Lily looked so frail in the hospital bed when Anneliese walked into the intensive care unit. Even though she’d thought about the possibility of Lily not waking up, the realisation hit her forcibly when she saw that frail body lying doll-like under the covers, winking and beeping machines all around her. The ICU was as quiet as a church with nurses hurrying back and forth, quietly and efficiently, while patients lay still in the ward’s four beds. There was no sign of Brendan at his mother-in-law’s bedside and Anneliese was glad for that. She didn’t want to have to comfort Brendan. Instead, she could sit quietly on the chair beside the bed and look at Lily. The older woman’s eyes were closed and yet she looked more than asleep; the animation that normally shone from her face was absent today. She’d always seemed somewhat ageless in normal life, yet now she looked like a very old lady, with fragile bones and skin delicate as tissue paper. A drip needle was stuck into the back of one of her fragile hands and Anneliese winced at both the pain of the needle and the ache of the bruise that had already settled around the sharp metal.
‘Oh, Lily,’ she said, taking Lily’s other papery hand in her own and stroking it. ‘I’m so sorry, darling. I’m so sorry you’re here and that I haven’t been talking to you. Things have been so dreadful with me and Edward, and I didn’t know how to tell you. I’m sorry, that’s not fair. And now, you’re here and I don’t know what you’d want me to do. We never talked about this. I don’t know if you want heroic measures to bring you back, or if you’re happy to go, my love. I wish I knew. You deserve the dignity of choice.’
It was odd, because Lily could talk about anything. Not for her the ostrich-in-the-sand mentality or thinking that if you didn’t face an issue, it would disappear. Lily faced everything head-on. But death, and what to do in the run-up to death, was one of the last taboos.
Anneliese held the old woman’s fragile hand and prayed for guidance. She wasn’t equipped for this, not now. Because of Edward, she felt as fragile as Lily herself.
‘Oh, Lily, what do you want me to do?’
Cosmetics contracts were the holy grail of the industry. There might be huge kudos at landing a photoshoot for Vogue but the honour was supposed to make up for the lack of cash involved in such a high-profile shoot. Editorial was great for a model’s portfolio, but mascara ads meant a whole lot more cash.
Once a model had signed on the dotted line with one of the cosmetic giants, she never had to worry about badly paid photo-shoots again. Cosmetics contracts guaranteed a lot of money up front and some security in an industry not known for it. A contract made a model more valuable in that a million billboards made her famous, made her a name. Once a model became a name and not just another slender beauty, she had a chance at the big time: more advertisements, television, endorsements. When that happened, everyone – including the model’s agency – got to laugh all the way to the bank.
The day after she’d stared at Joe and his wife outside the museum and had felt her life crashing painfully around her, Izzie had to put her pain aside for a big meeting with a cosmetic company client about a mega-million-dollar campaign aimed at teenagers. The Jacobman Corporation wanted a new model to front their new cosmetic line and Perfect-NY were, through a fabulous piece of luck, in the running to find the girl.
It was a huge slice of business for Perfect-NY and exactly the sort of job that Izzie didn’t want to be doing the day after her heart had been broken.
As she marched into Jacobman’s giant office block on Madison, she looked the part – on the outside. She was fashion perfect in black Marc Jacobs with her hair sleeked back, wearing a solid four ounces of Bobbi Brown nude make-up in order to look as if she was wearing no make-up at all.
On the inside, however, she was tired, dead-eyed, and felt as if she had barely enough energy to lift her coffee cup to her lips.
The meeting was in the Jacobman Corporation’s third boardroom – the first and second ones were big enough to host a Yankees game – and there were only four people present: Izzie, representing Perfect-NY, two people from the SupaGirl! range and a Jacobman bigwig, Stefan Lundberg.
Cosmetic companies spread their net wide when looking for the right girl for their products. But Perfect-NY had been invited to showcase any of their girls who filled the brief because the current Mrs Rick Jacobman Jnr had once been a model at Perfect-NY and had, astonishingly, never forgotten the agency which had launched her career, a rather short one which had then launched her into the arms of Rick, heir to the Jacobman millions. Around the model agencies, Svetlana Jacobman was seen as a model who’d won the ultimate cosmetics contract. Even with a cast-iron pre-nup hanging over her should it all go horribly wrong, Svetlana had joined the ranks of the truly rich.
‘Yeah, she’s fresh-faced, but she’s sorta kooky, isn’t she?’ snapped one of the SupaGirl! executives, tossing aside the third model card they’d looked at. ‘We’re not about kooky. We want a normal American teenager.’
On the other side of the boardroom table, Izzie stuck her nails into the palms of her hands to make herself keep schtum. Normal teenager – yeah, right. She’d seen the brief, and no matter how they pretended they were looking for normal, what they really wanted was a fifteen-year-old goddess who’d never seen a zit in her life in order to advertise oil-free foundation.
‘Lorelei is actually very versatile,’ Izzie said, once she’d managed to get her temper under control.
‘We’re not about kooky,’ agreed the other SupaGirl! person, who looked about twelve years old and was clearly a yes-woman for the other executive.
‘No, definitely not. Let’s skip her. Who else have you got?’ snapped the first executive.
After another half hour of this, Izzie had only four models left to show them and couldn’t face doing it, and being rejected again, without a hit of caffeine. Perfect-NY weren’t getting an early chance to place one of their models with SupaGirl! after all. This whole thing was a PR exercise to please Svetlana Jacobman and the bitchy executive had never had any intention of doing business this way.
‘I need a coffee,’ Izzie said, forcing a smile on to her face and rising abruptly from the conference table.
‘Yeah, me too,’ said Stefan, following her.
Outside the conference room was a small kitchen that was, nevertheless, bigger than the one in Izzie’s apartment.
‘No good so far, but hey, you never know, we might hit gold yet,’ Stefan said as he leaned against the door jamb and watched Izzie making her mind up between machine espresso or filter. She’d known him for a few years; he was good looking in an outdoorsy way, but he was too obvious: blond hair carefully gelled, shirt opened to show his impressive chest. Izzie had a vision of him in front of the mirror in the mornings, working out exactly which button to open down to on his shirt. She hated that: she preferred her men rougher, as though they could afford nice suits but really couldn’t be bothered trying to look so smooth. Unfortunately, that type of guy clearly couldn’t be bothered about her either, if Joe Hansen was anything to go by.
Irritation with Joe spilled out on to the general population.
‘I’m not holding out much hope for us hitting gold,’ she snapped. ‘Your Laurel and Hardy team don’t seem to like any model I show them.’
‘Ouch. Laurel and Hardy. That’s harsh. Bad day?’ said Stefan.
‘You could say that.’ Izzie went for filter coffee. She might start to shake if she had any more espresso inside her.
‘Man trouble or