Chapter Text
Andy had always had trouble waking up all at once. Her morning began on her back, staring at the ceiling, woken by the alarm she heard, turned off, and despised. Each time Andy lingered in a state of half-consciousness, and each time she tried to force herself to open her eyes fully and for good. So Thursday began the same way, with the nagging alarm at 5:40.
She lowered her feet onto the cold concrete floor, maybe even too cold for a house someone actually lived in. It was October now, and the sun came up late and warmed the concrete slab very lazily. The house had a modern heating system, of course, but Andy ignored it on principle right up until November, because that sharp, almost prickly contact woke her faster than any caffeine. It was especially useful on the days she sometimes literally had to kick herself out of her own house.
In the bathroom, in the shower, she let herself a few slow minutes without any guilt, however late she was running. Standing with her eyes closed, she thought about the fourth paragraph of the infrastructure speech the President had to deliver on Tuesday. The President wanted the words assembled into a promise, not a dead budget report. But promises, as Andy knew perfectly well, lean on numbers, and the numbers this time weren't on their side: fifteen billion for bridges, three of which the Senate still hadn't approved. Andy could easily wrap an intention in words, but it wouldn't mean anything, not to Andy, not to the President, not to people. Andy always tried to anchor herself to specifics rather than shapeless lying words, but right now she had to wrigle her way through, so her mind had been obsessed with this problem for a few days already.
As always, after the shower Andy's hair stayed loose, sometimes a little damp at the ends, which left it in free curls and uneven waves. Her makeup was always minimal, she liked seeing her own features, real and clean, rather than some idealised temporary version of them.
A president's speechwriter had to know several languages fluently: the language of the body, the language of words, the language of clothing. Andy's wardrobe was compact and narrow, like a train carriage, built into the wall behind the bed: shirts on the left, suits on the right. She had a weakness for white, black and navy blue, so her wardrobe met her with an already familiar palette of cold colour blocks.
She pulled from the hanger what she'd chosen the evening before from the Saint Laurent SS25 collection. A black double-breasted blazer, oversized, with wide sharp shoulders. A white shirt under it, a narrow black tie. Wide high-waisted trousers in the same black wool that somehow seemed to fall to the floor, breaking on black Prada heels. Tortoiseshell glasses, the arm of which replaced her pencil when one wasn't to hand, for nervous, aimless turning between her fingers. Andy built her silhouette out of architectural lines on purpose, keeping in it something of a man's suit recut by a woman's hand, and of a woman's body that refuses to be smaller than the room it walks into.
Andy often stopped in front of the mirror, watching in the reflection the person everyone else saw: a woman who could write a speech capable of toppling a government while staying in the shadows herself. But in the reflection she saw only Andy, her eyes slowly dimming, forgetting they'd once shone brighter than anyone's. Maybe one day they'd shine again after all.
For now she was already heading down to the kitchen, where the coffee machine was the main object of Andy's attention. While she ground the beans, Andy managed to reread the morning breifs. Today's, from Chen, her deputy, was no good, because it was too soft for Ohio. So she made three notes in the margins: "tone", "specifics", "cut the intro in half". Every day she built words, took words apart, wrote words, spoke words. Words, words, words, that in the end assembled into powerful speeches delivered to the whole country, sometimes even to the whole world. Words, words, words, that Andy breathed every minute, trying to mould something decent out of them, something of her own.
Andy's first cup of coffee every morning came with looking at the river. She liked associating it with the feeling of something predictable, yet reliable and inevitble. Today that feeling was hazy. October over the Potomac was especially vivid, the trees on the far bank already burning a rust-gold fire, until the first frost would bare the branches. This view was what had made her buy this house. For the quiet, for the fact that no one saw her in the morning when she wasn't put together yet, when she wasn't ready yet to be the woman who stood behind the President of the United States. For the fact that she could be only Andy, who could be smaller than the nature behind the glass.
