Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Harper 2014

Copyright © Holly Peterson 2014

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Holly Peterson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007233052

Ebook Edition © September 2014 ISBN: 9780007583881

Version: 2014-08-05

Dedication

To my four parents in their starring roles as role models: Sally for teaching empathy, Pete for personifying drive, Joan for dispensing wisdom at every turn, and Michael for setting a high intellectual bar for all of us.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1. Memory Lane

2. Homefront

3. Power Jaunt

4. Party in the House

5. That Woman Again

6. Bizarre Behavior

7. Wifely Conundrums

8. Pulled Toward the Edge

9. No Choice but the Grindstone

10. Necessary Reckoning

11. Crash Course

12. Left-Field Curveball

13. Date with Destruction?

14. Danger Zone

15. Spin Cycle

16. Confrontation Catalyst

17. Torn in All Directions

18. Guests at the Masquerade

19. Focused and Frustrated

20. Playing the Procrastinator

21. Under His Spell

22. Blasting Heat

23. Landed Gentry

24. The Guard Saw All

25. Texan Rage

26. How to Keep It Clean Now?

27. Can’t Climax Yet

28. Simmering Situations

29. Please Don’t Let This Happen

30. Rare Moment of Maturity

31. Life in Boxes

32. Fear of the Unknown

33. Percolating Problems

34. Girl Loses Girl?

35. Cash Call

36. Afternoon Feast

37. Girls Can Hurt More Than Boys

38. Hold on Tight

39. Surprise in the SUV

40. Courtesy Call

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Author

About the Publisher

1
Memory Lane

The taxi driver took off down Seventh Avenue as if he’d just mainlined a pound of crystal meth. This guy was on a kamikaze mission, reckless even by New York standards where taxi drivers charge down the streets with no regard for their passengers’ lives.

“Slow down, sir, please!” I yelled through the opening in the glass partition as I contemplated ditching this driver at the next corner.

He slammed on his brakes. “Okay, lady! I’ll slow it down a little. Yeah.” But when the light turned green, he began weaving between cars and playing chicken to blow past the giant city buses. We brushed a bike messenger who retaliated with a fisted punch on the trunk. I again waffled about getting out, but it was that bustling time of early rush hour just before the taxi shift change, when I wouldn’t be able to get another, so I stayed put and latched my seat belt. Besides, my kids were waiting for me at home, and I was already half an hour late leaving the office.

I sat strapped in the ratty backseat, tossed back and forth down the length of Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue like a Ping-Pong ball.

This car is going to crash.

The lethal night of the plane accident came back to me in waves, starting with the instinctual pangs telling me not to step up from the tarmac onto the slippery, rickety staircase of the little six-seater. This plane is not made for all this stormy snow, I had said to myself that night. And I was right.

So much of my life had gone according to plan since then, much of it mapped out in a two-decades’-long fit to fix wrongs—the most evil happening on the eve of my sixteenth birthday that winter night, eighteen-years and four-months ago.

MY FATHER HAD been planning the trip all year. He had told Mom it was his chance to spend a few days one-on-one with his only child, teaching me the secrets of ice fishing at his favorite spot on Diamond Lake up north. He’d been talking about this as long as I could remember, and, finally, a week before my sixteenth birthday, Mom said I was old enough to go.

Dad had handed in his boarding pass outside, and he came onto the small commuter plane in Montreal, dusting snow off his beard and shoulders once he managed to jam his huge frame into the seat. I knew Dad saw the fear in my face and tried his best to reassure me. All I could think about was how small and fragile that plane seemed against the howling winds outside. Deep down that voice was telling me this was a bad idea, but I kept my mouth shut at first. I didn’t want to look like a frightened little girl.

Dad smelled of metal and cold air, a scent that further unsettled me because it was so far from his usual salty warmth. I rubbed his arm to chase away the odor and he smiled down at me.

On the plane, I thought danger was nearby but I didn’t want to scare anybody. Others have certainly had that same feeling before they board a plane with severe weather forecast in the flight path, wondering if they should resist getting on because this could be the one that goes down. A moment’s hesitation before they step over that little gap and feel the rush of cold outside air between the boarding ramp and the aircraft front galley. Is my mind playing tricks or do I somehow know this plane is going down? Am I having some kind of psychic experience? Am I going to be on the local news as the one person who survived only because I didn’t get on at the last minute?

