Sheer, page 1
Also by Vanessa Lawrence
Ellipses
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Copyright © 2026 by Vanessa Lawrence
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Hardcover ISBN 9780593854860
Ebook ISBN 9780593854877
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Dedication
Prologue
Day One
Origins
Day One
Natural Instincts
“You’ve Got Talent”
Day Two
Cosmetic Awakenings
Vigorous Heterosexuality
Day Three
Caroline Part One
Caroline Part Two
Day Three
Lust in a Bottle
Hot and Bothered
Day Four
Image Is Everything
Be a Boss
Day Five
Absolute Devotion
Investor Relations
Day Five
Friends and Family
Ahead of the Game
Day Six
Money, Money, Money
Day Six
Building Trust
London
Day Seven
Clashing Visions
A Fresh Pair of Eyes
Day Eight
Sly Part One
Day Eight
Sly Part Two
The Aftermath
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_154717897_
For Dana, who makes everything better
Prologue
At rush hour on a Wednesday, in the stifling purgatory between summer and fall, I do something completely crazy: I leave the office early. I’ve had a professional victory. Elizabeth, my brilliant publicist, has resolved a nagging issue at work and I can think of no better way to celebrate than vacating the premises.
My Uber carries me from the SoHo headquarters of my beauty company, Reveal, to my apartment building on Central Park West. Things that would normally irk me—the artificial cherry scent from the air freshener tree; the driver’s choice of heavy metal, at an earsplitting decibel level—glide over me, smoothly, like face oil. My body is airy, borderline levitative. I am not one of those New Age spiritualists, but I will venture to say the lightness in my bones is as much existential as it is corporeal. Something has shifted. After years of diminishment at the hands of so many men, of doubts from the Board and the public, I have returned to my signature pinnacle of achievement. Maxine Thomas the beauty visionary is back.
When the Uber drops me off at my building’s awning, I pause before the doorman. I am not ready to settle on a sofa, glass of ice-cold vodka in hand. I don’t want the day to end.
“I’m going for a walk,” I tell my doorman. “A sunset walk,” I add, as though that clarifies matters. “When do I ever get to do that?”
“Very good, Ms. Thomas,” he says, closing the door. He smooths the placket of his black uniform. “Enjoy your walk.”
The entrance to the park is across the avenue. A winding path beckons me toward the park’s main drive and beyond that, to the reservoir with its sweeping view of the surrounding skyline and greenery. Every morning I rise at dawn to pound mile after mile into various dirt and asphalt trails; a leisurely end-of-day meander, though, with no purpose beyond visceral pleasure? That is the stuff of fairy tales.
Unfortunately, the dusty path circling the reservoir, no longer the keeper of the city’s official drinking water, is crowded with pedestrians. There are the obvious tourists, with their long-lens digital cameras strung around their necks. The Upper East Side denizens in their clingy black yoga togs and quilted down vests, despite the balmy September breeze. The Upper West Side habitués in their slouchy track pants, unironic waist packs, and orthopedic footwear. A few extra-fit and misguided twenty-somethings have chosen the narrow trail as their running path. Shouts of “On your left!” and “Watch it!” puncture the urban idyll. Normally, the confluence of oblivious out-of-towners and ill-advised athletes would undo me. Not on this evening.
The sun is blood orange. Streaks of magenta and violet and coral zip across the sky. The pool of the reservoir is euphoric with color. I could dream up decades and decades of Reveal product shades from this beauty, though I prefer a more intimate source for my makeup inspiration: women. I am on the eastern portion of the reservoir path, parallel with the white curves of the Guggenheim Museum, when my phone vibrates.
The screen shows Elizabeth’s name, so I accept the call.
“Elizabeth,” I say. “You’ll never believe it. I’m strolling around the reservoir at sunset, like some rich housewife with nothing better to do. It’s fabulous. You should try it one day.”
Elizabeth says nothing. I hear the tinkle of ice against glass. It doesn’t seem like she is at the office.
“Elizabeth?” I ask. “Are you there?” I pause my walk and step to the side of the path.
“Max,” says Elizabeth. She is the steadiest person I know and yet her voice shakes my phone. “We need to talk.”
“So talk,” I say. The sunset is peaking. The colors are so fiery I think my heart will burst.
Elizabeth talks. Suddenly, it isn’t the sky but my world that is engulfed by flames.
