“Brilliant.” LoLo turned to our managing editor. “Can we bump ‘Dirty Talk’ from October and replace it with ‘The Sex Workout’?” Without waiting for her response, she barked at the digital director, “Let’s get that cover line up online and testing immediately.” She lowered her chin at me. “Well done.”

Eleanor trailed me back to my desk, a contrite little gnat. No, she was too gangly to be a gnat. More like a mosquito who had gotten a taste of my blood and wanted more. “I hope you don’t mind that I brought up your friend’s situation in the meeting. I know that’s a personal thing.”

My desk phone was lit up red with a voice mail. I hiked up my pants before sitting down—I’d been following the Dukan diet for the last seven days, and the waistbands of my skirts and pants were starting to pucker away from my stomach as I sat. It was so soothing that when I couldn’t sleep, the gnawing in my gut and the memories on an insomniac Tour de France, I would grab a pile of pants from my closet and model them for myself in the bathroom mirror, marveling at the way I could pull on size twos without ever unbuttoning them. This small, private victory almost made up for the fact that when I crawled back into bed, Luke flinging his sleep-heavy arm over my size twenty-six waist, I’d have to smell his searing middle-of-the-night breath. Did his breath smell this bad when we were dating? It couldn’t have. I couldn’t have ever been that in love with someone who had breath that bad. Something had happened. His tonsils maybe. I’d mention it to him in the morning. This was fixable. Everything was fixable.

I cooed, “Of course, I don’t, Eleanor.”

Eleanor perched on the edge of my desk. She was wearing a pair of white, wide-legged pants. “Love those trousers,” LoLo had said when she walked into her office for the meeting, and now I have the misfortune of knowing what Eleanor’s face looks like when she squirts. “Maybe she’d want to talk about her experience for the story?”

“She might,” I said. There was my green ballpoint pen, cap off, idling on my desk. I nudged it with my elbow, inch by inch, until the inky head grazed the seam of Eleanor’s pants. I maintained eye contact with her as I dutifully promised I would ask her that very afternoon.

Eleanor rapped her knuckles on my desk, and the corners of her mouth dug into her jowls. Not a smile, a conciliatory smirk. “Maybe we can arrange to get you an additional reporting byline. That would be so great for you.” Additional reporting bylines go to interns. My piece on birth control and blood clots had been nominated for an ASME the year before, and Eleanor would never forgive me for it. She removed her ass from my desk, and I admired my handiwork, the way the oily squiggles took on the appearance of green varicose veins on her outer thigh.

“So great for me,” I agreed, my smile finally genuine, and Eleanor mouthed “Thank you,” and pressed her hands together in prayer, like I was such a dear, before walking away.

I picked up my phone, triumphant, and dialed into my voice mail. After listening to the message from Luke, I hung up and called him back.

“Hey, you.”

I loved the sound of Luke’s voice on the phone. Like he was busy but having fun and stealing away to tell me something in confidence. I’d been the one to push for the engagement—obnoxiously push. The HBO producers had e-mailed me almost a year ago now, asking if I would want to participate in a documentary loosely titled Friends of the Five. I was no friend of the five, but the opportunity to redeem myself, to tell my side of the story—it made my mouth water. But if I was going to do this, I would do it right. There was no way I was mugging for the camera if I hadn’t checked off all the boxes in the hotly contested “having it all” category: cool job, impressive zip code; hungry body, and the kicker—dreamy, loaded fiancé. An engagement to Luke would make my rise unassailable. No one could touch me if I was marrying Luke Harrison the IV. How many times had I fantasized telling my story to the camera, bringing my hand to my face, the emerald that would soon be mine gloating as I wiped away a dainty tear?

Luke and I had been dating for three years before the engagement, I loved him, and it was time. It was time. This was how I put it to Luke, solemnly over dinner one night. “I wanted to wait until next year’s bonus,” he said. But he caved, had Mammy’s ring reset for my tiny finger, and I happily agreed to participate in the documentary. I know I shouldn’t fall into the old trap that I’m not someone, that I haven’t really “made it,” until I have a ring on my finger. Fucking Lean In and all that. I’m supposed to be better than this, a more confident, independent woman than this. But I’m not. Okay? I’m just not.

“What if we do that dinner with my client tonight?” Luke asked. He’d been trying to set this thing up for a week. I still had two more days left on the “attack phase” of Dukan. After that, I would be allowed to eat a few select vegetables. Don’t even think about broccoli, fat ass.

I held the phone tighter. “Can we do it in a few days?”

The only sound was frat-boy hollering from Luke’s floor.

Back when we first started dating, I was terrified for Luke to meet my mother. Her nostrils would twitch—yup, that’s the smell of the real deal—and she would call me Tif, would ask Luke how much money he made, and it would all be over then. Luke would come to his senses, realize I’m the girl you meet in a bar and bang a few times until you fall in love with a natural-ish blonde with an androgynous first name and a modest trust fund. Instead, to my utter amazement, when we returned to his apartment after dinner with Dina and Bobby FaNelli, he bundled me in his arms, rolled me onto the bed, and said in between kisses, “I can’t believe I’m the one who got to save you.” Like I had a slew of blue blood Dumpster divers lined up before me, vying to wife away my garbage scent.

“Never mind,” I said. “I can do it tonight.” Maybe some broccoli would help.

I stopped by the fashion closet before dinner. The outfit I was wearing wasn’t ugly enough. The uglier and trendier the outfit, the stronger I emanate intimidating magazine editor.

“This?” I pulled out a baggy Helmut Lang dress and leather jacket.

“Is it 2009?” Evan snipped. Come on, there has to be a requisite bitchy gay fashion editor.

I grumbled, “You pick something.”

Evan drummed his fingers along the racks of clothing, tapping each hanger like a key on a piano, finally landing on a Missoni striped top and polka-dot shorts. He looked over his bony shoulder and stared crossly at my chest. “Never mind.”

“Oh, fuck you.” I leaned against the accessories table and nodded to a floral print shirtdress, the lower back cut wide open. “That?”

Evan regarded the garment, brought his fingers to his lips, and hmmed. “Derek usually cuts for straighter figures.”

“Derek?”

Evan rolled his eyes. “Lam.”

I rolled my eyes right back at him and snatched the dress off the hanger. “I’m seven pounds down, I think I can handle it.”

The dress pulled slightly across my chest, so Evan unbuttoned it a notch, slipped a long pendant over my head, and studied me. “Not bad. What diet are you doing again?”

“Dukan.”

“Isn’t that what Kate Middleton did?”

I started to apply eyeliner in the mirror. “I chose it because it was the most extreme. It’s not going to work unless it feels like the worst thing in the world.”

“There you are,” Luke greeted me, crossed between relief and irritation. On time is late for Luke, and his militant punctuality annoys me so much it’s something I actively rebel against by running a few minutes behind, always.