adventurous chapter in her life. Not so much a new Kit really, but the Kit she’d once been as a girl, before everything had unraveled in her family’s life. Well, so much for being a bit of a badass. Maybe she should take the whole episode as a warning.
The irony was that in her work she rarely held back. She’d started her own business, and when it came to the actual design work, she liked to turn things on their ear, like painting a wall to resemble awning stripes or upholstering a couch with the fabric inside out.
That was one of the reasons she’d been so excited about teaming with Baby, a bold decorator who advocated that every room have at least “a dash of clash.” She always pushed the envelope, like choosing Fanta orange for the accent color in a posh Upper East Side apartment. The two of them loved tossing wild-card ideas back and forth.
“Oh, you naughty girl,” Baby would say to her.
But in other aspects of life, including love, Kit had always played it ridiculously safe. Risks scared her pants off, or rather, for the most part kept them on. She thought of herself as the total opposite of a woman who was buttoned-up all day at the office but after sundown turned into a whip-wielding dominatrix, with a name like “Madame Darke” or “Nurse Payne.” After a gutsy day at work, she turned into “Miss Goody Two Shoes.”
Of course her friends would probably have been surprised to discover she thought of herself that way. They referred to her as spunky—or at least most of them did. Kit suspected that after her bland, lame relationship with Jeremy, a few might have begun to revise their sense of her.
She crashed at eleven that night. The sound of a couple arguing on the street below woke her just after one, and it took her over an hour to fall back to sleep. She kept thinking of X, wondering how she could have done such a bad job of reading him. A few memories surfaced: X on the phone on the walkway, sounding slightly aggravated. Maybe he’d been talking to a cohort. X casting his gaze around the restaurant right after they’d finished eating. At the moment she’d supposed that he was searching for the waiter. But it could have been the instinct of a criminal who was always on the watch.
First thing the next morning, she emailed Matt Healy and told him that she’d drop by his office at noon. The sooner she got it over with, the better. She dressed casually—she planned to shop a good part of the day—grabbed a yogurt, and unlocked the door that led to her office from the apartment. The point of the door wasn’t simply for her convenience. Both she and Baby occasionally used the living space for client meetings—it was a great way to show off the kind of nontraditional aesthetic they subscribed to—and the inner door gave them easy access back and forth.
Baby had beaten her into the office that morning. She’d laid trace paper over an apartment floor plan and was plotting out where the furniture ought to be positioned.
Baby had spent nearly four decades as one of Manhattan’s top decorators—not quite in the same league as Bunny Williams or Mario Buatta, but in demand by tons of well-heeled clients. She’d retired at sixty-four, planning to travel, entertain, and relish life, but when her adored husband Dan had died five years later, she’d decided that the best way to tackle grief was to jump feet first back into work. After meeting Kit at an event and getting to know her, she’d suggested partnering with her—and investing a small amount of money in the business. Kit had been ecstatic. This time, though, Baby had no interest in her projects being splashed in the pages of Elle Decor or Architectural Digest. She wanted out of the limelight and that’s why a small boutique business had appealed to her.
In the two years they’d worked together, she and Baby had become not only colleagues but also friends, often reaching out to each other for personal guidance. The day after her return from Florida, Kit had reported on her dinner under the stars with the man calling himself Matt Healy—and had admitted to spending the night with him. As soon as Baby set eyes on Kit this morning, she arched a brow mischievously, eager for a full report about the date.