The house rested on glass walls floor to ceiling on three sides. The fourth wall, warm, wooden, hid the stairs, the fireplace, shelves with books arranged by mood rather than alphabet. Barcelona chairs in black leather, chrome. The island, which ran its entire length, from one end to the other, had a decorative crack in it that looked like a fracture in rock. The architect, a friend from her Post days, an architecture critic Andy had once profiled, kept saying the island was the main character of this house. But Andy disagreed, because for her the main characters were the glass walls, which let the sunlight in at a low angle all day long, breaking it across the floor, the walls, the furniture. Thanks to those walls Andy got to enjoy the most beautiful sunrises and sunsets, when the weather was on her side.
On the whole it was the house Andy had imagined when she'd dreamt about it: a house for a person hiding from people, not from the landscape. Concrete underfoot, concrete overhead, glass here and there, the river and nature. By temperament the house was cold, the kind that respected solitude. She could also say the interior was modernist and designer, so there was no reason for Andy to change anything about it. This was her home, where she could hide, even if not for long.
President Catherine Whitmore, when she first saw the photos during the mandatory security sweep, told Andy it was a house built for one person. Well, Andy was one person. One person who needed quiet so badly she sometimes didn't understand why she was this tired. The President had looked at her over her glasses and left it without comment, filing it for later, for the least convenient moment. Why? Because lately Andy kept making the same choice, and each time it was equally wrong: putting work above everything else. The President should have approved of that, but she didn't. So Andy was expecting Whitmore to keep collecting small truths about her, to use them later in service of her own arguments. Smart.
Andy deliberately slowed herself down with thinking before work, because that was how she tuned herself for a potentially long and difficult day. And those days were almost every day, so instead of "potentially" she could really just say "almost certainly". Either way, it was time to go, so Andy grabbed her keys, phone, briefcase with three drafts and one sealed envelope from the National Security Council, and walked out. The black GLE 63 AMG sat under the carport, slightly to the side of the house. She'd leased it because she had neither the energy nor the desire to argue with security: some fights were worth your time, and some were Secret Service rules. Agent Reynolds had suggested her own driver, but Andy refused immediately, because she needed those thirty-five minutes without traffic, fifty with, alone with herself and her thoughts. She hated it when someone's presence was too intrusive.
The city arrived gradually: first the suburbs, then concrete, then last of all the white dome of the Capitol emerged. She drove and rebuilt paragraph after paragraph in her head, shifting the emphasis a little: not "we will build," but "your commute"; not "bridges," but "routes"; and definitely not "infrastructure". The President wanted it personal. More precisely, she always wanted it personal, and Andy agreed with her completely, which was why she clung to every word in her speeches.
The phone on the dashboard chimed with a new notification: X (or former Twitter). She didn't look right away, but the red light had already stopped her, so nothing would happen if she found out something new. That was the job, basically: working perpetually on the edge of something new.
Miranda Priestly trending.
RUNWAY EDITOR UNDER FIRE FOR DISMISSIVE COMMENTS ON LGBTQ+ VISIBILITY
It was strange, how a single headline could bring back the memories she'd spent so long trying to bury. Just one headline, and Andy was already in that car, on that back seat with Miranda beside her. She felt again that almost-phantom touch of their shoulders brushing each other. She saw again Miranda's expression after what she'd done to Nigel: no guilt in it, no regret. This was the price of power, and Miranda knew it too well, had known it long enough not to pretend. That absence of pretending had been the worst part. Or the most honest.
Though Andy had understood the logic of Miranda's cruelty, she was still frightened by it. For her, understanding something meant the same as agreeing with it, and agreeing meant the same as helping. She didn't want to be that kind of person, for Nigel or for Emily or for anyone she'd have to sacrifice for something bigger. And still, somehow, even through all of it, she'd wanted to stay. Wanted to be on Miranda's side when nobody else was.
But those were only the surface reasons, the ones she had no wish and no intention of tearing open any deeper.
Over fourteen years, Andy had built a career that, as she thought, was the opposite of Runway: public service, democratic rhetoric, words that belonged to everybody instead of to one person, but which were hers. Back then she hadn't been able to stay near a woman who'd shown her the real shape of power. But, with the kind of irony life favours, what Andy built in the end used the same structure. Cut slightly differently, but the same. So she'd only fooled herself with it.
