Virtually Perfect

by Paige Roberts

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Not so long ago, Lizzie Glass had a successful TV show, a cookbook deal, and a social diary crammed with parties and events. But fame doesn’t stay fresh for long. Her show fizzles, her magazine column is canceled, and Lizzie’s only option is a summer job as personal chef to the Silvesters, a wealthy and eccentric family.

Their beach house is a lavish, beautifully decorated palace on the Jersey Shore, and Lizzie gets to work catering to Kathryn and Jim Silvester’s fashionably restrictive diets. But it’s their
twenty-something daughter who presents Lizzie with her biggest challenge—professionally and personally. A self-proclaimed “wellness warrior,” Zoe Silvester has a hugely popular website and app that promotes healthy living and organic, unprocessed foods. Yet Lizzie soon realizes that The Clean Life site has a dirty little secret. In fact, Zoe’s entire online persona is based on a dangerous hoax that runs deep and will damage lives. Exposing Zoe won’t just jeopardize Lizzie’s job and a promising new relationship—it may expose the cracks in her own past.

Sharply observed, witty, and thoughtful, Paige Roberts’ debut novel is a compelling look at one woman’s journey toward reinventing herself—and seeing through the façade of others—to discover the imperfect but sometimes wonderful truth.

Release date: September 26, 2017

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Lizzie Glass didn’t consider herself a liar. Or at least not a born liar. She hadn’t made up stories in kindergarten about how she was secretly a princess in disguise, even though she wanted nothing more than to be just that. As a teenager she never pretended to have smoked pot or made up a fake boyfriend, even when doing so would have saved her a lot of embarrassment. For the most part, any lies she’d told had been crimes of omission. And, okay, yes, some of those omissions had been bigger than others. Some had been pretty massive, actually. Nevertheless, she wasn’t in the habit of making declarations she knew were patently false.

And yet here she was: dressed in a toga in the New York Botanical Garden, handing out free samples of “cottziki,” and lying.

She’d been hired by Queensridge Dairy to help with their #FitForAQueen campaign to give cottage cheese a face-lift, and she’d spent the past month trucking around New York and New Jersey trying to convince people cottage cheese wasn’t merely diet food for old ladies and health nuts. Today was Mother’s Day, the final day of the campaign, and Queensridge had arranged for Lizzie to camp out next to the food trucks on Daffodil Hill, hoping to snag some hungry families taking part in the Botanical Garden’s annual Mother’s Day party.

“Cottziki?” Lizzie offered cheerily, extending a tray of dill-and-cucumber-flecked curds toward a group of passersby.

The truth was, Lizzie hated cottage cheese. Hated it. For someone who cooked for a living, despising a food with such passion was awkward, if not unusual. The sour smell, the lumpy texture . . . she always felt as if she were being asked to eat someone else’s vomit. Every time she looked at the samples of cottage cheese tzatziki in those little plastic cups, she cringed. She had no idea why she’d taken this job.

That wasn’t true. She knew why. It paid, and she needed the money. And as long as someone out there was willing to exploit her former fame, she was happy to cash the check. There had been far fewer of those checks lately, as her television days drifted further into the past. Recently, even her personal chef gigs had started drying up, leaving her with a single client, who was demanding and impossible but who paid on time and in full. And of course there was the monthly column with Savor, but her contract was nearly up, and the magazine had recently appointed a new editor in chief, who’d spawned rumors about a “total magazine makeover.”

So it had come to this: pushing a food she couldn’t stomach onto strangers, telling them it was healthy and glamorous and they absolutely had to try it.

“Cottziki?” Lizzie repeated as another crowd walked past. This time a mother and her twentysomething daughter slowed their step to survey Lizzie’s offerings.

“Cott what?” the mother asked.

“Cottziki. Like tzatziki, but with cottage cheese instead of yogurt.”

“Why not just use yogurt?”

Lizzie smiled and trotted out her practiced spiel. “Cottage cheese is an excellent source of protein and vitamin A, and with its unique flavor profile, it takes dishes like tzatziki to the next level!”

