Page 2 of The Comeback Summer

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“LOOK WHO’S LATE,”Scott, our office manager, calls out in a singsong voice. “Your baby sister had to start the call without you.”

I shoot him a dirty look as I hurry down the hall to the office Hannah and I share. Scott was the last hire GiGi made before she passed away, and we haven’t had the heart to fire him—even though he spends most of the workday shopping online and scrolling social media. That’s what you get for hiring a person whose claim to fame is going viral in a YouTube video of himself as a six-year-old.

I’m responsible for at least a dozen of the video’s seventeen million views—I can’t get enough of tiny Scott standing in a department store dressing room, arms crossed, declaring his mother’s outfits either “great!” or “not great!” The video earned him the nickname Great Scott, which we ironically use to tease him, and which he unironically seems to enjoy.

“Bee-tee-dubs—bold move with the scarf. We like,” he calls after me, reminding me of one reason we keep him around and, I imagine, the reason GiGi hired him. The man knows how to turn on the charm, and the few clients we have left love him.

Hannah’s sitting at her desk, her back stiff with tension. She glances at me briefly; her face is pale and her eyes wide with barely concealed panic.

“Is there anything we can do to change your mind?” she asks Mr.Rooney, focusing on her computer screen.

I catch the tiniest wobble in her voice and feel a rush of guilt for being late. Hannah prefers to stay behind the scenes, while I handle most conversations with our clients. She’s going to be an emotional wreck after this, and it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have left her to face this alone.

“Unfortunately, there’s not,” Mr.Rooney says. “But I wish you and your sister the best of luck.”

My stomach drops twenty-one floors to the Chicago streets, where I’m afraid we might end up, out on our asses.

“Thank you,” Hannah says to Mr.Rooney, her voice deceptively strong. She ends the call and slumps forward, head in her hands. “It’s over, Libs,” she says. “I’m so sorry, I tried—”

“It’s not your fault,” I say, rushing over to her.

“I just froze,” Hannah says, and I curse myself for every detail and decision that kept me from getting here in time to help.

“What else did he say?” I ask, wondering if she reminded him that it was us—Hannah and me, not GiGi—who helped guide UnderRooneys through a nasty public scandal about their factory conditions a few years back.

“You heard most of it. He apologized, said it wasn’t personal.”

I scoff—it’s never personal for them. Most of our former clients are old men, half of whom don’t trust their business to two “little girls”—their words, not ours. The other half have retired and been replaced by slightly younger old men who have no sense of loyalty to the firm that helped make their brands household names.

The one thing all our ex-clients seem to have in common is that they’re looking for a change. Which is ironic, given how much we’ve been trying to keep things the same. But we just don’t have GiGi’s magic, and I hate knowing that everything she worked for might end with us.

So much forl’dor v’dor—one of our grandmother’s favorite Hebrew sayings. From generation to generation. More like from gold to dust.

“Is it as bad as I think it is?” I ask my sister.

While I bring my creativity and imagination to the table, Hannah is the analytical, business-minded one—she’ll know the financial impact of this loss. Knowing her, she probablyran the numbers last night. Hannah always prepares for the worst-case scenarios.

“It’s not good,” she says, rubbing her temples with her fingertips; one of her headaches must be coming on, and I make a mental note to pick up some Advil for her. “I don’t know how to keep us in the black without UnderRooneys.”

A flash of panic hits me, and for once, I can’t find the words to make things better. Hannah looks up at me with her big brown eyes and asks, “What are we going to do?”

The question takes me back two decades, when she was seven and I was nine. We were sitting on our bedroom floor, both shaken by the news that our parents were getting a divorce. Hannah looked so small in her nightgown, her knees curled into her chest, her eyes red from crying. Even though I was shocked and scared, too, I summoned a smile and said what she needed to hear: that everything would be okay.

It was true then, and it’s true now.

“We’re Ruth Freedman’s granddaughters,” I remind her, back in big-sister mode. “Nothing can stop us.”

Hannah exhales in relief, and I wish there was someone to reassureme. But there isn’t. There hasn’t been since I was nine years old. So, I sit at my desk and turn away from my sister, hoping to hide the panic that’s racing through my veins.

Two

HANNAH

My digital clock reads 6:03 a.m. as I dress in the soft morning light of my bedroom. After the night I had, with one stress dream after another—my teeth fell out; I couldn’t find my keys; I ended up in my high school English class buck naked—I need to run. Desperately.

My brain is often a mess of anxious thoughts, like a hundred hyperactive monkeys chattering away, and even more so after our bad news yesterday. Hopefully my morning ritual will quiet them down.

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