New York after Paris had become impossible for her then: the city belonged to Miranda, and Andy found her own absence in Runway on every street. She broke up with Nate, left the Mirror, cut off most of her New York contacts to move to Washington at twenty-three. Four years at the Washington Post, starting as a junior staff writer, ending with investigative political pieces. At thirty her book came out, The Margin, about lobbying networks and corruption in the legislature. Then-Senator Whitmore called her personally: she needed an Andy who knew the nuances of the words power was built from; she needed an Andy who could reach even Whitmore herself. So eventually Andy joined the campaign. Whitmore won, and Andy became the youngest Director of Speechwriting in modern White House history. The first woman in the role under the first woman president, which meant every speech carried double the weight, though she'd been feeling that weight in every word she wrote already.
Whatever the case, the light blinked green again, reminding Andy that all of this had stayed in the past. She was moving forward, reluctantly, but moving.
When she pulled up to the gates of the Eisenhower building, she was still in the echoes of those memories, heading for her office. The Eisenhower was her quirk, because there were fewer people here, more windows, and she could quietly close the door when she needed to say a sentence out loud.
The senior staff meeting started at 7:30. Thirteen people at the table, with coffee in white cups bearing the presidential seal. The caffeine dependency, at least, was one they all shared. Nobody looked like they'd slept more than five hours, because, obviously, nobody had slept more than five hours.
Andy was presenting the skeleton of the infrastructure speech that had been tormenting her day and night. It mattered to her that everyone agreed on her sequence: the problem first, then the scale and the solution, and finally the human element. Andy answered questions almost with her eyes closed, because all of it was running through her mind constantly in her attempts to land on the best possible phrasing.
Between the next items on the agenda Donovan, the press secretary, lifted her cup to her lips. "Miranda Priestly is trending. Fashion story, but it's getting traction. Something about a comment on queer visibility at a Runway gala." As expected. Donovan, like everyone else on the team, really, didn't know the details, but knew the outline, that Andy Sachs had once worked at Runway. Nothing more, nothing less, but when the chance came she, like everyone else on the team, still messed around a little, testing Andy's reaction.
"It's a fashion industry story," Andy said dryly, not lifting her eyes from the papers. "We don't comment."
After the meeting, she "ran into" Whitmore in the hallway. Though "ran into" doesn't quite fit, because it was Whitmore who came up to her, so they walked together for a whole fifteen seconds. "Your former employer is having a day." Whitmore was one of those everyone-else-on-the-team types.
"So I hear," Andy exhaled.
Whitmore ran everything at once, so she was never on just one topic, only if it was a problem. "The speech for Tuesday needs a sharper close."
"I know. I'm working on it." Andy had almost beaten that speech.
Whitmore stopped and looked at Andy a little longer than necessary. "And Andy, you look tired."
Andy lowered her eyes, studying the folder of documents in her hands. "I'm always tired, ma'am."
"That's not the reassurance you think it is." Whitmore walked off, and Andy listened to the click of her heels on the marble for a few more seconds. And then, along with the quiet, she moved on down the hallway.
Back in her office with the door (finally) closed, the window, and the autumn light falling at an angle across the parquet, golden, with dust visible in the air, Andy opened her laptop and stopped seeing everything she'd been seeing around her. Now she saw sentences, points, words, commas, full stops, and everything that replaced reality for her for the next few hours.
A few edits for her junior staff, one of which had to do with finding the voice that needed to carry through one of the speeches for some appearance. It seemed as though she was always pointing at something incredibly obvious, but that something was the thing no one but her could see. That was her job.
A few calls to the policy office to gather the exact figures: how many jobs, how many states, how many bridges classified as "structurally deficient". The numbers she'd use in the speech, and the numbers that were true, and the distance between them. That was her job too. Her job, which existed exactly in that distance.
Lunch she almost entirely ignored: a salad Andy looked at, and coffee, the fourth that morning, which she actually drank. Sometimes she wondered how she still managed to function properly on nothing but coffee and stress, but a minute later she was usually already distracted by something else, so she forgot about it with relief until her next moment of wondering.