“But isn’t it loaded with sodium? And those lumps . . . ick.”

You’re right! Lizzie thought. It’s gross! But I can’t afford my rent anymore, so I’m pretending it’s not!

“Give it a try,” Lizzie said. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

The mother and daughter eyed each other warily. “Here goes nothing . . .” the daughter said.

Lizzie watched as they both reached for a cup and brought the small plastic spoons to their lips. The daughter’s expression was unreadable, but the mother looked as if she’d sucked on a lemon.

“Not for me,” she said, and tossed the cup into the trash bin.

Lizzie smiled politely and adjusted her toga. Why was she wearing a toga, anyway? The whole costume only seemed to emphasize that what she was serving was emphatically not authentically Greek and that she was trying way too hard.

The mother and daughter began to walk away, when the daughter stopped and turned around. “Hey, didn’t you used to be on that show a few years back? Healthy University or something?”

“Healthy U.”

“Yeah, that’s it. What happened? I never see it on anymore.”

“It got canceled. A while ago, actually.”

“Oh.” She took in Lizzie’s costume and the electric-blue Queensridge Dairy food truck behind her. “So is this what you’re doing now?”

“Among other things.”

“That’s . . . cool.” She tried to sound enthusiastic, but Lizzie knew better. “Good luck to you.”

The daughter turned around and joined her mother down the walking path, and Lizzie told herself there was no reason to feel embarrassed, even if, deep down, she knew that was another lie.

An hour later, Lizzie had made little progress in her cottziki crusade. Apart from a handful of enthusiastic cottage cheese fans (whose sanity Lizzie couldn’t help but question), people generally didn’t see why they needed to try a lumpy riff on a Greek dish when they could get the real thing from the Greek food truck fifty feet away.

“This stuff any good?” asked Emilio, the Queensridge truck driver for the day. There seemed to be a different one every time.

“It’s okay,” Lizzie said. “Not my favorite.”

Emilio grabbed a cup and took a bite. “Eh. Not bad. Who made it?”

“Me.”

“And you say it’s just ‘okay’?”

“I’m my own biggest critic.”

That was true, but it also killed Lizzie to serve up a dish she could barely recommend. When she’d first taken the job, she pitched recipes that disguised her most hated food in dishes she loved: her grandmother’s noodle kugel, lasagna, deep-fried dumplings (because she figured pretty much anything tastes delicious if you dip it in batter and deep-fry it). But the #FitForAQueen campaign manager told Lizzie the point was to showcase the company’s product—not to hide it under so many ingredients the customers wouldn’t know it was there (which was, indeed, exactly what Lizzie was trying to do). Besides, healthy cuisine was Lizzie’s calling card, and things like fried food didn’t fit with her image.

So Lizzie came up with a battery of healthy, cottage cheese–centric recipes: herbed cottage cheese dip, cherry-and-oat cottage cheese breakfast parfait, honey-vanilla cottage cheese pudding. She could tolerate those recipes, and she even developed a chocolate–peanut butter “Snickers” protein shake she quite liked (though she was certain it would be better with yogurt). But then as Mother’s Day approached, the campaign manager got it in his head that a Greek-themed dish was essential, as if somehow togas and motherhood went hand in hand, and her riff on a Greek classic was born.

Lizzie stared across Daffodil Hill, taking in the bright yellow and white blooms, their fluffy petals fluttering in the warm spring breeze. After a cold April that had felt more like autumn, May had ushered in a spell of warm weather that had awakened all of the flowers and shrubs from their winter slumber. The vibrant fuchsia and white azaleas reminded Lizzie how much she missed her mother’s garden in Philadelphia, where her flame-colored azalea bush probably looked as if it were on fire right now.

Instinctively, Lizzie reached for her phone, only to realize she’d left it in the truck because her toga didn’t have pockets. There was a momentary lull in foot traffic, so Lizzie took the opportunity to rest for a few minutes in the front seat of the truck, where she’d left her phone on the dashboard.