Day One
Morning
Bliss isn’t a first-class ticket to Bora Bora. It isn’t a prime-time table at the hottest restaurant in town. It isn’t a lightning-fast metabolism that allows a young woman to eat like an Olympic swimmer and still fit into her size twenty-five jeans. Grade-A Mongolian cashmere, custom-tailored shirts, jars of face cream boasting ingredients the FDA will never approve: Bliss is none of those things. It’s the amnesia that coats your vision like Vaseline when you first open your eyes to the morning light before you remember the nightmare your life has become. Before you feel the weight of the world’s disdain.
I wake at 5 a.m. like it is any other day. The bedroom is dark and cool. The sheets are silky against my skin. Habit propels me out of bed and into the bathroom to begin my morning toilette. It isn’t until I am standing in the middle of that white marble room, one leg partially covered in the black spandex of my running leggings, that I realize I have nowhere to go. There are no meetings to attend, no company to oversee, and therefore no need to run before dawn breaks through the darkness outside. I have no reason to be.
Down go the leggings. On go my pajamas. Back to bed I trudge. After years of 5 a.m. starts, my body refuses to rest. It is off to the kitchen, then, to brew some coffee. I sit with a searing mug, dark as a void, at my dining room table, soft light glinting off its polished surface, a blank document on my laptop screen. I am ready to type away. Stab away is more like it.
Before I disabled the search engine alert for my name, my phone hammered notifications at me like a firing squad. It is so interesting that The New York Times has no problem printing the word bitch but draws the line at fuck. That fifth letter makes all the difference.
This is the kind of thing that gets my blood burning. It’s good no one’s around because I’d scald them with my touch. Everyone on the internet thinks they know what happened. So does the Board. Only I know the truth. The Bible tells us that the truth shall set us free. If the Bible were written today that line would require serious revision.
I need to write my story, the one the Board will never hear and that the public will never know. Even my lawyer, Sandrine, will never grasp the full extent of it. Sandrine is my defense attorney, which suggests that I require defending. I guess I do in the most literal sense. But defensiveness implies wrongdoing and I am here because of someone else’s wrongdoing. Two someone elses, in fact.
Ell
Obviously, I can’t say this to the Board. It would sound too angry, too aggressive. People like their women leaders unemotional. I can compartmentalize as well as any man, though when I do, I’m accused of being an ice queen or a power-hungry witch. No matter what, I am an outsider. My whole life, all forty years of it, has been one long battle to manifest my intrinsic worth in a world that has told me that I have none.
I have never considered my existence in its totality. Autobiographical exercises have always struck me as deeply self-indulgent. In this moment, I recognize that they don’t stem from ego; they grow from necessity. Other people have painted me as a monster. I need to show who I really am. As always, transparency will be my savior.
I cannot scream my story from the rooftops—no one can stop me from writing it down.
Origins
It all started when I was six years old. That may sound young, but I was always precocious. My mother was out grocery shopping and didn’t want to bring me, so she left me home alone in our white clapboard house. I understand this is something mothers are no longer permitted to do, that today they would be reprimanded and even arrested for such a misdeed; in 1980, this was a very common occurrence. My mother didn’t have regular childcare. While my parents would splurge on a babysitter for the occasional date night at a restaurant or movie theater, there was no budget for a day-to-day nanny.
My mother wasn’t negligent. She informed our next-door neighbor that she would be gone for forty minutes. Left to my own devices, I grew bored of the television set and wandered out of the living room, up the stairs, down the second-floor hallway. Nubby gray carpeting covered the warped floorboards. Into my parents’ bedroom I went.
This room was usually off limits to me, explicitly so. My parents were adamant about their need for privacy. I was ordered never to enter their room without a preliminary knock, regardless of whether the door was closed or ajar. Even once they called, “Come in” or waved me forward, I never ventured farther into the room than a few steps beyond the doorway.
The spiritual dead bolt on my parents’ bedroom only made it more appealing. My mother’s absence was an opportunity of which I took full advantage. The oatmeal wall-to-wall carpeting in their room was more luxurious than the floor coverings in the rest of the house. I waded across it slowly; my feet sank into its plush pile. The floral sheets on the bed clung to the mattress like a second skin. Unlike in my room there was an en suite bathroom.