The whole body stiffens on the ramp for a moment to stall and consider the possibility.

But then, No. That’s ridiculous. Screw it. I’m getting on. Statistics say it is more dangerous to drive to the airport than to get on this plane.

At least most often it goes like that. I guess you don’t need to be clairvoyant to know that during a blizzard, when a lumberjack pilot in a plaid shirt working for a low-budget commuter airline in Canada’s outback says, “It’s just a little snow,” you get out of the twin-engine Cessna and run for your life.

MY PLAN SINCE then has been to run for my life. Run away from a boyfriend who kept traveling too far, run into a marriage that I thought would work. Rush to have kids to cement the union. Rush home to them today. This plan means I’ve tried to solve everything quickly before all hell descended on me again. Trauma is like that. It smashes into your life out of the blue and just lingers, dripping like a broken egg.

The kamikaze taxi lurched me back into the New York present, and the frayed seat belt snapped into place, jerking me hard. “Please slow down, sir,” I yelled again at the driver. “That light was clearly turning red, and you were never going to make it, so you don’t need to speed up just to slam the brakes.”

“Okay, lady. Thanks for the driving tip. All I need at the end of my shift.” This time he took off two full seconds before the light even turned green. I clenched my teeth and again started to feel that old tingle I’d felt in my bones as the pilot had swung the plane out of the boarding area some eighteen years earlier.

THE ENGINES HAD revved up as he made a ninety-degree tight turn at the end of the snowy runway. I gripped my armrests, imagining how my funeral would be. Matching father-daughter coffins. That’s what it would look like. I blinked hard against the image.

Dad seemed oblivious to my fears. “You don’t actually sit outside and fish all day. You can leave the lines in and then go check them,” Dad went on. “You’re gonna love it, Allie Lamb. No trout tastes like this anywhere in the world. This lake is crystal clear in the winter; beneath five feet of ice those damn fish still manage to …”

“Dad,” I rasped. “The snow, it’s just …”

He held my hand and kissed my forehead. “It’s okay, honey. A dozen guys I know have flown to this paradise in weather like this. All good.”

The plane made a high-pitched whine as we sped down the runway into a cloudy, billowy, late-afternoon haze. The takeoff was absolutely normal, save a few little bumps when we made the initial ascent, and I let out a small breath. Dad patted my thigh. “You see, honey. It’s all fine. We’ll be above the clouds soon and see the sun.” Our craft coasted up toward the sky.

OUTSIDE THE WINDOW of the taxi, I could see we were now speeding west across Forty-Second Street, past a seedy commercial section of town, heading toward the flashing lights of Times Square and standstill traffic. I said through the glass, “You might want to loop over to Ninth …”

The guy slammed on the brakes and turned around. “Look, lady, I’m gonna get you there.” Two blocks later, we were parked in traffic. I did the math: it would take me about twenty minutes to walk, but if this traffic jam broke after five minutes, then it would only take fifteen more to reach home. Same difference. Same exploding anxiety over something with the same result that I couldn’t change. I sat back against the seat again, frustrated and sweaty, my hands clammy from the plane ride down memory lane.

“YOU’RE NEVER GOING to forget the first time the fish bite, it’s so exciting out there, the nature so delicate,” Dad yelled over the whirl of the propellers, still gaining altitude. He cradled me in the crook of his elbow and kissed the top of my head.

My dad couldn’t contain his excitement about introducing me to his greatest joy, and I couldn’t spoil everything for him, so intoxicating was his commitment to seek that thrill with his own daughter. I wanted to warn the pilot that I felt we were in serious trouble, but I kept silent. I felt we shouldn’t even take off in this weather. Maybe I was too young to protest, to be taken seriously. And I loved my dad too much to drag him through my worries. Downers were anathema to everything he stood for.

But there was that unmistakable ice on the wing. I’d seen something on TV about ice buildup that doomed a big plane, and I wasn’t sure if it was the same thing. Or was it just beads of water pooled out there that would slide off somehow? Or was my mind conjuring up troubles? It sure looked like little bubbles of ice were popping up. Maybe the lights on the wing were just reflecting off beads of water. But would there be water at this altitude and at this temperature? I had reminded myself the takeoff was absolutely normal. Surely my mind was playing tricks.

It was getting dark and the lights on the wings were flashing intermittently so I couldn’t tell how bad the storm was. The snow socked us in with zero visibility. We did not see one ray of that sun Dad had promised me.

