CHAPTER TWO
Suzanne
The lights came up and the music dropped and Suzanne forgot, for exactly three seconds, how to breathe.
Then muscle memory took over. The years of grinding through fashion school on a scholarship that didn't cover everything and a part time job at a dry cleaner on West 34th that covered the rest. She exhaled slowly through her nose the way Mrs Adeyemi had taught her in Lagos when she was seventeen and terrified of wanting something this badly.
You breathe Suzanne. You breathe and then you work.
She was working.
From the wings of the stage she watched the first model step out and felt something move through her chest that she didn't have a precise word for. Pride and terror and the particular vertigo of a person standing at the edge of something they'd worked toward for so long that its arrival felt slightly unreal.
Adaeze was first. Twenty two, Nigerian born, six feet tall in the custom heels Suzanne had sourced from Milan after three other suppliers failed her. She was wearing the opening piece, a structured ivory jumpsuit with architectural shoulders and hand embroidered gold detailing along the lapels that Suzanne had finished at two in the morning six weeks ago with her glasses on and Fela Kuti playing because some things required the right music. Eleven hours of embroidery across three nights. Looking at it now under the runway lights she'd do it again without hesitation.
The audience settled in the way good audiences settle when they've decided to pay attention.
Suzanne gave herself one full second to feel it.
Then she turned back to the rail and started checking fastenings.
Michelle appeared at her shoulder the way she always did, from nowhere, red hair pinned back, clipboard in one hand and a water bottle she pressed into Suzanne's free hand without being asked.
"Adaeze is killing it," she said, keeping her voice low under the controlled chaos around them. "The ivory reads beautifully. You were right about the warm gels."
"I'm always right about lighting." Suzanne's eyes were already on the second model smoothing the front of the emerald gown. "How's the room reading."
"There's a woman in the third row who hasn't looked at her phone once and she looks like someone who looks at her phone constantly."
"That's a very good sign."
"That's what I said."
Michelle disappeared back into the movement of the backstage and Suzanne returned to watching her work walk out into the world for the first time.
She'd come a long way from the girl who'd arrived at JFK eleven years ago with one large suitcase, a scholarship letter from Parsons folded in her passport holder and the very specific terror of someone who has wanted something their entire life and is suddenly standing at the beginning of the path that leads to it. She'd been eighteen. She'd cried on the plane from Lagos quietly enough that the woman beside her didn't notice, which she'd considered a personal victory. She arrived in winter and the cold was something she hadn't been prepared for despite researching it, the kind of cold that pressed against you with intention.
New York hadn't been kind to her immediately. It hadn't been unkind either. It had simply been indifferent the way large cities are indifferent to new arrivals, offering everything and owing nothing.
Parsons was extraordinary and brutal in equal measure. She'd been one of very few Black women in her cohort and she understood within the first semester exactly what that meant. Her work was held to a different standard. Not higher in the generous sense of that word. Different. More skeptical. The kind of standard that required her to be not just good but undeniable. Certain professors looked through her in critiques and adopted her observations two comments later as though they'd originated elsewhere. She learned which rooms were worth fighting to stay in and which ones weren't worth the energy.
She stayed in all of them.
After graduation she worked three years under a creative director whose name she didn't mention in interviews anymore. She learned everything she could learn there and then she left and started Zee Clothing Line in the second bedroom of her Harlem apartment with a sewing machine, a laptop and a business plan she'd been refining for two years.
That was five years ago.
The label now sold across twelve countries. A studio in the Garment District. A team of twenty two people whose salaries she signed off on personally every month because she never wanted to forget what it felt like to worry about whether a cheque would clear. Vogue. Business of Fashion. The Financial Times. A New Yorker profile her mother had framed and hung in the sitting room in Lagos without asking permission. Yearly revenue past ten million dollars and still climbing.
And tonight was her first major New York runway show. The first time she'd put everything she was onto a stage this size and asked the world to look at it.
She watched the seventh look go out and pressed her thumbnail against her forefinger the way she did when something moved her and she didn't want it to show.
The show ran thirty four minutes. Every look landed. The closing piece, a sculptural black gown with a train that required two handlers offstage and a neckline she'd redesigned four times, got the kind of response that made the venue feel smaller than it was. Warm and genuine and loud.
Suzanne walked out for her bow in the burgundy suit she'd made herself, her grandmother's diamond studs in her ears, hair down and pressed straight. She walked to the end of the runway and looked out at the room.
She let herself feel all of it. Every year. Every closed door. Every night she'd questioned everything.
She bowed. She smiled and meant it completely.
She walked back into the wings and Michelle was there with her arms open and Suzanne went into them and held on.
"You did it," Michelle said.
"We did it. You've been here since six."
"Five forty five," Michelle corrected, pulling back, her eyes doing the thing she'd deny later. "And you are not allowed to cry because your makeup is perfect and I will not forgive you."
Suzanne laughed. Which was better than crying anyway.
The post show hour was wonderful in the specific way that earned things are wonderful. Industry people came backstage, real ones, the kind whose attention means something. Conversations about stocking and collaboration. The buyer she'd been targeting for three years pressed a card into her hand and said call my office Monday like she meant it.
She meant it.
Michelle was beside her for all of it, managing the room with the practiced ease of someone who understood both the fashion world and the particular requirements of her best friend in a crowd.
Arnold arrived at half past nine.
Late. She'd expected late. What she hadn't expected was the energy he brought through the door, the way he moved through the remaining backstage crowd like his arrival was its own event. Dark coat she hadn't seen before. Blond hair pushed back. The practiced ease of someone accustomed to being looked at.
