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Chapter One: Tiffani

Tiffani had lived for years with a rigorous and unforgiving beauty routine

Exercise: yoga, treadht for her to get any real ht,” as her now ex-husband Gordon had always said Everything about her was always supposed to be tight and tucked in

She’d had hand lotion ular facial peels and mud masks If her skin didn’t always look flawlessly sht-pored, some “friend” would make sure to mention it over s okay with you and Gordon?

Her hair had to be perfect, of course Its natural light broasn’t good enough She needed a tawny, lion-like gold that would set off the glowing undertones of her skin And if her skin wasn’t glowing, well, whose fault was that? She should take more vitaar scrub?

And let’s not forget the makeup and the clothes

Her job, according to Gordon, was to et a look up her skirt Her job was to be his arm candy She hadn’t understood any of that when she’d married him at twenty-two and he had, with his usual business savvy, banked on her ignorance She’d been a bubbly hair stylist still trying to pay her way through coe and she’d never met ait away on her, she fell hard and fast Who could resist trips to the French Riviera? Candy-colored nights in Vegas hotels? Chanel gowns delivered to her door?

He had never offered to pay her tuition, not even when they were e had vanished in the rearview hter, Jillian She was supposed to be fun She was supposed to be sexy

In all her years of being married to Gordon Marcus, Tiffani had never once felt sexy Her body had been an exhausting maintenance project kept up to someone else’s specifications Even sex itself wasn’t sexy: it was just the end result of all those Brazilian waxes and all those exercises that kept her flexible

It had taken Gordon going to prison for a laundry list of white collar criive Tiffani a second chance to know herself

It scared her shitless

What if there’s nothing about ?

But her stepdaughter Jillian had been characteristically fir to offer the world, and she’d been patient while Tiffani had struggled with how to rejoin it In the end, it had been Jillian’s adorable boyfriend Theo, a US Marshal, who had pointed the way