The Girl Next Door Read Online Free PDF

her parents for college. And she saved, more than might be expected, from her salary at the library. She didn’t crave things the way Madison seemed to.
    Madison earned more than twice what she did, working at a fashion magazine. And Charlotte knew that her mother sent her cheques almost every month, and paid the air fare when she was going home for the holidays. But she was always claiming penury, usually because she’d have spent her food money on shoes in Barneys in her lunch hour. She had what she called a ‘wish board’ in her apartment, propped up against the kitchen cabinet next to the sink. She said she got the idea off Oprah once, when she’d been home with a cold and watching daytime television. Oprah had told her she should put pictures of all the things she dreamed of on a board, and that this would help her visualize them, and thus come closer to attaining them. Charlotte suspected that Oprah – even if you didn’t consider the idea to be hokum, as she did – had loftier ideals for such a board, and hadn’t particularly meant it for an YSL Muse bag and a three‐carat, princess‐cut Tiffany diamond necklace. But those were the things that Madison dreamed of.
    Madison talked about marriage a lot. It was inevitable, clearly, in her mind. This part of her life – the time when she dated lots of men and slept with almost all of them without ever knowing things about them – this was just now. When the time came (and Madison thought that twenty‐seven was about the right time) she would get serious in her search. And the guy she found (a guy who wouldn’t mind at all that she’d spent the previous five years working her way through the male population of Manhattan, apparently) would be wealthy or, at the very least, have spectacular prospects, from a good family, tall, athletic, handsome and generous. Fate would take care of it all. There was a little girl’s heart beating far beneath the Agent Provocateur‐clad bosom of Madison Cavanagh, and it dreamed of Prince Charming.
    Who may or may not currently be sporting a slightly lazy goatee and living on the fifth floor of this very building…
    Since the story had first been told, around February time, Madison had been on what Charlotte called (only in her own head) ‘Trip watch’, which was a somewhat frustrating game, since Trip rarely appeared. She’d cornered him in the elevator once or twice, and talked to him about the friend of a friend they had in common, but he hadn’t taken the bait. She’d commandeered a package she’d seen Raoul signing for once, and taken it to Trip’s door, but he’d been on the phone when she rang the doorbell, and though he’d winked and mouthed thanks at her when he’d taken the envelope, nothing more had come of it.
    Charlotte wished she was so certain there was a happy ending in her future. She sat, every day, on the subway, and looked at the men in the carriage, none of whom, it seemed, were ever looking back. Most of them, she wouldn’t want. But one… just one, one day…
    Eve
    This apartment was beautiful, and easily the best part of their new life so far. She felt like she was living inside the pages of a magazine she used to read in the hairdressers. Eve had found it when she’d been over in January. The bank used a relocation company, assigning her a consultant, Francine, who was a veritable font of knowledge. She, in turn, had set up a day of appointments with real estate brokers across the city. Eve had felt impossibly glamorous, being picked up outside the hotel by a limo, and driven from location to location all day. In between appointments, Francine would talk to her in the back of the car about neighbourhoods and budgets, and sip Vitamin Water without smudging her lip gloss. She had patiently explained the difference between a co‐op and a condo and a cond op. About supers, and doormen. She appeared to know the location of every Whole Foods and Dean & Deluca and CVS Pharmacy in the city, as