She had a missed call and message from her mom. Lizzie had tried her earlier in the morning to wish her a happy Mother’s Day, but the call had gone straight to voice mail. She’d assumed her mom was still sleeping, but part of her worried, like she always did, that something was wrong. A few years ago, a friend had told Lizzie about his former neighbor, who died when she choked on a piece of chicken in her kitchen. The woman was divorced and lived alone, and all Lizzie could think was how easily that could happen to her own mother.

Lizzie listened to her mom’s message while she sat in the passenger seat, playing with a chestnut strand of hair that had come loose from her faux Greek updo.

“Hi, sweetie, it’s Mom.” Lizzie smiled at the sound of her mother’s voice. It had a gravelly quality, with a slight New York accent that betrayed the nearly four decades she’d lived in Philadelphia. “Sorry I missed your call earlier—if you can believe it, I only just woke up! But give me a ring when you get this. You said you might be able to take a late train to Philly? I know better than to get my hopes up, but . . . it would be great to see you. Anyway, hope your event is going well. Cottage cheese? Are pigs flying?”

Lizzie grinned.

“Hey, traffic’s picking up again,” Emilio called. “You should probably get back out here.”

“One sec’,” Lizzie called back as she quickly scrolled through her in-box. She scanned through the usual junk—sales at Williams Sonoma and the Gap, recipes from various food sites—but her smile tightened when she reached an e-mail from Jonah Sun, her editor at Savor:

Lizzie stared at the message, the world around her fading to silence. She read it two more times just to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood anything. So that was it. Over. Like her show, like her book deals, like everything else. Over. Okay, so she wasn’t fresh and new. She understood that. But she was only thirty! Surely she was still fresh-ish. People still loved her columns, or at least that’s what the e-mails she received led her to believe. Granted, there had been fewer of those e-mails lately, but she hadn’t received any telling her otherwise—that her recipes didn’t work or that her recipe for kale chips was so ten years ago.

“I’m still . . . somebody,” Lizzie said to herself, her phone clutched in her hand.

“You won’t be for long if you don’t get out there,” said Emilio, who’d snuck up behind her. “The boss will be pissed if he hears you were hanging in the truck all afternoon.”

“Sorry. Coming.” Lizzie slid the phone back on the dashboard, grabbed the tray of Greek curds, and tried to tell herself everything would be okay, even though at the moment she couldn’t see how that could possibly be true.

The problem was this: Lizzie was broke. Not properly broke, as in she had zero dollars in her bank account and nowhere to live, but “New York broke,” in a way that was becoming increasingly unsustainable.

Six years ago, she never would have dreamed she’d be in this position. Looking back on it now, she realized that was probably part of the problem. But she’d had a successful show on the Food Network and a two-book cookbook deal with Clarkson Potter, and she was making good money—not millions or, frankly, anywhere close, but enough to live a comfortable life in a hip Brooklyn neighborhood. She’d been invited to openings of some of the coolest New York restaurants and went to all sorts of parties and events, where people recognized her and everyone she met wanted to be her new best friend. She’d buy those new friends rounds of drinks and at the end of the night could take cabs home without worrying too much about the cost.

What she soon discovered was that comfort in New York had no buffer. Her life was like a shaky tower built of Popsicle sticks, and removing just one caused the entire structure to collapse. Gone were her carefree days of meals out and regular taxis. She started scrimping and saving, eating nearly every meal at home and keeping only the essentials in her pantry. She invested in a good pair of sneakers and walked everywhere she could reach in forty-five minutes or less on foot and used buses and the subway for the rest. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d bought a new article of clothing. Yet even with all of her commitment to frugality, she was still barely scraping by.

And now she was in even bigger trouble.

“Hey, what’s with the sour puss?” Emilio asked as they packed up the truck. The event was over, and not a moment too soon.

“Nothing. Long day.”

“Hey, at least they’re paying you for this. It’s not like you’re working for free.”