I tiptoed across the bathroom’s cold blue tiles, as though my caution would negate any wrongdoing. In the corner, by a window that overlooked our small, well-maintained backyard, was a tufted stool on casters that fit tidily beneath the counter. When I knelt on the stool, I was barely high enough to see myself in the mirror. My downy, white-yellow head was nearly the same shade as my porcelain skin. Everything popped against that canvas, especially my molten-brown eyes, which complicated my angelic portrait with a flash of darkness.
There was a clear plastic bin on the counter, sectioned off like a cafeteria lunch tray. One of the compartments held a few short, wood-handled brushes. Another had a stack of closed metallic compacts. I tried to open the top one, but my recently clipped nails couldn’t manage it. There was a collection of colored liquids, various pinks, reds, and oranges, in glass bottles. I had watched my mother apply these liquids to her toenails with the brushes built into the bottles’ caps. She would choose a different one for each week of the month and then repeat the rotation.
A corner of the tray held six or seven shiny metal tubes that I had seen my mother use to color her lips. I reached for the nearest tube and after some fiddling managed to twist its cap off. Inside, there was a stub of hot pink that came to a rounded point. I didn’t know how to push the hot-pink wax out of the tube, so I stuck my right index finger inside and rubbed it against the sloped top of the stub.
The substance was soft and slippery. It reminded me of fudge. I ran my right index finger across the underside of my left wrist, leaving a hot-pink streak in its wake.
I peered over my shoulder, out the bathroom doorway, across the expanse of my parents’ bedroom. Then I went for it. I stuck my finger back inside the tube and mushed my finger against my lips. In the mirror, I considered my handiwork.
I had colored outside my natural lip lines. The messy slash of bubble gum made me look like I had taken a slug from a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. Why did grown women do this to themselves, I wondered, as I frowned at my reflection. My lips seemed alien, like they were no longer part of my face. They didn’t look pretty or fun. They looked wrong.
Downstairs, the front door slammed. My parents’ room was at the back of the house, so I hadn’t heard my mother’s car pull up the driveway. I quickly replaced the tube’s cap and put the tube back in the bin. With a tissue from a box on the counter I wiped at my pink lips. It made the situation worse. I splashed water on my lips and rubbed them with my fingers. My mouth was still a furious pink. Then I had my first of many brilliant ideas.
I dashed for the stairs and tiptoed down. By some miracle, my mother had yet to call out my name or come looking for me. The front door was ajar and there were a few brown paper bags of groceries in the foyer. My mother was still emptying our car’s trunk.
Her next destination was going to be our kitchen. That was where I was headed, too. I ran directly to the fridge and scanned the contents; nothing helpful presented itself. I opened the freezer door. Bingo.
The front door slammed again. I reached for a cherry Popsicle, ripped it out of its plastic sheath, stuck it in my mouth, and sucked on it. Hard.
“Maxine!” my mother exclaimed as she walked in on me, her arms full of brown paper bags. She set the bags on top of the kitchen table. “You know you’re not allowed to have Popsicles without asking.”
She snatched the frozen treat out of my hand and threw it in the garbage.
“Sorry, Mommy,” I said, shrugging my shoulders and staring at the floor in what I hoped seemed like remorse.
“What were you thinking,” my mother admonished, as she examined my face. “You’re a mess. Go upstairs to your bathroom and wait for me. I’m going to scrub your face after I put these groceries away.”
I hung my head and walked slowly out of the kitchen and up the stairs. A plastic footstool helped me see above the sink. I looked at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror and grinned at my cleverness. My mother hadn’t spied any pinkness on my lips thanks to the Popsicle’s red syrup. As I stared more closely, I noticed that my mouth had a ruby flush, different from when it was spackled in bubblegum beeswax. The cherry juice was completely sheer; it let my lips peek through. Why didn’t women wear something that looked more like this, I wondered.
Well over a decade later, when I created Flush, a lip and cheek tint that was my first product for Reveal and that remains our bestseller to this day, it was in no small part because of this formative moment. At six years old, I had already uncorked the secret to professional success: never settle for anything that makes you feel like a stranger to yourself.
* * *
—
I’m sure this sounds hyperbolic as a founder’s origin story. What kind of an egomaniac believes that she had already cracked the code to innovation while in kindergarten? At six years old, I couldn’t foretell the vector of this discovery; now at forty, I know this was the beginning of my narrative.
