Lumière Cosmetics was the last chance. Gary had made that very clear. A French skincare brand, launching in the country for the first time, looking for a face for their campaign. Brooke's agent had gotten her a meeting, and the meeting had gone well, and there had been a second meeting, and now there was a third. Today. Nine o'clock. In the brand's temporary office in a converted warehouse in the arts district, across the river, with the head of their marketing division, who had flown in from Paris. Her agent said they were down to two names. Her agent said she had a real shot. Her agent also said, very quietly, on the phone last night, Brooke, honey, you cannot be late for this. Not by a minute. These people are French. They take punctuality very seriously. If you're late, it's over.
It was eight-oh-six.
She finished her makeup in nine minutes, which was a record. She had planned the look a week ago. Glamorous but fresh. Lumière was about glow, about light, about skin that looked lit from within, so she kept her base sheer and dewy and built up her cheekbones with a pearlescent highlighter that caught the light like the inside of a shell. Her eyes she did in soft bronze, smoky at the outer corners. Her lips in a glossy, deep red. She pulled her platinum hair back from her face on one side and pinned it up in a loose twist at the crown, leaving the rest to fall smooth and heavy past her shoulders, half up and half down, the side part sharp as a knife. She put in her biggest gold hoops, the ones that brushed her jaw when she turned her head. She layered three gold chains around her throat, one fine and two heavy, so they lay against her collarbone in a glittering stack.
And then the outfit, which she had chosen with even more care than the makeup, because the outfit was the message. Red. Lumière's brand color was a particular shade of deep, glossy, lacquered red, the red of their packaging and their logo and the lipstick that was their bestselling product in Europe, and Brooke was going to walk into that meeting wearing it from top to toe. A strapless bandeau crop top in glossy red faux leather, so shiny it looked wet, that left her shoulders and her midriff bare. A matching red pleated skater skirt in the same glossy material, very short, that flared out when she turned. And a pair of red patent-leather high heels with sharp pointed toes and four-inch stiletto heels, the same red exactly, shining like candy apples.
She looked at herself in the full-length mirror by the door. She looked, she thought, like a fire engine. Like a stop sign. Like a woman who could not be ignored.
She looked like she was winning.
She did not look at her own eyes.
Tyler's car was in the garage under the building, in the space beside hers, where his driver had left it the night before. Tyler was in Miami for the week, opening a fourth restaurant, and he had said she could use the car while he was gone. He had said it in the casual, slightly bored way he said most things, the way you might offer someone an umbrella, as if a six-hundred-horsepower Italian supercar the color of a traffic cone was a perfectly ordinary thing to lend your girlfriend for a week. Brooke had pretended to be casual about it too. She had not told him that she needed it because her own car, a small white SUV with a monthly payment that had become a monthly horror, had been repossessed eight days ago from the visitors' lot of the building while she was upstairs filming a video about her morning routine.
She did not like driving Tyler's car. It was too low and too loud and too fast, and it had paddles behind the steering wheel instead of a gear stick, and the seats were so deeply bucketed that she felt as if she were sitting in a bathtub. Every time she pressed the accelerator, even gently, it roared like something that wanted to eat her. But it was orange, and it was beautiful, and when she pulled up in front of a building in it, people looked. And today, of all days, she needed people to look.
She slid into the driver's seat, set her bag on the passenger seat, put on her sunglasses although it was raining, and pressed the button to start the engine.
The car roared. The dashboard lit up, a sweep of digital dials in red and white.
And in the center of the dashboard, a small amber symbol in the shape of a fuel pump began, insistently, to flash.
Brooke stared at it.
She looked at the fuel gauge. It was not in the red. It was below the red. The needle was lying flat on its back at the very bottom of the dial, like a dead thing. A message scrolled across the small screen beneath it in cheerful white letters. FUEL LEVEL CRITICAL. RANGE: 9 KM.