Free The Knockoff by Lucy Sykes, Jo Piazza Page B

places around town. This particulartech conference had grown in popularity, due in no small part to last year’s appearances by several A-list actors, the ones who had forgone the typical celebrity revenue stream of Japanese cosmetics commercials and cheap clothing lines in favor of investing in technology start-ups.
    These accommodations were cheap in every sense of the word. The price for the two of them in that one room was a third of the cost of any Union Square hotels like the Fairmont or Le Méridien.
    After three swipes of the faded magnetic strip on the key card they finally entered the small room. Imogen needed sleep.
    “Tomorrow is going to be so rad, Imogen,” Eve said, sitting next to her in bed, as Imogen struggled to find a comfortable position. “We are going to kill it at this conference.” She raised her hand in a high five, and then, thinking better of it, lowered it and stuck out her pinky.
    “Let’s pinky swear on it. That’s how awesome it’s going to be.” Imogen was at a loss for what to do. She extended her pinky as well, which Eve promptly grasped with her own smallest digit and shook it vigorously up and down.
    “I’m bringing pinky swearing back,” Eve said, more to the entire shabby room than to Imogen. “Ooo, I should tweet that.” Eve spoke out loud to herself as she tapped the words into her keyboard. “Bringin da pinky swear back. Booya!” With that she rolled over and went to sleep.
    Imogen was exhausted and jet-lagged, but her mind just wouldn’t shut down.
    Did I really only come back to work the day before yesterday?
She was having trouble processing just how much had changed so quickly. She’d barely even had time to discuss it with Alex in the hour they had seen each other before bed the night before. Her lawyerly husband wanted her to talk to an employment attorney right away.
    “You have rights,” he told her.
    A right to what? She hadn’t been fired, hadn’t really even been demoted. The situation had merely changed and the ground had shifted from underneath her. She had gotten to say a quick good-bye to the children that morning after she packed her bag and now here she was in San Francisco. This was where Silicon Valley was, wasn’t it?
    She tossed and turned in the bed, desperate to find a comfortable spot on the scratchy sheets. She felt blindsided—felt like a woman whose husband was having an affair right under her nose, who brought his mistress to dinner parties and called her his protégée. How could she not have known all of this was happening to her magazine?
    All of this was because of that damned cancer. The surgery hadn’t been easy. Then there were the kids and Alex’s new case. Imogen hadn’t gone out professionally or socially while she was away, preferring to spend most weekends at their cottage in Sag Harbor. A workaholic for so many years, she’d had to let herself heal. This happened so fast. Eve just finished school in June and came back in July. The site would become an app next week.
    Before dawn Imogen woke to the sound of an ice machine dropping its cubes insufficiently into something obviously not meant to contain ice. The frozen water plunked out of the chute into what sounded like a plastic bag.
Plop, squish, plop, squish. Plop, squish
. Eve snored away on the other side of the bed, eyes twitching beneath a purple sequined sleep mask.
    Imogen opened one eye and then the other. Light filtered through cheap nylon curtains, revealing a too thick television set bulging off a plywood dresser, a relic of the nineties.
    Like me
, Imogen thought with a smirk as she briefly flashed back to her last business trip—four days in Italy for the Milan collections the previous February. Those already seemed like the good old days. Back then a shiny black car would collect her from home and deposit her at the airport. She would be ushered into first class and handed a glass of champagne, a warm towel and a soft blanket. The flight attendants