“Thank God for that.”

Emilio laughed, but Lizzie didn’t find any of this very funny. What was she going to do without the monthly check from Savor? They didn’t pay her a fortune, but the thousand dollars she received each month helped defray the cost of her rent, which she was having more and more trouble paying.

Would she have to move to Queens? She’d already moved from her apartment in Park Slope to a smaller, cheaper place in neighboring Greenwood Heights, and even that rent was a stretch. Frankly, she was barely in Greenwood Heights. She was really in the northern part of the predominately Mexican and Chinese neighborhood of Sunset Park. But nearly everyone she knew lived in Brooklyn these days, and the prospect of moving away from them—not just physically but also financially—made her feel like an even bigger failure.

“Got any Mother’s Day plans after this?” Emilio asked.

“I was thinking of taking the train to Philly to see my mom, but it kind of depends on the train schedule.” And the ticket price, she added to herself.

“No kids of your own then?”

Lizzie flinched. “Of my own?”

She’d only met Emilio this morning, and she was pretty sure she hadn’t said anything that would imply offspring of any kind.

“Yeah, I thought maybe . . .” He trailed off, clearly rethinking whatever he’d been about to say.

“I’m not married,” Lizzie said, waving her left hand.

“So? Doesn’t mean you couldn’t have a kid.”

“Emilio, how old do you think I am?”

As soon as she spoke the words, she wished she hadn’t. She wasn’t ready to hear the answer, unless it was a number less than thirty.

“I dunno . . . thirty?”

Lizzie’s shoulders relaxed. He didn’t think she was forty-two. Thank God.

She stiffened again, though, when she realized the implications of his answer: that thirty was a perfectly reasonable age to have a child. Because it was. Her mom had been thirty-one when she’d had Lizzie, and her aunt Linda had given birth at twenty-seven. Every day, it seemed, Lizzie was bombarded with images on Facebook of swaddled newborns in those little pink-and-blue-striped hats, the progeny of one of her classmates somewhere along the line. Every time she saw one of those photos, she had to fight the instinct to call one of her high school friends and exclaim, Oh my God, did you know Katie Allen got knocked up? In Lizzie’s mind, they were all still so young—certainly too young to be parents. Parents were old. Parents were responsible.

But gradually Lizzie realized everyone else was growing up, while she was being left behind. She didn’t even have a boyfriend, much less a baby. Right now she barely had a job. At least if she were still hosting Healthy U she could point to her high-flying career and fast-paced lifestyle. But instead, she was hawking cottage cheese with some guy named Emilio and had just lost yet another source of income.

“Good guess,” Lizzie said as Emilio sealed up the truck. “For a minute there you had me worried.”

“I was right? You’re thirty?”

“Yep,” Lizzie said, and as she did she sounded almost as surprised as he did.

As soon as Lizzie reached her apartment building, her phone rang. It was her mom.

“Mom, hey—sorry, I’m only just getting back from this job.”

“I guess that answers my question, then.”

“Which was?”

“Whether or not you were on a train.”

“Oh. No. Sorry.”

“No need to apologize. I wasn’t expecting it. Just hoping.”

Lizzie opened the front door to her building. It was a three-story walk-up, sandwiched between brick row houses of varying shades of red, beige, and cream, all of which seemed to bear tin awnings over their front doors.

“I didn’t expect the day to last this long. What time is it now? Five something?”

“Almost six.”

“Seriously? I swear, no matter how long I’ve lived here, I can’t get over how big this city is. It took me almost two hours to get home from the Bronx.”

Emilio had been kind enough to drop Lizzie at the subway on his way to the truck depot, but the D train ride lasted a good hour and when she factored in the time to and from the subway stops the journey seemed downright Odyssean.

“How’d the event go?”

