New York City is a big place but [ SLOANE INES RIBEIRO ], a [ 28 ] year-old [ CIS FEMALE ] has made it their home in [ ASTORIA, QUEENS ]. In this city you can be anything you want to be and [SHE ] is a [ EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT AT VOGUE ]. Described by loved ones as [ DRIVEN, EFFICIANT, AND POLISHED] but those wanting to bring them down might say they are [BITTER, SUPERFICIAL, AND GUARDED] but I guess that is up to everyone else to decide! You never know who you’re going to meet around here, but weirdly they look like [ CAMILA MENDES ] - what are the odds?
Tw: alcohol poisoning, death, alzheimer's, car crash, domestic abuse
Growing up without a father has never been something Sloane thought much of to be honest. She was always told by her mother that he wasn’t someone worth knowing and took the woman at face value - choosing to focus instead on her love of all things fashion. Quite the departure from Adriana Ribeiro’s career path which had taken her to the top of the police force, ending up as a SVU detective working out of the downtown Chicago precinct. They lived a comfortable life, Sloane spending a lot of time with her grandparents when her mom was working, so much so that they became like a second set of parents to her, her grandmother the one who would sit with her granddaughter on her lap looking through the pages of Vogue like she was reading her Goodnight Moon. It was really no surprise she developed an interest in the garments hanging from the impossibly beautiful woman enclosed in those glossy pages, dreams to one day not be one of them, but to dress one in something she’d designed herself.
School was uneventful for the girl, she was popular and managed to safely situate herself into the somewhat bitchy clique of cheerleaders who would play toot or boot with everyones outfits as they came and went from the dining hall during lunch period. It kept her secure, it gave her a platform, plus it came with perks. She got to date the hottest football players, wear the latest trends, and the excise cheer practice demanded gave her a nice ass. A win win. So despite her grades not being anything special she sailed through her high school years with arguably minimal speed bumps. Sure there was the odd pregnancy scare here and there, one or two of her friends ended up in A&E to have their stomachs pumped, but who doesn’t have stories like that from their teen years? What mattered to Sloane was FIT. She had her eyes set on the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York since she was old enough to know such a place existed so every paper she turned in was simply enough to get her to that end goal, nothing more, nothing less. Breaking her back to get straight As in math wasn’t going to make her any more likely to win a spot at her fashion school of choice so she didn’t bother to do it, preferring to focus on her social life when she could.
Some people called Sloane Ribeiro materialistic but she preferred to call herself fashion savvy. Always knowing what had come down the runway at Paris Fashion Week and making sure she secured herself the closest version she could afford, scouring second hand shops, websites, and apps to get designer items that a teen really shouldn’t be able to own. Soon she’d built up quite the collection, which hadn’t done anything good for her attitude. Slowly gaining an air of superiority over others that stretched further than just being a popular kid at school. She was so sure she was destined for something special she began to manifest that though her actions - which in turn led to some thinking of her as a snob. Which…wasn’t too far from the truth, at least from her school persona. At home she was much more mellow, spending time with her grandparents or her mom when she was home, although this was rare. It wasn’t until she was eighteen and her grandmother was put into a home that the girl started to really become cold. Her grandfather not far behind his wife within six months both were in an old peoples home about an hour away and their memories dwindled rapidly. For a while Sloane would visit, take her grandma the new issues of Vogue to read her as if the roles were reversed from when she was younger, but it began to get too painful. By the time she stopped visiting they would greet her with nothing but blank stares. Sloane made the choice to stop the visits, out of sight out of mind, at least that was what she told herself. Even though both of them are still alive in Chicago even now she doesn’t tell anyone that, the idea of having to explain the situation too painful to comprehend.
At twenty she moved to New York City to attend the Fashion Institution of Technology - finally. Her whole life had been leading up to this point and she could be more ready. Perfectionism was too nice of a way to phrase the way she approached everything she set her mind to, because failure to Sloane wasn’t an option. There was one shot in the fashion world so she sure as hell wasn’t going to throw it away. About a year ago, half way through her third of her four years at the school, the phone call came she’d been expecting for years at this point. Her mother had been shot in the line of duty and died before EMTs could get to the scene, apparently it was a hostage negotiation gone bad, but the details really weren’t important. Since she was about seven, old enough to notice how many funerals her mom went to for colleagues, she’d been waiting for this kind of call. It was so rare to get out scot free in her line of work, why should Adriana Ribeiro be one of the lucky ones? Really the girl had mourned her mother’s death years before it had even occurred when she’d realised that it was more about when rather than if, which was why she appeared to so easily squish the pain down inside her so she could carry on with her daily life. After all, who do you call when your mother dies? She had no father figure, her grandparents didn’t know her name anymore, and all the friends she had from school were at home married to their high school sweethearts - a lifetime away from Sloane now. Except for one thing.
Sloane too was married to her high school sweetheart, but it was no longer happy. Sure it had been for a while, they had moved to New York City together, her for FIT and him to attend NYU. Charlie, her husband, was from a well off family so naturally that had attracted the brunette to him the second their eyes locked in science class, and she had made it her aim from then on to mastermind a way for him to be hers. And of course she had managed it just like anyone would have been willing to bet on had they known her master plan because when she set her mind to something she wouldn’t stop until it was completed. The marriage was happy for the first few years. Excitement at being in a new city together where they were able to build their own lives no longer restricted by their hometown they’d moved into a well placed apartment in Astoria while the two of them studied and on graduation Sloane went to work at Vogue while Charlie ending up on Wall Street, they were an obnoxiously privileged young couple which lead them to argue. It started as bickering, just over little things that would niggle at each one, but eventually it broke town into full blown screaming matches at all hours of the day or night. Her husband turned violent towards Sloane but this remains to this day something she never told a soul about, appearances being something she valued too highly to permit those looking in to see the cracks in the facade. It went on for years with her convincing herself that every apology he gave would be the real one, until finally she could stand it no longer. The headstrong girl who had been dominated into submission for going on four years broke free of the chains by some unknown power of strength and filed for divorce. She told no one, Charlie was refusing to sign the papers, Sloane would spend more nights at hotels than she did at home claiming it was closer to work but really she just didn’t want to be left alone with him. In public though? On social media? To their friends? Everything was rosey.
About six weeks ago Charlie was involved in a car crash downtown, heading back to the office from a lunch meeting his taxi driver had tried to cut through a light that was rapidly turning red at the last second and the passenger right side door had taken the brunt of the impact. He’d been in the ICU for almost three weeks when his condition deteriorated so much that the doctors finally declared him braindead with no option but to remove him from life support. Leaving Sloane a widow from a marriage she’d wanted out of anyway, but not like this. Now she was tied to Charlie Ines for the rest of her life without any chance of escape and sometimes she would wonder if this was all an elaborate ploy from his to get the last hold over her, stop her from ever truly carrying on with her life, his shadow always looming in the background. Everyone expected her to be the destroyed widow so to some she played the part, but it was hard. How were you meant to mourn a man you hadn’t been properly in love with for years by this point? Sure she was upset by his death, but nothing on the level people assumed. Instead she became more cutting, ruthless, some would call her a bitch. And they wouldn’t be wrong. Sloane’s anger at Charlie, at the world, at her own emotions, they all manifested into a superficial callousness - a rage inside her she couldn’t escape just festering there while she tried to carry on with her daily life in some sort of normal way. Death followed the girl at all times it felt like, she wondered if she was cursed, and so she pushed people away as if she was.