Somewhere around midday she was rewriting a toast for a state dinner. The Prime Minister of Canada, as it turned out, loved hockey metaphors. Whitmore couldn't stand hockey. So Andy had to find something between those two opposites, and preferably something that sounded like Whitmore's own personal wit. The President hated insincere humour more than she hated bad humour. And Andy hated opposites like these.
Then there was the National Security Council, where she argued with two analysts and the Council's lawyer. Andy was good with the small details, so it often helped, an arsenal of the necessary arguments to hand. Yes, she was annoying to exactly that degree.
Around 16:00 she was in the Oval Office, settling in there for a whole forty minutes, going over the hundred and one versions of one speech with Whitmore. Whitmore read it aloud, so whenever she stopped on some paragraph, the gears in Andy's head worked to minimise the displeasure already showing on Whitmore's face. That, in fact, was one of the reasons Whitmore had chosen her four years ago: not because Andy wrote the best (though that too), but because she wrote like someone always there with her in thought. Words, words, words were yet another language, the language of thought, the one she worked in and lived in from 7:00 to 21:00.
On the whole her job consisted of countless thats and thises that wore her to the bone every day, but which she was far too good at (she wasn't bragging) (though, maybe she was bragging a little after all).
It was time to rewrite the speech for the seventh time when a notification came through on her phone. An official email from the Elias-Clarke publicist, the kind it would have been better not to open at all. It wasn't hard to connect the two dots after Miranda had turned all the headlines upside down that morning, and after Miranda had started throwing off Andy's working rhythm too.
She could pretend she was hesitating, but in truth, somewhere deep down, she'd already opened that wretched email. Already opened it and already regretting it.
Miranda Priestly, Editor-in-Chief, Runway Magazine
Andrea Sachs, Director of Speechwriting, Executive Office of the President
It was a proposal from the Elias-Clarke crisis team to explore a "strategic visibility partnership" around Miranda Priestly's public image. Two months of public appearances, media management, clearly defined terms. A fake relationship, in other words.
Not for anything in the world would Andy be rewriting that seventh version of the speech now. So she grabbed her bag and her car keys to escape home. The whole way back she forced herself not to think, because if she started, she'd have stopped the car somewhere on the shoulder and sat there until someone knocked on her window or until someone called.
Her house met her with warm light coming through the glass of the house. She always left one lamp on when she went out, because coming back to a dark house was worse than coming back to an empty one. Empty she'd chosen on purpose, dark she hadn't.
She grounded herself, palms braced on the island.
A fake relationship? NO.
But the phone was already ringing: unknown number, New York. She picked up, because she already knew Miranda would call personally. Miranda probably also knew that if Andy did agree to the proposal, it would only be if Miranda called her herself, because Andy never reacted to some stranger.
"I assume you've read the proposal." Fourteen years, and her voice hadn't changed. Still low, level. Still a little insolent in the assumption that everyone owed her something.
"I'm not interested, Miranda." This was the right decision. The right one and the safe one. She wasn't obligated to rescue Miranda in any way. She wasn't obligated to think about Miranda in any way. She wasn't obligated to want to help Miranda in any way.
She'd already screwed up.
"Then let me rephrase." Andy felt Miranda pause to calculate her approach properly. "I'm not asking for a favour. I'm offering you a strategic partnership with clearly defined terms that protects both of us and costs you nothing."
"Costs me nothing?" Andy sat down on the bar stool to look at the river behind the glass. It had gone dark already, so the river could only be guessed at by the even hum that sounded every evening and that stood in for conversation. "My reputation, my position, the President's communications office, the entire vetting structure of the most scrutinised workplace on the planet. All of that at the mercy of your headlines. And you say it costs me nothing?"
"Your reputation is bulletproof. You built it that way. If anything, this enhances your public profile."
"I don't want an enhanced public profile. I want a functional one." Andy didn't entirely understand why she kept arguing. Or she did , but just didn't want to admit it to herself.
"Andrea, your public profile consists of seventeen Google results and a channel that broadcasts congressional proceedings and government events to an audience of insomniacs and policy wonks. That is not functional. That is invisible." There was no doubt Miranda meant the C-SPAN archive. Charming.
