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blond highlights.”
    “Oh, the Chloe,” I say, recognition striking at last. It’s their fault that it took me so long. If they’d had the presence of mind to bring the May issue with them, we could have sorted this out five minutes ago. “Her name was Carla Hayden?”
    “Carla Hayden Keller,” says Allison.
    “Carla Hayden Keller?” I repeat.
    “Carla Hayden Keller,” Kate nods.
    “You mean he’s married?” I try to imagine the sort of woman who would wed a bad-tempered, wart-faced troll. Short, pudgy and dishwater-brown didn’t seem the type.
    “She’s his sister,” corrects Sarah with a laugh. “She dropped her last name to throw Jane off the scent.”
    “His sister?” Keller never gave the slightest indication that he had siblings, so we didn’t factor any into his life story. It seems bad-mannered—and typical—of him to start throwing them around now. “I didn’t know he had a sister,” I say, cross. We should have known about a sister.
    “He has two,” Kate declares.
    “The bastard,” I say, trying to make sense of this development, which was at odds with what we already knew about him. Sisters should have been a civilizing force on the young Alex. “They must be older. They must be older and domineering and mean like Cinderella’s stepsisters.”
    Sarah shakes her head. “They’re younger.”
    “Damn.” I don’t know how such an awful man can have younger sisters. It just doesn’t seem possible.
    “So you get why he owes you a favor?” asks Kate.
    I do twenty to thirty makeovers a year. Nobody has ever treated it like a favor. “No.”
    “You changed her life,” Sarah says.
    This is precisely the sort of silly nonsense we propagate in our magazine but it’s not true. Your happiness doesn’t really depend on the type of eyelash curler you buy. “I changed her hair.”
    “Two days after leaving here with her blond highlights and Chloe dress, Carla Hayden Keller got a job as a host of Generation Y on the Metro channel. At a Metro function, she met renowned corporate financier Alistair Concoran, who fell instantly in love with her. They got married two months later, bought a house in Westchester and are even now expecting their first child,” Allison says with a wide smile.
    “So you see,” says Kate, “Alex Keller owes you one.”

Alex Keller
    E veryone in the office has a Keller story. Although no one has ever seen the confirmed misanthrope, we’ve all had our share of run-ins. He is always slamming the phone down in disgust or sending rude e-mails with impatient replies or dashing off abrupt little notes that cut interns to the quick.
    He keeps his office door closed. You never see light shining through the frosted windows, and if you didn’t hear the constant disco beat emanating from behind his door, you’d assume the room was empty. When you have something for him, you follow the prescribed delivery system. You place it in his in-box, knock twice and walk away. Turn around a second later and it’s gone. The whole process is cloaked in mystery, and you feel like Dorothy leaving a broomstick for the Wizard of Oz.
    Alex Keller is the events editor for Fashionista. Every month he fills a dozen or so pages with pictures from premieres, galas, benefits and openings. All happy parties are alike and when you look at the layouts you can hardly tell what distinguishes a Givenchy fete from a breast cancer fundraiser. Take the cookie-cutter genericness of every wedding you’ve ever attended, add a few thousand candles and you have Alex Keller’s section. Only the names are different.
    The candid snapshots, which vary only slightly from the ones in your high school yearbook, are usually accompanied by blocks of text describing the bash. Keller’s snappy writing style—always chatty, frequently punny and seldom dull—mimics the Page Six gossips, only without the insinuations of sex and greed.
    Since his life, tinged with glamour, offers no justification for his