Original Sin

‘He’s overseen two major launches, Liz: Glow and Skin Plus. Not to mention the successful re-launch of The Balm.’

Liz shrugged. She had to concede that one: a simple repackaging of the cleansing pomade that had made her father’s name when he had launched the company in the late 1950s. They’d replaced The Balm’s dated black plastic pot with a sleek brushed-glass one and increased sales by twenty per cent.

‘That was three years ago,’ said Liz, shaking her head.

‘Well, I believe in your brother,’ said Meredith and, with those words, Liz knew she was wasting her breath; she knew her mother would never hear her objections. Not for the first time, Liz felt a sinking sense of disappointment and rejection. Why do I even bother trying? she thought miserably. Yes, she had been born into wealth and privilege, but Liz had never taken it for granted, working twice as hard as anyone else. But what good was all that effort? All those summers she had spent in the Research and Development lab as a student when all her college friends were having fun in Mexico, Australia, or the South of France, or the MBA she had earned at Wharton in order to understand the business side better. It was all a waste as far as her mother was concerned. Meredith’s attitude seemed to be ‘keep quiet, the boys know best’. The problem was, Liz had been born first and she had been born a girl.

Liz stood up and silently walked out of the room. She was sick of her brother, sick of her mother. She was sick of trying to save the company with her creativity and the hard work she got no credit for. Screw them, she thought to herself as she quietly closed the door behind her. Screw them all. It was time to look after herself.

6 (#ulink_66584a84-e2c5-54a7-812c-c860006dd6f9)

‘Welcome to Asgill’s,’ beamed a tanned blonde as Tess walked nervously into the company’s reception area. If she hadn’t already been anxious on this, her first visit to the offices on the thirty-second floor of a midtown skyscraper, the receptionist was enough to unnerve her. She looked like a super-charged Cosmopolitan cover girl; all bouncy, tawny hair, perfect skin and feline eyes. Tess wondered how anyone could look so perfect and perky at seven o’clock in the morning. Then again, all of New York seemed to bristle with an energy she had never witnessed in London, certainly not this early. For her first day at work she had wanted to be the first in, but it seemed as if the rest of Manhattan had had the same idea. The streets below her were already full of people, cars, and noise, and Starbucks had been so busy she had walked straight past it – no one needed a latte that much.

‘I’m Sally,’ said the blonde, handing Tess a security pass and leading her down a long cream corridor. ‘When did you get into town?’

‘Last night,’ replied Tess. Everything had happened so quickly that it was easy to forget she was in a completely new city on a new continent. The Asgill offices seemed like a different world, too, especially compared to life at the Globe, which had been one huge airless room full of ringing phones, old Formica desks, and the smell of stale tea. Here, on the thirty-second floor, everything was tasteful and calm, with pale-ivory walls, chrome cantilever furniture and huge photographs of the company’s advertising campaigns. It even smelt delicious, thanks to vast arrangements of fresh lilies everywhere. We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto, she thought as she tried to keep up with Sally’s brisk pace.

‘Office hours are eight to five, although some of us get in earlier, others a little later,’ said Sally, nodding over to some smaller offices off the main open-plan block.

‘Mrs Asgill has the corner office and she gets in at nine a.m. She’ll drop by and see you this morning. In the meantime, Patty Shackleton, our legal counsel is going to show you around and get you up to speed.’

Sally stopped outside a small, sunny office and motioned for Tess to step inside.

‘Home,’ she said with a grin.

When Sally had gone, Tess took her jacket off and hung it on the coat stand next to the door, then went to sit behind the glass desk, closing her eyes for a moment as she felt the morning sun pour through the windows and warm her back. My new life, she thought, feeling excited, on edge, and just a little bit sad about how easy it had been to leave London, the city she had called home for almost ten years. She had flown back to England the day after Brooke Asgill’s engagement party and given her notice letter to a smug, suntanned Andy Davidson first thing on the Monday morning. Unsurprisingly, he’d been more than happy to accept her resignation. ‘Leave at the end of the week, yeah?’ he had said. ‘No sense hanging about, is there?’

Tess was inclined to agree, and her plane ticket to JFK was booked for the day after that. Her farewell drinks in the upstairs of the pub next to the Globe offices prompted a good turnout, but only confirmed to Tess that she was making the right move. There were so many new faces in the crowd. Tess knew she was part of the old guard at the Globe, and that wasn’t a good place to be at twenty-nine. Even when her girlfriends turned up to say goodbye, Tess realized how infrequently she saw them, and how distant they had grown. Seeing them once or twice every six months: no wonder all they had to talk about was celebrity gossip and memories of nights out that had happened years ago. Tess knew she had fallen into a rut; it was time to get new stories and have new adventures. That’s what Dom had told her on the drive to Heathrow, and it was what she had kept telling herself as she walked through Departures, willing herself not to get upset. After all, it wasn’t as if she was emigrating, it was more like a very long press trip from which she would return richer, hipper, and infinitely more connected than if she had stayed in London.

Just as she was firing up the computer in front of her, she heard someone enter the room. Looking up, she saw a tall black woman wearing an expensive trouser suit, her hair worn like the singer Sade’s, scraped back off her head.