"Invisible is the point. I write for the President. I'm not the President."
"Then why did you answer my call?" That really was a good question.
Andy exhaled. "Why me?" She held the phone in her right hand and dragged her left down her face, both elbows propped on the kitchen island now. She was tired. "Your team must have had a list. Someone who owes you."
"They did. Three names. But I rejected all of them."
"Why?"
"Because they were strategic in the wrong direction. A fashion-adjacent actress invites tabloid coverage I can't control. A tech CEO invites speculation about mergers. A media executive invites every conflict-of-interest allegation from here to the Financial Times."
"And I don't invite any of that?"
"You invite credibility. You're publicly respected, politically unassailable, and not in fashion. No conflict of interest. No tabloid history. No angle for anyone to exploit except the one we provide."
"That's the press answer, Miranda. I'm hanging—"
"You're being deliberately ob—" Miranda cut herself off midword. Andy caught it: the start of "obtuse" or "obstructive", swallowed before it became a word. That damn woman. A few beats of nothing. "Their proposal was useless as written. You're the only name I said out loud."
Andy heard something in that, something that wasn't calculation, wasn't control, and wasn't the Miranda Priestly she knew. Something closer to a wavering toward the true thing instead of the safe one.
But Andy was starting to get irritated. She knew all of this was for show. "That's not a reason."
"I don't trust anyone else."
Oh.
She should have said no. Every axis of risk pointed the other way: her reputation, her position, the President's communications team, the whole blast radius of Miranda Priestly headlines. And still. Miranda had called her. Her. After fourteen years of nothing, Miranda Priestly had picked up the phone and chosen her. That fact meant something. Something Andy couldn't name, but also couldn't wave off.
Don't do this. Don't do this. Don't do this.
"When are you arriving?" Fuck. The question was out before she'd decided to ask it. Her subconscious was worse than any traitor. The email had also specified that Miranda would need to be out of New York, which meant Andy would be sharing a space with her.
"Friday." She heard the faint relief in the woman's voice.
Tomorrow. That. Was. Tomorrow.
"Friday." Andy opened her eyes. "I need to clear this with my principal. You understand that."
"I assumed as much. Your President is not a woman who tolerates surprises."
"She's not my President. She's the President."
"Semantics."
"Semantics is literally my job."
The line went quiet. Neither of them filled it.
"Friday, then."
"Friday." The call ended on the last word. Andy put the phone on the island and sat there. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe twenty.
Eventually she got up, drank water from the glass standing by the sink, and saw her reflection in the window, which turned into a mirror every night: a woman who had probably made a decision she didn't understand yet.
Eight weeks. Eight weeks with Miranda Priestly. In my house.
Andy undressed slowly, as though her life had turned into slow motion in some (not) romantic drama. She hung her tie on the hook, threw her shirt in the laundry basket, folded the blazer and trousers, because it was Saint Laurent wool that didn't forgive carelessness. Automatic actions that today couldn't manage to pull her out of one constantly repeating word: Miranda.
In the shower she could just as easily have been running some paragraph through her head, the way she did with every paragraph after work. Could have. But instead she thought about the voice on the phone that hadn't changed and had changed at the same time. Andy had heard this voice before, when it sounded like every word had been edited in advance, polished. But she hadn't heard it unedited, because Miranda either hadn't had time or hadn't wanted to.
They're both tired, Andy thought.
Andy put on her pyjama trousers, the old "Northwestern" t-shirt she'd worn since she was twenty-one and that had long lost its shape and colour and everything except softness. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, trying to rinse this day off. And finally, finally, Andy lay down in bed.
Andy lay there and waited for her mind to go quiet. But it had no intention of going quiet.
A strange feeling, not being able to stop your own thoughts. The moment you take aim at driving even one of them out, it slips away, coming back an instant later more visible, louder than before.
Friday, the third of October, was a day like any other. A meeting, one, then another, then a third, draffs, edits, two calls from Capitol Hill. One thing caught on the next almost constantly, not letting Andy catch her breath. But the infrastructure speech was approved in its final version, which was a great relief.
