For 100 Days (100 1)

Tasha takes the envelope out of my slack grasp and peers inside. “Well, you’ve got fifty Benjamins in here saying it did.” She grins at me. “Remember what I said about letting someone help you out once in a while? Yeah, you can thank me now.”

Chapter 4

Tasha insists on coming with me to check out Claire’s apartment. I hadn’t even been sure I intended to go tonight, but Tasha refuses to be swayed and I can hardly deny my curiosity either. Suddenly, the idea of waiting until tomorrow morning to see where I’ll be living for the next four months requires a patience I don’t have.

All night, the key to Claire’s apartment has bee

n burning a hole in my pocket—even more so than the money, which I’d reluctantly stowed in the bottom of my purse in the employee locker for the duration of my shift.

After we close at Vendange, Tasha calls home to let her family know what’s going on, then the two of us set out for the Upper East Side address Claire gave me. Ordinarily, I’d think nothing of walking the handful of long blocks, even in the chill of a drizzly April night. But hoofing it a couple of miles after two in the morning with five grand in cash on me is a stupid risk I just can’t take.

As we step out of the restaurant, I motion for Tasha to follow me to the curb. “Come on. We’re splurging on a taxi. My treat.”

Manhattan is impressive at any hour, but there is something magical about this part of the city so late at night. As the taxi rolls along the divided lanes of Park Avenue with its tree-lined median, my artist’s eye greedily soaks in my surroundings. Street lamps and traffic lights spangle the wet pavement with shards of color. The mixture of pre- and post-war limestone and brick buildings on either side of the grand boulevard stand defiant beside soaring glass-and-steel residential towers and elegant five-star hotels. In front of all those buildings, the ribbon of concrete sidewalk ebbs and flows with a steady stream of pedestrians who are wearing everything from formal attire or club clothes to vagabond rags.

The colors, the shapes, the energy, the teeming life even at this late hour . . . all of it stirs the part of me that dreams in light and shadow, the part of me that can only speak with a paintbrush.

Tonight, after Margot’s call, it hurts to hear that voice whispering to me, to see all of the pictures filling the fresh canvas in my mind. I close my eyes against the impulse, but I can’t shut it off. It’s been a part of me for too long. My art has been my escape, the only place I could go—the only place I could live—when everything else in my world was trying to destroy me.

Now I can’t help but wonder how long that part of me will survive if it turns out Dominion’s owner is right and my art doesn’t deserve to be seen.

“Holy shit,” Tasha gasps, dragging my attention back to the here and now. The taxi maneuvers toward the curb on my side and turns in to a U-shaped entrance in front of a monstrously tall high-rise. Tasha leans across me to gape. “Avery, is this the right building?”

I peer out my window as the driver slows to a stop under the sleek glass overhang and announces that we’ve arrived. Even so, I have to double check that the numbers etched in black on the gleaming silver plate mounted above the entrance of the tower match the address Claire gave me.

“This is it.”

Tasha exits on her side while I pay the twelve dollar fare. She’s already at my door as I climb out, a look of awe on her face. She hooks her arm through mine and leans in close as we step away from the taxi.

“Girl, do you have any idea where we are? This section of Park is prime real estate. We’re talking billionaire row. I’ll bet you can’t even get a closet-sized studio for under a couple million in this building.”

“Seriously?” My brows lift in surprise. “Apparently international commercials and Japanese game shows are lucrative business.”

Tasha grunts a non-response as I crane my neck to follow the jutting column of glass before us. It’s so high, I lose sight of it in the dark canopy of clouds blotting out the night sky. I’ve never even set foot inside a building of this caliber and as we approach the brightly lit lobby inside, I’m not sure if the sudden pounding of my heart is stemming from excitement or doubt.

I wasn’t sure about any of this to begin with; now all I have are second thoughts. I feel conspicuous and nervous. This isn’t my kind of neighborhood. It’s not even in the same orbit I’ve inhabited for any of my twenty-five years.

What the hell was Claire Prentice thinking, drafting someone she’s never even met before into house-sitting in a building like this?

Desperate, that’s what she was. Desperate and without other options as she’d openly admitted. As desperate as I am to have a roof over my head until I can somehow get back on my feet.

But I sure as hell wasn’t prepared for this.

Looking at the yards of polished marble and massive glittering crystal chandeliers that wait for me on the other side of the ultramodern lobby’s glass facade—not to mention the fact that Claire is paying me to stay here besides—there’s no question that I got the better end of our deal.

A middle-aged doorman in a dark coat and cap opens one of the chrome-trimmed glass doors and steps out to hold it open for us.

He greets Tasha and me each with a pleasant nod. “Good evening, ma’am. Ma’am.” He’s a big guy, slightly round beneath the long drape of his thick wool coat. But his hazel eyes seem genuinely kind and his smile is warm within the brackets of his gray-flecked goatee. “How can I help you ladies?”

I pause and smile back at him. “Hi. I’m Avery Ross, and this is my friend, Tasha. Claire Prentice sent me. I’m, ah . . . she’s hired me to watch her apartment while she’s out of town.”

I start foraging anxiously in my purse for her business card as if that will be ample proof, but the doorman is already nodding his head even before I hold the card out to him. “Ms. Prentice called earlier this evening to let me know you were expected, Ms. Ross. Please, both of you, come in out of the cold.”

Tasha and I step inside with the doorman following behind us. Silver-veined, gleaming marble spreads out beneath our feet, from the entrance to the towering banks of elevators across the lobby. Soaring walls of exotic dark woods and stone frame the polished steel elevator doors. Above our heads, immense, cascading crystal chandeliers glitter like waterfalls of twisting, sparkling ice.

“My name’s Manny,” the doorman says. He leads us to a reception desk across the wide expanse of the lobby. Grabbing a tablet PC from the desk, he taps on the screen a few times before handing it to me. “Please sign in where I’ve indicated, Ms. Ross. Will you be staying in Ms. Prentice’s apartment starting tonight?”

The question takes me aback, if only because I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the fact that I’m actually standing here and not dreaming. I shake my head as I scrawl my finger across the tablet in a barely legible version of my signature. “I wasn’t planning to stay, no. It’s late and we just got off work. I only wanted to stop by to check things out.”