"You were incredible," he said, kissing her cheek and pulling back with the expression he used when he wanted to appear proud. "The room was talking about nothing else."
"Were you in the room," Suzanne said. Kept her voice light.
Something moved across his face. Quick. Gone. "I caught the end. The closing piece was extraordinary Suzy. Really."
She looked at him for a moment. Then smiled because tonight was not the night and she was too full of the good of the evening to let anything else in.
"Thank you for coming," she said.
Michelle, two feet to her left, said nothing. Her face said everything.
They went to dinner after, the three of them and four members of her team, at a place in Brooklyn she'd been going to since Parsons. She ordered and ate with the appetite of someone who hadn't properly eaten since seven that morning, the food doing what good food does, grounding her completely in the moment.
Michelle ordered the same and they ate and talked and laughed and the table was warm with the specific joy of people who have worked very hard for something and are sitting in the aftermath of it having gone right.
Arnold ordered and ate half of it and looked at his phone under the table for most of the meal.
She saw. She always saw.
Tonight was not the night.
They parted outside the restaurant at eleven thirty. Arnold said he was tired and going home. She said fine. She and Michelle took a car to Fort Greene and rode in the comfortable silence of six years of friendship, the kind that doesn't need managing.
"You were extraordinary tonight," Michelle said outside her building. "Everything you made was extraordinary. I need you to know that I know that."
"I know that you know that."
"Good." She squeezed Suzanne's hand once. "Call me tomorrow."
Suzanne went upstairs. Took off the suit carefully. Stood in her bathroom removing her makeup and looked at herself in the mirror for a moment. Deep brown skin still glowing faintly. Brown eyes steady.
Well done, she said quietly to her own reflection.
Her phone buzzed. Unknown number. She put it face down.
Unknown numbers at midnight were problems for tomorrow. Tonight had been too good.
She slept deeply and woke at seven to seventeen congratulatory messages and one from her mother in Lagos.
My daughter. I watched the livestream. Your father would have been so proud. Come home soon.
She read it three times. Put the phone on her chest and looked at the ceiling.
Then Arnold called.
His voice had something in it she didn't recognise. Can you come over. Now. Please.
The please made her sit up.
She dressed quickly. Wide leg trousers, oversized cream blouse, white sneakers, hair back. Out the door in twelve minutes. In the car across town she looked out the window at the early morning city and thought about her mother's message and felt warm and slightly aching in equal measure.
Arnold's building. Upper West Side. Doorman nodded her through. Fourteenth floor. One knock.
The door opened.
He was fully dressed at seven thirty in the morning. She noticed that first. Then she noticed the coat on the hook that wasn't his. The shoes near the door that weren't his.
She went very still.
"Suzy," Arnold said.
A door opened down the corridor. A woman came out in one of Arnold's shirts and stopped when she saw Suzanne. She was Latina, sharp featured, striking even at this hour. Her face did several things quickly before settling on something almost defiant.
Suzanne knew that face.
Emily Wolf. Her direct competitor. The woman Arnold had told her was an ex he hadn't spoken to in two years.
The three of them stood in the hallway and nobody said anything.
Suzanne looked at Arnold. Really looked at him. And she understood. Not just about this morning but about things she'd been filing away for months without examining. The late calls. The half attention. The way he'd arrived at her show last night and kissed her cheek and said you were incredible in the tone of a man reading lines he hadn't quite memorised.
She'd known. Some part of her had known.
She turned and walked back to the elevator.
"Suzy." His voice behind her.
She pressed the button.
"Suzanne. Please."
The doors opened. She stepped in. Turned to face forward and watched them close and her own reflection looked back at her. Composed. Devastated. Both at once.
She called Michelle.
Second ring. Which meant she'd been awake. Which meant she'd been waiting. Which meant she'd known or suspected something she'd chosen not to say until Suzanne was ready.
"Tell me," Michelle said. Just that.
Suzanne told her. Precise language. No tears yet. They were behind something that hadn't broken and she knew when they came they'd come properly but not in a car. Not yet.
Silence on the line when she finished.
Then Michelle said quietly, "I'll be at yours in forty minutes."
"You don't have to."
"Suzanne."
"Okay."
"I'm sorry. You didn't deserve this. Not tonight. Not ever. But especially not the morning after everything you built last night."
Suzanne looked out the window. The city was properly awake now, loud and completely unbothered by what had just happened on the fourteenth floor of a building on the Upper West Side.
"No," she said. "I didn't."
She ended the engagement by text. Precise and clear. No room for negotiation.
Arnold called four times. She didn't answer. He texted twice. She read them and put her phone face down.
Michelle arrived in thirty eight minutes with her overnight bag and food from the place on Fulton Street they'd been going to for six years, and the particular expression of a woman who has set aside everything because her person needs her.
They sat on the kitchen floor because sometimes the floor is the right place and they ate and Michelle talked about everything and nothing and let Suzanne be quiet when she needed to be and that was exactly right.
The tears came eventually. Which was also exactly right.
By midnight they were on the couch and Michelle had fallen asleep sitting up, head tilted back, mouth slightly open, and Suzanne looked at her and felt the specific gratitude that only comes from being known well by someone who chooses to stay.
She would be alright. She knew that the way she knew most important things, not because someone told her but because she'd survived enough to understand what she was made of.
But tonight she was allowed to not be alright yet.
She pulled a blanket over Michelle's shoulders, turned off the lamp and sat in the dark for a little while longer.