Andy set off home a little after 20:30. She was too tired for words, having already said too many of them during the day. Her state was a little empty, a little automatic: she didn't hear the radio, didn't see the road as such. She just turned, changed lanes, braked, picked up speed. And again the same thing.
She started waking from that state only when she saw the silhouette by the front door in a black coat with a single suitcase. Miranda had probably been waiting for her long enough to already be past getting angry.
Andy parked, and the engine went quiet. Five seconds, in which she tried to pull herself together. She'd had a whole day to project this meeting in her head. She really tried. But in the end it doesn't work the way we imagine it, and so she still wasn't ready for Miranda Priestly.
When Andy opened the car door and got out, she felt the cold, damp air off the river. Miranda turned toward her. Fourteen years, but Andy saw before her the same face, the same lines, only deeper, hair that had gone from silver to whiter, the same shoulders, and the way Miranda held the space around her. And the same eyes. God. The same ones. Older, yes, but also sharper, more defined. Fine lines around the eyes that hadn't been there in Paris. Lines from the nose to the corners of the mouth, by which she could trace what Miranda did most often: restrained disapproval. And something new. Something Andy didn't remember from Paris, but something she'd recognised the night before in the woman's voice, because she felt the same thing herself: exhaustion.
"You said Friday." As she'd expected, Miranda was furious.
"It is Friday. You said nothing about a specific hour." Andy had learned to defend herself after all.
"You could have come back in the morning."
"And miss the look on your face? Oh no." Andy looked at her, studying the older woman more closely than she should have. Miranda looked back. Neither one moved toward the other, or toward the door. "How long have you been waiting?" Andy asked.
"Long enough."
All of this was bullshit, because Miranda would definitely have reached her by phone. Maybe it was something else, something more complicated than ordinary indecision or bullshit. Two people who hadn't seen each other in years, standing in the dark and wavering over whether the next step would be something right or something wrong. Two people who somehow, all the same, stood before each other.
"Come inside," Andy said, moving toward the door.
Miranda followed her in, stopping just past the threshold, sweeping her gaze over everything that fell into her line of sight. Apart from the lamp, the most striking thing in this house was the glass and the river behind it, now visible in slow reflections from the interior light, golden patches on black water. A turn to the right, concrete, the fireplace set into the wooden wall, unlit and dark, the kitchen island. The space was built to decide for itself what a first-time visitor's eye landed on. So Andy watched Miranda see it for the first time.
Miranda walked over to the glass wall and stood there, looking either at her reflection or through it. From behind Andy found it hard to tell. "I thought you valued privacy above all else."
Andy set her bag on the island and poured herself water. "The river doesn't gossip."
Miranda turned from the window and swept the room again, slower this time. "Barcelona chairs." She ran a finger along the back of one, making her way to the bookshelf. She took one, looked at the cover, put it back, then took another. "You've organised these by mood?"
"I've organised them by the order in which I need them after the kind of day I've had."
Miranda put the book back in its place, turning her attention to the vinyl records (Chet Baker, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell) and the stack of papers by the sofa. Eventually she came back to Andy, standing on the other side of the island, which between them felt like a border where two oceans met, and she could see that they were different all the way to the waterline.
"We should discuss terms," Miranda said, her voice sliding back into a business tone.
"Sit." Miranda glanced briefly at the bar stool before sitting. Andy noted it in silence, because at Runway Miranda had never obeyed commands. "I have conditions," Andy said.
"As do I."
"First. Everything I work on in this house is classified or close to it. If you hear me on the phone, if you see a draft, if you read a single sentence, it stays in these walls. Not a whisper. Not to Nigel, not to Emily, not to the twins, not to anyone. This is classified material in an unsecured house, and you will be in that house, and I need you to understand what that means."
"I understand discretion, Andrea," Miranda noted, bored. "Agreed. Continue."
"Second. If this threatens the President, it's over. No negotiation. No exit strategy. No parting statement. I walk, and you handle the fallout alone."
"Your loyalty is noted."
"It's not loyalty. It's my job."
"Then mine." Miranda's voice dropped lower, but definitely not softer. "If at any point you treat this as a concession you're making for a woman who can't manage her own crisis, I leave. I am not your charity project, Andrea. I am not a career you're rescuing. If you approach this with even a trace of moral superiority, I will know, and I will not stay for it."