‘Patty Shackleton,’ the woman said, briskly offering a long, manicured hand.

Hell, even the lawyers look like models here, thought Tess, rising out of her seat to introduce herself.

‘Pleased to meet you, Patty, I’m Tess,’ she said, smiling.

Patty didn’t move, her face wearing a taut, concerned expression. ‘Have you read Danny Krantz?’ she asked quickly, pulling out a paper from under her arm and opening it with a rustle.

Tess felt a flutter of panic as she instantly fell onto the back foot on her first day, feeling both incompetent and unprofessional. Danny Krantz penned the gossip column in New York’s Daily Oracle. Together with Page Six in the New York Post and Rush and Molloy in the Daily News it was one of the juiciest, best-read newspaper columns in the country.

Shit, she silently cursed herself, of course she should have read all the papers, but there seemed to have been so many other things to do that morning.

‘Not yet,’ she replied quickly. ‘I’ve organized for all the papers to be delivered to my apartment, but that won’t happen until tomorrow,’ she said, blushing.

‘It came online at five a.m.’ Patty did not say it in an unkind or accusatory way; it was a simple relaying of fact. She tapped the page. ‘Read that.’

Tess took a swig of coffee as she read the story, wincing both at the strength of the coffee and the gossip item.

Brooke Asgill, fiancée of New York’s most eligible man, David Billington, may look like perfect wife material, but this morning news emerged that Brooke is a home-wrecker.

Tess glanced up at Patty, her expression grave.

Brown University professor Dr Jeff Daniels left his wife of ten years to be with Brooke Asgill when she was a student at the institution. Although the relationship between Daniels and Asgill didn’t last …’ Tess quickly skimmed the rest of the story, reading the last line out loud.

‘Old flame Matthew Palmer, now a doctor at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center says: “Brooke was always hot. I’d be surprised if any man could resist her.”’

Tess shook her head, then looked at Patty. ‘I guess this means our guided tour is off?’

‘I guess so,’ smiled Patty. ‘Instead you’ve got a baptism of fire. Nothing we can’t handle, though.’

Tess didn’t doubt it. She had done all her homework on her contacts at Asgill’s and she could still recall Patty’s impressive CV: Duke University, Harvard Law School, five years at a Wall Street commercial firm, three years here at Asgill’s. She was exactly the sort of person you’d want on your side in a crisis. Tess was glad someone knew what they were doing.

She looked back at the newspaper in front of her and began to feel her old journalistic curiosity creeping back. Interesting, she thought. So Brooke Asgill does have a dark side after all. She almost smiled, before remembering which side of the fence she was on now. At the Globe it was all about exposing people’s misdemeanours; now she was being paid a great deal of money to cover them up.

‘Have you contacted the paper?’ she asked.

Patty shook her head. ‘I called Brooke as soon as I read it. She’s denying it all, of course, but I wanted to get the full facts from her in person. She’s due in the office any minute. In the meantime the story has run too late for the other papers to pick up until tomorrow, although I guess some could go online with it.’

‘Can we get an injunction? Stop it from appearing anywhere else?’ asked Tess, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. Her knowledge of American law was sketchy at best. At work she was used to feeling in control, but here, with efficient Patty in this clean, sweet-smelling office, she felt displaced, out of her depth, and unsure of herself. She didn’t like the feeling, not one bit. Patty was thoughtful for a moment.

‘Well, it’s certainly more difficult for celebrities to sue the media than it is in London,’ she replied. ‘The beauty of the First Amendment,’ she smiled, her icy demeanour softening.

They both heard Brooke before they saw her: a click-clack of heels followed by a sniffle and a sob in the corridor before she appeared in the doorway. Even though she was wearing wide black sunglasses, you could tell she’d been crying from the puffiness of her cheeks.

‘Hi Brooke,’ said Patty, her head cocked sympathetically. ‘I don’t know if you’ve met Tess Garrett before?’

Brooke nodded as she sat down. ‘Briefly, at my party. Sorry about the sunglasses. I look like Gollum this morning.’

Yeah, right, thought Tess. With her long butter-blonde hair, quivering lip, and Tom Ford shades, she looked like a young Jane Birkin on holiday.

‘So. Is any of it true?’ Patty asked earnestly.

Brooke looked desperately miserable and fragile as she looked down at her hands.

‘Yes and no. Jeff Daniels and I dated for about six months when I was twenty-one. Yes, he was one of my tutors at Brown, but we didn’t start dating until a few months after I’d left college and by then he was separated.’

‘Or he told you he was separated,’ said Tess.

Brooke looked up, her green eyes flashing.

‘It wasn’t like that at all,’ she said firmly. ‘He had been separated from his wife for about twelve months before we went on our first date and his divorce came through a couple of months later. There was no overlap at all, none. I’m not a home-wrecker.’

Brooke rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘David’s family are going to go crazy,’ she whispered.

Patty and Tess exchanged a look. They couldn’t really deny it.

‘What’s David got to say about it?’ asked Tess. ‘He’s the important one.’