to cry on when things were too hard as she soldiered on, since there was no alternative, not the way things were left with Eric when she'd walked out of his office.
And yet it hurt more than she cared to acknowledge when she leafed through the pages of some glossy society magazine at her hairdresser and landed on a picture of Eric arm-in-arm with a sultry beauty — some Argentinian heiress also spotted with him at the Met the preceding week, according to the caption. She was tanned and willowy, at least a couple of inches taller than Emmy, with raven hair and a killer figure showcased by her body-con designer dress. Needless to say she looked a perfect match for Eric, standing next to her in an impeccable tux, looking pale and just this side of bored. The pang of longing that hit Emmy almost felled her — a reaction, if she was honest, that was all out of proportion for the amount of time they'd spent together, a few weeks at most, but her attempts to talk herself down weren't really working, a prime example of cognitive dissonance if she'd ever seen it.
"Did I cut too much?" the hairdresser — Jerry — asked when he saw her making a face in the mirror, and she shook her head minutely (he was still holding his scissors close).
"Just some bullshit I saw about someone I know, Jer. Hair's great."
"Will you let me trim it a bit more — just here, look, I want to take some of the weight off, give it a little more shape, work with the curl."
He had a few wet strands stretched out in his hand, the scissors hovering nearby, and she pretended to think about it, all the while staring at her reflection in the glass, wondering how Jerry could tell that snipping away an inch here and there would give shape to her hair when it was looking like a drowned mermaid's.
She kept an eye on the social websites over the following week, and it cheered her more than it should to see Eric snapped with a trashier blonde three days later at some fashion benefit do for breast cancer, and then another brunette — who was making doe eyes at his impassive face, she noted with waspish satisfaction — at a gallery opening the weekend after that.
Apparently, he was back to his bad old ways, or worse — didn't he use to go stag to many of these things, if she remembered the chat she overheard in the Met’s restrooms? Now it looked like he was working his way through pretty girls like a convict fresh out of jail, and while she hated the idea of all those girls getting a piece of him (it was stupid, but she did), she found it easier than dealing with a single serious girlfriend.
It was all rather disconcerting, not least since she was positive that what she and Eric had had was over. For good.
Maybe she was just grieving for the loss of what could have been, for those glimpses of something deeper that had flashed up from time to time in those few short weeks — the raw emotion in his voice when he'd told her about his brother, the shared glances of elation when Carmen started her first aria, the anticipation on his face when the taxi approached the Grand Canal...
She slammed the lid on her musings whenever they threatened to overwhelm her, though, because she was all too aware that this way bitterness lay. Some nights, when she was tossing and turning in bed, she cried herself to sleep, but she kept these displays of emotion well away from her friends. They knew she hurt, but some weaknesses she couldn't bear to put on show, not least because it would mean admitting out loud quite how much she missed him.
◆◆◆
"So what do you think of organizing a benefit just before Christmas, to help with the relocation?" Gina announced one evening as she strolled in ahead of a meeting with the friends of Open Book — a growing group, with a few prominent local figures, and a good sprinkling of Columbia academics.
"That doesn't exactly leave us much time," Emmy said, taken aback, but Gina forged on.
"Nat thought we should do it after Christmas, but I think we can manage to pull something together in the next couple of weeks. Feelings are running pretty high, so it's best to strike while the iron's hot. Besides,