Andy held a couple of seconds. "Understood."
"The conditions," Miranda said.
Andy almost thought she was circling back for a second pass of realisation. "We just discussed them?"
"The operational conditions. We haven't discussed the domestic ones."
What? "Domestic?"
"We'll be sharing a space, Andrea. For eight weeks. There are practicalities."
"Such as?"
"Bathroom schedule. Kitchen access. Workspace boundaries. How we present in public, in private, and in the extremely narrow space between the two. Who drives? Who shops? Who deals with your security detail when they inevitably want to know why Miranda Priestly is receiving mail at a government employee's address?"
"You're planning to receive mail here?"
"I'm planning to live here. Living involves mail."
Andy drank her water, set the glass down and looked at Miranda, frowning slightly. With time the substance of what she'd agreed to was starting to reach her. "One more thing." She tapped her fingers on the concrete slab, silent but restless. "My parents will find out. My friends will find out. The President already knows. If you embarrass me—"
"If I intended to embarrass you, I'd have brought a photographer." Miranda tilted her head, barely frowning. "I brought a suitcase."
"The bedroom is upstairs," Andy said, already heading toward the bedroom and pointing Miranda at the couch on her way past. "The couch is comfortable. I'll get you sheets."
"I am not sleeping on a couch, Andrea."
Andy rolled her eyes and turned back. Of course. "There's only one bed."
"I'm quite capable of respecting a border. Are you?"
"This is literally an invasion."
"Consider it a diplomatic arrangement. Your country is fond of those."
They looked at each other. Then Andy picked up Miranda's suitcase, which was heavier than it looked, so that Andy nearly tipped sideways. Miranda followed Andy up to the second floor in silence.
The bedroom was different in that its glass wall cut the room off in a half-square, giving a much wider view of the water, the trees, and nothing else. On the nightstand to the left of the bed was a lamp, and beside it lay the book Andy was rereading for the second time (Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking). The nightstand on the right stayed empty, and would stay that way until Miranda claimed it with something of her own.
The bedrroom had no doors except to the wardrobe and the bathroom, so Miranda stood by the glass, watching Andy.
"The bathroom is through that door," Andy pointed that way. "Towels in the cabinet. I'll get you a second set."
"I brought my own."
"Of course you did."
Miranda walked over to the wardrobe and opened it. She saw the empty half, because the night before Andy had spent half a sleepless night clearing the right side for Miranda. The older woman started unpacking the suitcase, neatly and methodically. "I need the bathroom first," Miranda said after a moment.
"Go ahead." Andy lowered herself onto the edge of the bed, on the left side, closer to the way out of the room.
When Miranda took her pyjamas and a cosmetics bag and disappeared behind the bathroom door, Andy felt like none of this was real.
Miranda Priestly in my house. Miranda Priestly in my bedroom. Miranda Priestly is going to sleep in my bed. This can't be happening.
But it absolutely is happening.
The bathroom door opened, and Andy turned her head: Miranda's hair was loose, damp from washing, no makeup. She looked more at home than Andy could ever have imagined her. White silk pyjamas that probably cost more than Andy's monthly mortgage payment.
Miranda sat on the right side of the bed, her back to Andy, took a cream from the nightstand, from her own nightstand already. "Bathroom's free."
Unbelievable.
The bathroom smelled like something that hadn't been there before. Like someone who hadn't been there before. After the shower, Andy washed her face, watching herself in the mirror: the same woman who was starting to get herself back. She just hoped she wouldn't be disappointed in the end.
When Andy came back into the bedroom, Miranda was already lying under the covers, facing the window.
Andy took her side. The distance between them was maybe thirty centimetres? One duvet. A queen-size bed, but built for one person sleeping diagonally, not two lying like two sentences on a page: parallel, not touching.
Miranda's breathing evened out first, while Andy lay still, staring at the ceiling again.
Fourteen years I've spent building something that has nothing to do with her. My career, my reputation, this house and this quiet. And after one conversation Miranda Priestly is in my bed.