didn’t look back as he left and she wondered if that was the difference between men and women. Men looked forward, warriors focusing on the future. Women’s eyes darted everywhere. Searching, wondering, praying to some god to keep the people they loved safe.
She lay back in the bed still warm with the imprint of his body, and wondered if she would ever see him again.
The New Mexico sun was riding high in the sky when the Zest catalogue shoot finally broke up for lunch. Izzie Silver stood up and stretched to her full five feet nine inches, glorying in the drowsy heat that had already burnished the freckles on her arms despite her careful application of Factor 50.
Truly Celtic people – with milk-bottle skin, dots of caramel freckles and bluish veins on their wrists – only ever went one colour in the sun: lobster red. And lobster red was never going to be a fashionable colour, except for early-stage melanomas.
It was her second day on the shoot and Izzie could feel her New-Yorker-by-adoption blood slowing down to match the sinuous pace of desert life. Manhattan and Perfect-NY Model Agency, who’d sent her here to make sure nothing went wrong on a million-dollar catalogue shoot involving three of their models, seemed a long way away.
If she was in New York, she’d be sitting at her desk with the rest of the bookers: phone headset on, skinny latte untouched on her desk, and a stack of messages piled up waiting for her. The office was in a sleek block off Houston, heavy on glass bricks and Perspex chandeliers and light on privacy.
At lunch, she’d be rushing down to the little beauty salon on Seventh where she got her eyebrows waxed or taking a quick detour uptown into Anthropologie on West Broadway to see if they had any more of those adorable little soap dishes shaped like seashells. Not that she needed more junk in her bathroom, mind you; it was like a beauty spa in there as it was.
In between scheduling other people’s lives, she’d be mentally scrolling through her own, thinking of her Pilates class that night and whether she had the energy for it. And thinking of him. Joe.
Weird, wasn’t it, how a person could be a stranger to you and then, in an instant, become your whole life? How did that happen, anyway?
And why him? When he was the most inconvenient, wrong person for her to love. Just when she thought she’d cracked this whole life thing, along came Joe and showed her that nothing ever worked out the way you wanted it to. You have no control – random rules.
Izzie hated random, loathed it, despised it. She liked being in charge.
At least being here gave her the space to think, even if she was missing her eyebrow appointment, her Pilates and – most importantly – dinner with Joe. Because Joe took up so much space in her head and in her heart that she couldn’t think clearly when he was around.
Here at Chaco Ranch, with the vast hazy spread of dusty land around her and the big sky that seemed to fill more than the horizon, clear thinking felt almost mandatory.
Izzie felt as much at home as if she was sitting on the back porch of her grandmother’s house in Tamarin where sea orchids dotted the grass and the scent of the ocean filled the air.
Chaco Ranch, just thirty minutes away from the buzz of Santa Fe, was a sprawling, white-painted ranch house, sitting like an exquisite piece of turquoise in the middle of sweeping red ochre.
And though it was geographically a long way from Tamarin, the small Irish coastal town where Izzie had grown up, the two places shared that same rare quality that mañana was far too urgent a word and that perhaps the day after tomorrow was time enough for what had to be done.
While the ranch was landlocked with huge cacti and mesquite trees guarding the house and mountains rising up behind them, Tamarin sat perilously on rocks, the houses clinging to steep hills as if the roar of the Atlantic would send them tumbling down.
In both places, Izzie decided, the landscape made people aware of just how puny they were in the grand scheme of things.
The consequent tranquillity of the ranch had calmed everyone down at least as much as two hours of Bikram yoga would.
Bookers rarely went on shoots: their work was confined to the office, living on the phone, relying on email as they juggled their models’ lives effortlessly. But Zest were important clients and Izzie’s bosses had decided it was worth flying her in, just in case anything went wrong on this first shoot for a whole new Zest line.
‘I love this place,’ Izzie had said to the blonde ranch owner the morning before when the crew had arrived with enough clothes, make-up, hair spray and photographic equipment to make a small movie, and enough adrenaline to power a large town.
Mexican-inspired arches in the walls, tiled courtyards hung with Moroccan lights, and dreamy wall-hangings made locally gave the place depth. Local artists’ handiwork hung cheek by jowl with pieces by international artists, and there were two walls dedicated to haunting photographs of Anasazi ruins.
The ranch owner had waved slender brown arms that rattled with silver and turquoise bangles and explained that Chaco Canyon, where her treasured photos had been taken, was home to a flea that still carried bubonic plague.
‘Could we get some?’ deadpanned Izzie. ‘Not for me, you understand, but I’ve got some people I’d like the flea to bite.’
‘I thought you fashion people had no sense of humour,’ the blonde woman grinned back.
‘Only me, sorry,’ Izzie said. ‘It’s a hindrance in fashion, to be honest. Some of these people cry at night over hemline lengths and if you are not a True Fashion Believer, then they try to kill you with their Manolo spike heels or else batter you to death with their copy of Vogue: New Collections edition. Personally, I think a sense of humour helps.’
‘And you’re not a True Fashion Believer?’ asked the woman, staring at the tall redhead curiously.
‘Hey, look at me,’ laughed Izzie, smoothing her palms over her firm, curvy body. ‘True Fashion Believers think food is for wimps, so I certainly don’t qualify. I’ve never done the South Beach or the Atkins, and I just cannot give up carbohydrates. These are crucial in True Fashion.’
In an alternate universe, Izzie Silver could have been a model. Everyone told her so when she was a kid growing up in Tamarin. She had the look. Huge eyes, coloured a sort of dusty heliotrope blue with glossy thick lashes like starfishes around them, and a big generous mouth that made her cheekbones rise into gleaming apples when she smiled. Her caramel mane of thick hair made her look like a Valkyrie standing on her own longboat, curls flying and fierce majesty in her face. And she was tall, with long, graceful legs perfect for ballet, until she grew so much that she towered over all the other little ballerinas.
There was only one issue: her size. When she was twelve, she stood five feet six in her socks and weighed one hundred and ten pounds.
Now, aged thirty-nine, she wore a US size ten. In an industry where skinniness was a prize beyond rubies, Izzie Silver stood out for many reasons.
With her perfect hourglass figure, like a sized-up Venus, she was proof that big was beautiful. She loved food, turned heads everywhere she went and made the hollow-eyed fashion junkies look
