Pretty Baby novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Linden Agency

At a charity gala Winifred outs Lydia as an escort; Lydia owns it in public and Stefan kisses her in front of the board.

I didn't pack that night.

I went upstairs and sat on the edge of the guest bed with my shoes still on.

I told myself a woman who has been called a lot of things can survive a lady in pearls.

Stefan found me there an hour later.

"My mother says you're leaving," he said from the doorway.

"Your mother says a lot of things."

"She said you need to be gone by morning."

"Do you want me gone?"

He thought about it, which I liked better than a fast answer.

"I want the vote in June," he said. "You're the only person who's looked at my mother and not flinched."

"I flinched," I said. "I just did it quietly."

"Stay, Miss Kaufman."

"Lydia," I said. "If I'm wearing your ring, you can use my name."

"Lydia," he said, and he said it carefully, like a word in a foreign language.

The Hartwell Foundation gala was the following Saturday, in a ballroom with a hundred chandeliers.

I wore a green wrap dress that I'd bought myself, and a lipstick the color of a bruise.

Stefan's hand rested at the small of my back all night, because the cameras wanted it there.

It was warm through the silk, and I kept noticing, which was a problem.

"Smile," he murmured. "The chairman of the shipping board is watching."

"I am smiling."

"You're baring your teeth."

"It's the same thing at your income level."

The corner of his mouth twitched, and a woman in diamonds laughed beside us.

Winifred waited until dessert.

She stood at the head table and tapped a spoon against her glass, and the room went quiet in a ripple that reached the back.

"Friends," she said. "My son has finally done what every mother prays for."

Applause.

"He's found someone."

More applause.

"And since she'll soon be a Hartwell, I thought you should know where he found her."

Stefan's hand went still on my back.

"Lydia Kaufman works for an agency called the Linden Agency," Winifred said into the silence.

"It sends women to dinner with wealthy men. My lawyer has been very thorough."

A hundred people turned and looked at me at once.

I heard a fork hit a plate, and someone breathe in sharply behind a napkin.

Across the room, Alistair Crane lifted his glass half an inch.

I could have run.

I'd rehearsed running for years, in other ballrooms, in other rooms with that exact silence.

Instead I stood up.

My chair scraped, and everyone flinched at the sound.

"She's right," I said.

I walked around the table to the microphone on its stand, and I didn't hurry.

"I work for the Linden Agency," I said.

"I've sat through three years of dinners with men who talk about themselves and tip badly."

Somebody laughed, a short surprised bark, and then stopped.

"I've never taken a cent from a man who didn't offer, and I've never lied to one," I said.

"That's more than I can say for some people in this room."

I looked at Winifred while I said it.

She didn't blink.

"Stefan asked me to marry him," I said. "He knew what I do, and he asked anyway."

It wasn't true.

He'd hired me with a folder and a pen.

But I felt his eyes on me and I kept going.

"So if anyone here is bothered by what I do," I said, "say it to my face."

I smiled. "I'll tell you what I charge."

The silence cracked into a roar.

Stefan was standing beside me before I saw him cross the floor.

He took the microphone out of my hand.

"I did know," he said, and the room hushed again. "I knew from the first night, and it was the best thing about her."

He turned to me, and for a half second he looked like a man who had just discovered he was lying very well.

Then he kissed me.

It wasn't a stage kiss.

It was warm and slow and angry on my behalf, and his hand slid into my hair.

I forgot, too.

Somebody started clapping.

The sound spread, and it got ugly for Winifred fast, because nobody in a ballroom wants to be the last person not applauding.

When he let me go, my knees were not entirely mine.

"That wasn't in the contract," I whispered.

"The cameras were there," he said, as if reading from a card.

His thumb was still on my jaw.

At eleven, we got home, and the nanny went to bed.

I stood in the hall in my green dress with my shoes in my hand, still buzzing, still furious, still tasting him.

Then I heard a sound upstairs.

Mabel was standing at the top of the staircase in her rabbit pajamas with her eyes open and nobody home behind them.

She was walking in her sleep, one hand trailing the banister, and she was humming.

It was my song, note for note, the one nobody had ever taught her.

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