Page 2 of Business or Pleasure

Noemie grimaces in this familiar way I’m never sure whether I learned from her or the other way around. Noemie Cohen-Laurent is both my only first cousin and my closest friend. We grew up on the same street, attended the same schools, and now even live in the same house, though she owns it and I’m paying a deeply discounted monthly rent.

We both studied journalism, starry-eyed about how we were going to change the world, tell the stories no one else was telling. The economy pushed us in different directions, and before we graduated, Noemie had already been hired full-time at the PR firm where she’d interned during her senior year.

“I’m guessing that means you decided not to go?” she says.

“I can’t do it. You can go if you want, but—”

Noemie cuts me off with a swift shake of her head. “Solidarity. Wyatt Torres is dead to me.”

My shoulders sag with relief. I haven’t wanted her to feel like she needs to pick a side, even if there’s no risk she’d pick his. Still, she’s the only one who knows what happened between us a few weeks ago: one incredible night after years of pining I thought was mutual, given the desperate way his hands roamed my body as we tumbled into bed. I’d helped him unpack his new apartment, and we were exhausted and tipsy and just seemed to fit, our bodies snapping together in this natural, effortless way. Wyatt’s dark hair feathering across my stomach, tanned skin shivering where I touched him. The way he dug his nails into my back like he couldn’t bear to let me go.

But then came the Can we talk? text, and the confession, during said talk, that he wasn’t looking for a relationship right now. And I was a Relationship Girl, he said, with all the distaste usually reserved for that one person who replies-all on a cc’d email. He valued our friendship too much, and he didn’t want either of us to get hurt.

So I pretended I wasn’t.

“We would have been good together, though,” I say quietly, forcing my feet forward in line.

Noemie places a gentle hand on my shoulder. “I know. I’m so sorry. We’ll have a much better time tonight, I promise. We’ll go back to the house and order way too much Indian food, because I know how you love being able to eat leftovers for five days afterward. And then we can watch people on Netflix making bad real estate decisions with partners they absolutely should not be with.”

Finally, it’s our turn, one of the booksellers beckoning us forward. Maddy’s smile has barely slipped, an impressive feat after all those photos.

“Hi,” I say, thrusting my copy forward with a trembling hand, which is only marginally embarrassing. I wrote pages and pages pretending to be this woman, and now that she’s three feet in front of me, I can barely speak. Someone take away my communication degree.

“Hi there,” she says brightly. “Who should I make it out to?”

“Chandler. Chandler Cohen.”

She squeezes one eye shut, as though trying to remember. Any moment now, it’ll ring a bell. We’ll laugh about her takedown of internet trolls in chapter four and roll our eyes at all the people-pleasing she used to do, documented in detail in chapter sixteen. “How do you spell that?”

“Oh—um,” I stammer, every letter in the English alphabet fleeing my mind at once. “Chandler... Cohen?” Maddy gives me a blank, expectant look.

No. It’s not possible, is it? That she wouldn’t even remember my name after all the back-and-forth? All her demands?

“You don’t know Chandler—” Noemie starts to say, but I silence her with an elbow to the ribs.

Sure, I communicated mostly with Maddy’s team... but my name was on the contracts. The rough drafts. The endless email chains. I wrote this fucking book for her, and she has no idea who I am.

I must mumble out the spelling, but my vision blurs as she swoops her magenta sharpie over the title page, sliding in a bookmark and passing it back to me like a seasoned pro.

“Thank you,” I manage as Maddy waves us away with a sunshine grin.

Once we’re safely in the picture-book aisle, the one farthest from the stage, I let out a long, shaky breath. It’s fine. This is fine. Obviously, she wasn’t going to ask me to sign our book.

Her book.

Because that’s the whole point of a ghost—no one is supposed to be able to see me.

“You should have told her who you were,” Noemie says, one hand gripping her quilted Kate Spade and the other white-knuckling the water bottle. “I would have, if you hadn’t viciously attacked me.”

“It would have just made it more embarrassing.” I clutch the book tight to my chest because if I don’t, I might hurl it across the store. “Maybe she’s not great with names. She meets a lot of people. I’m sure she just gets... really busy girlbossing.”

“Right.” Noemie’s stance is still rigid. “Well, I’m still going to unfollow her.” And to prove it, she takes out her phone, only to have something else catch her attention. “Shit, it’s work. The wrong draft of a press release went out and the client is livid. I might have to...” She trails off, her fingers flying over the screen.

Every so often, it hits me that there are only two years between us, though Noemie’s life is wildly different from mine. When The Catch laid me off five years ago and eventually folded, unable to keep up with BuzzFeed and Vice and HuffPost, she was buying a house. When I was struggling to sell freelance articles about new local musicians and the evolution of Seattle’s downtown, she was juggling high-profile clients and contributing a respectable monthly amount to her 401(k). She’s twenty-nine to my thirty-one, but it’s almost shocking how much better at adulting she is.

Only two years, and yet sometimes it feels like I’ll never catch up.

“Go,” I say, nudging her with the book. “I get it.”

---