“Okay,” Lizzie said, trying to sound upbeat. She wasn’t lying. The event was okay—not brilliant, not disastrous, just . . . okay—but she didn’t want to belabor the “just okay–ness” of the day because she didn’t want to alarm out her mom. Lizzie knew how anxious she was about her daughter living alone in a so-so neighborhood in Brooklyn, and she didn’t want to add to her angst. For as long as Lizzie could remember, she had tried to ease her mother’s worries. That was partly down to Lizzie’s guilt over her parents’ divorce and partly down to her eternal desire to fix things, and also, she supposed, partly down to a lifelong attempt to make up for the death of her brother, Ryan, when he was a baby.

“So I guess there’s no chance you’ll make it to Philly tonight, huh?”

“I don’t think so,” Lizzie said as she let herself into her apartment.

Her mom sighed. “Ah, well. Maybe next Mother’s Day.”

“Hold on a sec’; I didn’t say I wasn’t coming at all. I said not tonight.”

“Oh!” Her mom’s voice brightened. “You might come this week? When?”

“Well . . . I wanted to run an idea by you first.”

Lizzie took a deep breath. She’d thought about this the entire journey back from the Botanical Garden. At first, she’d started crunching the numbers, trying to figure out how many new clients she’d need to pick up for her personal chef work to make up for the lost magazine column and dwindling cookbook royalties. But when she started factoring in transportation costs and travel time, she wasn’t sure she could accommodate as many clients as she’d need.

And then she started wondering: Why the hell am I doing this? For years she’d convinced herself she needed to be in New York, and for many of those years that was true. She’d shot her show in New York, and her agent, editor, and publisher were all there, too. And the food and restaurant scene in New York couldn’t be beat. Why would she live anywhere else?

But numbers weren’t adding up anymore. She wasn’t shooting a show, and her agent barely returned her e-mails, much less invited her for lunch or drinks. For a while, she got by on her former fame, but the Queensridge Dairy gig was the first promotional opportunity she’d had in a long, long time (and from what she heard, she only got it after a long list of other talent said no first). The fact that someone recognized her today had actually come as a surprise. Most people had figured she was simply another millennial looking to pick up extra cash on the weekend. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had asked for her autograph. Certainly not in the last two years.

And so she had made a decision.

“What if I moved home?”

“Home? With me?”

“Just for a bit, until I figure out what I’m doing.”

“What you’re doing with what?”

“My career.”

“But . . . I thought things were going well. Queensridge Dairy hired you to make cottage cheese seem hip! And you have that client with the Fabergé egg collection and gold wallpaper. . . .”

“Mrs. Sokolov? Yeah, she’s crazy. Nightmare client. And the other stuff isn’t . . . well, as regular as I’d like.”

“But for someone like you, who has such a strong background, who went to Penn.” She stopped abruptly. They both knew why.

“I’m not planning on sleeping until noon and sponging off you for months. I just think it’s time for me to pull the plug on New York, at least temporarily. I feel like I’m paying for the privilege of living here and not getting much in return.”

“Oh, believe me, I hear you. Why do you think your father and I decided to stay in Philly? It’s just . . . I worry about you.”

“I know. But you shouldn’t. I’m fine. And I think this is the right decision.”

“Well, if you’re sure, then I’m sure. I guess you can write from anywhere. And there are plenty of people in Philadelphia and the surrounding area looking for a personal chef.”

“Exactly.”

“I’ll need to get your room in order . . . and the pantry is an embarrassment.. . .”

“Mom, all of that can wait until I arrive. I’ll help you.”

“Oh! And I’ll have to stock up on oatmeal and yogurts. And eggs! And those honey-almond granola bars you used to buy all the time. You still eat those, right?” Her voice was brighter now.

“Sure.”

“Oh, good.” She hummed into the receiver. “My baby is coming home. I can’t believe it.”

Lizzie smiled to herself and held her breath, not wanting to admit out loud that as much as she stood by her decision, she couldn’t believe it either.

