Chapter 128

AMBER Icheck my teeth for rogue lipstick and smooth down a maverick hair. Heaven forbid I should have even one out of place—what would people say? I’d be the talk of Manhattan. I can imagine the headline: Shock in the City: Scandal as Amber James Looks Less than Perfect. I allow myself a small smile at the idea. Maybe I should turn up in jeans and Birkenstocks just for fun. Maybe even Elijah’s old Ramones T-shirt. No, that won’t work. Can’t risk him thinking I’ve cherished it all these years. Wouldn’t want him to know that I sleep in it every night when he’s away. He might start thinking I have fond feelings about our early days together, and that would never do. I’ve worked too hard to convince him and the rest of the world that I have no feelings at all to blow it with a twenty-year-old scrap of cotton. I scoop the T-shirt up from my bed, where I left it this morning, and hold it under my nose. Obviously it’s been washed in the last two decades, but some trick of the brain allows it