation!" she sang after me.
The door shut on the violins starting up again.
I rode the R train home to Bay Ridge with my fists in my lap.
Gran's shop was dark.
She was asleep upstairs with the radio on.
I sat at the cutting table under the one bulb we keep lit for burglars, and I opened Oakley's page.
Two million followers.
Oakley on a yacht. Oakley on a horse. Oakley in a white bikini in Saint-Tropez.
Every caption said some version of the same thing.
"I only date men who can afford me."
She had posted once about a dating app with a gold icon, the one rich girls used.
"Where the real ones are," she'd written.
I downloaded it.
I uploaded nine of her photos.
I typed her name.
Oakley H., 26, Upper East Side.
My plan was simple and very ugly.
I would find the richest man on that app.
I would make him pay me the fourteen thousand she owed me.
Then I would dump him as Oakley, so cruelly he'd spend the rest of his life telling people about her.
I scrolled past men on boats.
Then I stopped.
D., 34, Manhattan.
No photo.
One line.
"Not looking for a date. Looking for someone."
I wrote to him at 12:51 a.m.
"No picture. Are you ugly or married?"
He answered in under a minute.
"Neither. You don't write like your pictures."
I stared at that for a long time.
"How do my pictures write?"
"Slowly. With a lot of exclamation points."
I laughed out loud in the dark shop, and then I was furious at myself for laughing.
We talked until three.
He asked what I'd eaten for dinner.
I told him the truth, a sleeve of crackers over a sewing machine.
He told me he'd made braciole and nobody had come to eat it.
"Sad," I wrote.
"Very," he wrote. "Tell me something true."
So I did, every night for nine nights.
Never my name. Never the shop.
But everything else came out of me in Oakley's photos, in my own words.
On the ninth night, I made myself do it.
"A girl owes me fourteen thousand dollars and won't pay."
"Send me your account."
That was all.
The only account I had was the shop's.
I told myself a man like that would never read the name on it.
I sent it at 1:14 a.m.
At 2:20 my banking app chimed.
$14,000.00 received.
Sender: Scarano Holdings LLC.
Memo: For the dress.
I typed the name into my phone with one finger.
The first result was the New York Post.
A tall man in a dark overcoat was walking down the steps of a federal courthouse, a hand up between his face and the cameras.
"Domenico Scarano, 34, reputed head of the Scarano crime family, walks free for the third time."
My phone buzzed in my hand.
D.
"Friday. Eight o'clock. I'll pick you up at your father's house."
Then another.
"Wear the red dress. The one you wore the night we met."
I had never met him in my life.
I scrolled back through the nine stolen photos, one by one.
Oakley in white. Oakley in black. Oakley in a bikini.
There wasn't a red dress in any of them.
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