Lizzie turned onto Waverly Road, feeling more confident than she’d expected. When her aunt Linda called her with a potential summer job—a private chef gig at the beach house of CC Media’s chief operating officer—Lizzie wasn’t sure she wanted it. She’d heard strange stories about Jim Silvester and his family over the years, mostly from her aunt, who’d been his executive assistant for more than a decade. And Lizzie knew that working as a hired hand for extremely wealthy families came with a surfeit of potential hazards: esoteric requests, inflated expectations, complete lack of personal time.

But as Lizzie drove down the road in her mother’s Honda Accord she sighed in relief as she surveyed the houses around her. These weren’t the twenty-thousand-square-foot manses she’d imagined when she heard the Silvesters lived in Gladwyne, the crème de la crème of Philadelphia’s Main Line. She’d once read an article that listed Gladwyne’s residents as some of the wealthiest in the country, along with those of Beverly Hills and Greenwich, Connecticut. But from what she could see, the houses around her looked . . . well, normal. Bigger than her mother’s quaint redbrick colonial in Glenside, a thirty-minute drive from here, but not gargantuan. Not obscene.

“You will reach your destination in two hundred yards,” the GPS told her. “Your destination is on the left.”

Lizzie looked to her left. Okay, so the homes were beginning to look a bit more . . . stately. In fact, for a minute she thought the one she just passed was a hotel. But it wasn’t the Silvesters’ home. Theirs might be like the others she’d seen earlier—big but reasonable. That’s what she was hoping for in general: a family that had a big income and a big personality but that was also reasonable. After so many years cobbling together a living from different sources, Lizzie was ready for a summer of steady income and predictability, with an employer who didn’t shout at her in Russian while dressed in a gold lamé duster jacket.

“You have reached your destination,” the GPS said.

“Oh,” Lizzie said as she looked to her left. “Oh.”

She gulped as she took in the tall wrought-iron gate that stretched across a cobblestone driveway, both sides framed by tall stone-and-brick pillars. The lip of the driveway was framed by two flower beds, each of which was filled with perfectly pruned boxwoods and white and violet impatiens. The black mulch looked as if it had just been laid that morning, and the plantings were all spaced with scientific exactitude.

She turned in and stopped in front of the gate. There was a small call box to the left, so she lowered the car window and pressed the button.

“Hello?” said a woman with a slight foreign accent of indeterminate origin.

“Hi . . . yes . . . it’s Lizzie Glass. About the summer job? I’m . . . here.”

Obviously, you idiot, she thought. Where else would you be? Hong Kong? She hadn’t been for a job interview in ages, and she was suddenly very nervous.

“Yes. Okay. Please come in.” Lizzie thought the accent sounded Spanish, but she couldn’t be sure.

The gates juddered open, and Lizzie pulled through them and continued along the driveway until she reached a large parking area in front of the house.

“Holy stromboli,” Lizzie whispered as her eyes crawled up the building’s gray stone façade. The house rose four stories to a gabled roof, whose points and peaks were lined with limestone bricks. The footprint seemed to stretch on forever—for miles, it seemed—and she couldn’t believe only one family lived here. She was terrible when it came to estimating distances or square footages by sight, but she knew her mom’s house was about two thousand square feet, and, from the outside at least, she guessed she could fit about eight of her mom’s houses in this one. Eight. She shook her head in disbelief.

She grabbed her knife case and bag of ingredients and made for the front door. When she’d talked to Mrs. Silvester on the phone earlier in the week, they’d discussed the interview format. Mrs. Silvester would ask Lizzie a series of questions, and then Lizzie would cook a sample meal in the Silvesters’ kitchen to showcase her skills and style.

Lizzie pressed the buzzer beside the elegant walnut door and peered into one of the small windows that lined either side. Before she could glimpse more than the twinkle of the crystal chandelier in the foyer, her view was blocked by a demurely dressed Hispanic woman with a narrow face, dark hair, and striking dark, round eyes.

The door swung open. “Hello,” the woman said, ushering Lizzie into the foyer. “Mrs. Silvester will be down in one minute. You can wait here.”

“Great,” said Lizzie. “Thanks.”

The woman sm. . .