Free The First Assistant by Clare Naylor, Mimi Hare Page A

doors closed behind us. “Just really intelligent women with too much time and money on their hands.”
    The door was opened by an efficient blond with a clipboard. “Welcome. And you are?”
    “Lara Wagner and Elizabeth Miller,” Lara said.
    “Right,” she said and stared at me a moment too long before checking me off the list. “Go on through. Have fun!” she said in a jaunty way that didn’t sit easily with her.
    “Lara.” A woman whom I assumed was Nathalie stepped forward. She was like the prettiest movie star you’ve ever seen—petite and fine-boned and exquisitely dressed. “So glad you could make it.”
    “This is Elizabeth,” Lara said as she unwrapped herself from what must have been an unevenly matched hug—Nathalie couldn’t weigh much more now than she had as a fourteen-year-old cheerleader.
    “Elizabeth Miller?” I swear she scrutinized me. Maybe they were going to ask me to join some sort of Masonic fellowship and get me to marry and divorce Luke very quickly before I joined. Fat chance, I thought—even our conversation last night, when I’d only called to be nice to him and not nag about the Emanuelle dinner party, had ended with a frost worthy of Eastern Europe when he’d told me that he could only talk for five minutes because he had to play chess with the director. “Great to meet you.”
    “So, I can’t wait to see your new line,” Lara said vaguely.
    “Oh, you’re going to love it.” Nathalie touched her arm conspiratorially. “Now come on through and we’ll get you girls some cocktails.”
    The room was teeming with women dressed in the kind of clothes you had to preorder straight from the designer at the beginning of each season. The waiting-list boots by Stella McCartney, the only-fifty-in-existence handbags by Alexander McQueen. I looked down at my party outfit and it suddenly felt very tired. If only I was less proud, I would take Luke’s credit card and exercise it a little in Chanel, but I’m not sure that I could ever justify five thousand dollars of anyone’s money on a blouse.
    “Champagne, ladies?” a waitress offered. Lara and I each took a glass and, as we sipped away, took in our surroundings. The apartment was a tasteful blend of olive greens and ice-cream pinks; the saccharine edge had been taken off with the shelves and shelves of books—most of them vast books with Arabic on their spines. The artwork, too, had a Middle Eastern feel.
    A woman appeared at our side. “Doesn’t Nathalie have great taste?” “She certainly does,” Lara said. “Didn’t she do some art history
    course or something after she left The Agency?”
    “She did a master’s in Oriental Studies,” the woman told us as we
    looked out over the white sand of the beach, which glowed ghostly in the dark, and listened to the foaming waves breaking a mere fifty feet from the balcony. “I’m Jessica, by the way,” she said, and smiled.
    “Lara Wagner.” “Hi, Lara.”
    “I’m Elizabeth Miller.”
    “Good. To. Meet. You,” Jessica said, and looked at me for a moment too long. Only the third person to do that tonight. Or maybe I was be-ing paranoid? Maybe this was just the way of the Malibu divorcée.
    “So what do you do, Jessica?” I smiled and relaxed into my new role as, if not “one of them,” at least a person with a name. It was the first time I’d ever been at a soiree like this and not had to serve drinks or make sure the party magician didn’t get Emerald Everhart pregnant. Her reputation for having sex with strangers in bathroom stalls was not merely the invention of the tabloid press, I’d discovered at the last Agency party. But here I was a fully fledged guest for once.
    “What do I do?” Jessica took half a step backward and looked at me as if my mental illness hadn’t quite been diagnosed accurately yet, but she was determined to figure out what it was. I sensed I’d made a faux pas but couldn’t tell what.
    “Oh, sorry,” I said, suddenly