Woman of the Year

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.CLICK HERE TO SIGN UPAlready a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. Chapter OneTHE VIDEO of my cat saving my life was shared over four million times.Cat lovers and cat haters alike were thrilled by the sight of my large, broad-shouldered gray cat sinking his teeth and claws into my assailant, reducing a full-grown man to a whimpering wreck, curled up on the floor.In the interviews that fueled my sudden media stardom, I’d say: The film speaks for itself. I focused on Catzilla, his courage, loyalty, and grace, the gentleness beneath his brute strength. The telepathic bond between us.A few interviewers couldn’t help asking, Had I trained my cat to attack?The answer was no. Of course not! He’d never done anything like that before.He knew that I was in danger.He was my protector.All that publicity led to my current association with the American Feline Protection Society. Really, a second career. A first career, if I’m being honest. So you could say that my cat saved my life in more ways than one.When I tell the story, I keep certain… details to myself. Certain things I don’t want people knowing, information that might upset my fans and my colleagues at the AFP Society.For example, the night I poisoned Holly Serpenta.The Woman of the Year.I didn’t want to kill her. I just wanted to make her sick.I didn’t even want to make her very sick. I just wanted to see her get sick in front of two hundred adoring fans who’d paid thousands of dollars to have dinner with her, and who, thanks to me, would be getting more than they paid for.I didn’t want her dead. Well, maybe briefly dead. I wanted to revive her. I wanted to bring her back to life. I considered getting an EpiPen, in case she went into shock. I could happen to have one on me.That might have been hard to explain, seeing as I don’t have allergies. Back when men took me out to restaurants, and the waiters asked if I had any food allergies, I’d say, “None that I know of so far.” Funny joke. The waiters would pretend-laugh. They’d heard it a million times.You need a prescription to get an EpiPen. It’s expensive. The manufacturer went to jail for jacking up the price. But probably no one ever asks why you have a lifesaving drug in your purse. Lorelei, what were you doing with the epinephrine, the Narcan?I wanted to bring a dead celebrity back to life and say, Hi, Holly! Remember me?Oddly, or not so oddly, someone did kill Holly. The Woman of the Year.Later that same week.Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who wanted her dead.Not that I wanted her dead. As I keep saying.I wasn’t the one who killed her.Everyone on social media knew that Holly Serpenta’s loyal assistants, Tamara and Dan, were always nearby with the rescue hypodermic that would save her in seconds. Not that they’d need to, because they basically tasted every whole grain of gourmet vegan food that passed her lips.If they’d put me at another table at the Woman of the Year Gala Benefit dinner, anywhere other than smack up against the kitchen door, I might not have gone through with it.Self-defense versus a swinging door. How would that play in court?Miss Green, how do you plead?Not guilty, Your Honor. Every time the kitchen door slammed open, I had to jump up and scoot over to avoid being concussed by a tray of delicacies on their way to another table. Members of the jury, what would the waiter have done if I’d grabbed a nest of puff pastry cradling a fat blip of caviar? He would have smacked my hand away. Or maybe he’d check out my watch—cheap!—and jewelry—cheap!—and then smack my hand away.The caviar was for the guests who’d “bought” entire tables and invited a dozen rich, famous friends.By the time a picked-over tray had limped past me, every last micro fish egg was gone, and the soggy pastry cups exuded a pinkish salmon paste.The waiter’s smile had been superior and triumphantly bitchy.I’d smiled and shaken my head no, my Barbie wig shifting a little on my head. Thanks, but no thanks!At the very least, I would have been sent away somewhere for psychiatric observation. The judge would have been right. I was temporarily out of my mind.So what if I’d spent forty years being sane, holding down a job, paying rent, having boyfriends then not having boyfriends, taking care of my cats—one cat at a time—nursing them in their final illnesses, nursing my parents in their final illnesses. Living a life.Not drunk in a gutter. Not in a psychiatric unit. Not a crack whore.I get credit for that. Considering.Still… I must have been crazy, after all those years, to poison the partly guilty person instead of the really guilty person.Of course I had a good excuse: the really guilty person was dead.A good excuse, not a great one.Welcome to the annual Woman of the Year Gala Benefit.Why, thank you. Great to be here.The long, narrow restaurant was jammed full of women swimming in slo-mo through a body-temperature sea of perfumes so expensive that the scents weren’t competing, though the women certainly were. Who was the most famous, the prettiest, the best dressed, the most respected for her talent, career, and good works?Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who donated the most money from her women-only hedge fund to an all-women company developing renewable energy options?It was an A-list crowd of women so famous that even I recognized them. So famous that looking around was like paging