The Big Wife's Revenge: From Model to Queen novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Big Wife

The clip goes viral and Tobias Linden books her on the spot.

By midnight, the clip had four million views.

Hettie's kitchen in Queens smelled like burnt toast and old radiators.

I sat at her table in my coat and the ruined dress while she held an ice pack against my knuckles.

I had squeezed the microphone so hard they ached.

"They've given you a name," Hettie said, turning her phone toward me.

The video showed me at the stage, the dress open to my waist, setting a ring in white frosting.

The caption said, The Big Wife Walks.

Under it, thousands of comments.

Some were cruel. Most were not.

One said, She stood there like a queen. I would have run.

Another said, That woman is a size twenty and she looks more confident than Monique Merrick ever has.

"I can't look at it anymore," I said.

"Then don't. Eat something."

She put a plate of scrambled eggs in front of me and sat down across the table.

Hettie had been a booker for thirty years before her eyes got bad.

She found me in a Dayton mall when I was nineteen, carrying a tray of soft pretzels.

She told me I was a model, and I laughed at her.

She was the only person who never laughed at me back.

"Corbin called six times," she said. "I didn't pick up."

"Good."

"His mother called once. I did pick up that one."

My stomach dropped. "What did she say?"

"That you have no money, no agent, and no work. She said you'd be sleeping in your old bed at Rye Hall by Monday."

"I'm not going back."

"I know." Hettie slid a sheet of paper across the table. "So here's the other thing."

It was an address on the Lower East Side.

Linden Studio. Open call, nine o'clock, Sunday morning.

"It's tomorrow," I said.

"It's in nine hours. Linden is small, but he's honest. He's been shouting for a year that fashion needs real bodies."

"Hettie, I haven't had a booking in seven years."

"I know that too."

She said it quietly, her expression softening for an instant before flattening again.

I thought she was only sorry for me.

I slept on her sofa in a borrowed nightgown with the wedding dress folded under my head.

At eight, I stood outside a narrow brick building on Orchard Street in last year's jeans and a white shirt.

The line went around the corner.

Girls in size zero, girls in size sixteen, a few in between, all holding portfolios.

I had no portfolio. I had Hettie's old composite card and a phone full of messages I wasn't reading.

Inside, a man in round glasses and paint-stained cuffs walked down the line looking at faces.

He stopped when he reached me.

"You're her," he said.

"I'm sorry?"

"The Big Wife. The woman with the ring and the cake."

My face went hot. "I'm here for the open call."

"I know. I was hoping you would be."

He held out a hand. "Tobias Linden. I own this place, and I'm also the one who sweeps it."

I shook his hand. "Roxie Ludlow."

"Come in, Roxie. Walk for me."

The casting room was bare, with a long strip of white tape on the floor.

I took off my shoes and walked the tape.

Seven years of rooms and no cameras, and I had missed it so much I almost wept at the first step.

I walked the way I used to in my kitchen.

Hips first, chin up.

At the end I turned, and held it, and looked straight at him.

The assistants stopped writing.

Tobias took off his glasses.

"Every agency in this city told me you were difficult," he said. "Unbookable. A liability."

"They said that?"

"Every one. I wondered why a woman like that kept turning up in my feed as the best thing I'd never seen."

He stood. "I have a campaign shoot on Wednesday. I want you for it. Full day, full rate."

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

"Say yes before I go broke," he said.

"Yes."

Behind me, the front door chimed.

Everyone looked toward the street.

A black car had pulled up at the curb, with a driver standing at the open back door.

Corbin stepped out of it, in a dark suit, with a photographer's flash already going off behind him.

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