“Dad. It’s, like, pouring snow. Are you sure …”

“Allie. Don’t worry, we are doing just fine.”

Ten minutes passed, and the plane dipped into a mini wind pocket and then jerked up again. It felt like we just dropped fifteen feet, hit something hard, and bounced right back up. The metal on the wings rattled. I gasped.

“Hey, pull those belts extra-tight back there; it’s getting pretty damn windy,” the pilot yelled to us. “We’re beginning our descent, but it’s gonna be bumpy.”

The wings now alternated up and down like a seesaw with our passenger capsule in the middle. Dad tried to get my mind off things. “What about the summer? I don’t want you selling T-shirts at that ratty shop downtown. Scooping ice cream just off my dock will be easier to get to and …”

He paused and looked out the window; the last bump was so big he had to rest his arm on his head for protection. “Now I know teenagers veer toward doing whatever their friends are doing downtown, but …” Dad’s chatter went on, with him talking faster and faster, while the teeny cabin shook so much his words came out all jumpy.

I think he might have been scared too and wanted to distract us both. He kept looking out the window, pausing, then talking again quickly. “I sure don’t want you in cars of any teenagers, so I’d have to drive you, and that won’t work for my early morning work schedule …” I don’t know what was really going on for him. God, the number of times I’ve wondered. How I wish to have been able to ask him. I’ll never know if he knew what I felt at that point.

My father grabbed my hand. The plane seemed to fall twenty feet and then lunge forward.

The pilot yelled. “We’re descending fast. Hold on!” Dad’s eyes grew large. He then knew what I knew. For a millisecond, part of me felt relief that my fears were justified, but then seeing him anxious did anything but quell them.

“Hold on, honey!!!” he screamed at me.

I’d never seen fear in his eyes before. Ever. I screamed. I think everyone did, but I’m not sure. Seconds later, metal crunched everywhere around me.

I remember every jolt of force throwing me forward as we bumped along the icy grass. They say I must have blacked out for a while after the crash, but I know I remember it. Blood sloshed around my mouth. I smelled the burned fibers of the synthetic royal blue seat fabric.

After we slowed to a deceiving, gentle stop: total silence.

“Dad!” I screamed. “Dad!”

Wind whistled through the cracks in the metal, and snow started whirling into the now shattered front windshield. It was way too calm inside. And next I knew, maybe three full minutes later, the skidding sound of vehicles outside the craft penetrated the eeriness inside. A man in a yellow suit with reflective silver stripes started coaxing me through the wreckage, the gusts of snowfall obscuring the beam of his flashlight. I couldn’t see my father or the pilot. I knew they were hurt. I didn’t hear them and they weren’t taking care of me, the child, in the wreckage. And I had the sudden sense they were dead.

Once they pried open the window, the men asked if we could move. I was curled upside down and waited for my father to answer.

“Dad?”

That was the worst moment of all: the silence after I asked again. I would have actually been relieved to hear him screaming in pain at that point.

Freezing wind was now howling through the front window and the sides of the open plane. The men asked again if we could move, if anyone heard them. I finally said out loud, “I’m okay.”

“Good. That’s good. Can you try to get through this window?”

“I don’t know if anyone else is okay.”

“C’mon, sweetie, we’ll get them; you just get yourself through the window. Undo your seat belt if you can. There’s room for you to get out from under the seat. Crawl through right here.” The top of my hand was cut badly and my bones felt rattled, but, as far as I could tell, nothing was broken. The red light of the ambulance siren reflected off the snow and metal, blinding me every time it whipped around like a lighthouse beam. I did not want to leave that plane.

I shook my head. “I gotta get my father. I gotta get my dad!”

“We’re going to get him for you. We have to get you out first; you are next to the exit.” He grabbed my upper arm with one hand and supported my lower arm with the other. “Can you get out this way?” I thought that metal had somehow gotten lodged in my mouth. My tongue felt jagged, shattered teeth on the right side. I remember worrying the edges were going to cut my tongue.

“Where’s my dad! Where’s my dad!” I screamed, the taste of iron from the blood in my mouth now thick and soupy. My head filled with pounding wrath.

How dare Dad let us take off.

And how dare he let two other people from back home get on the plane with us.

“HEY, LADY, YOU gonna pay or what? What are you doin’ so quietly back there, knitting an entire sweater? I don’t got all day. We’re here already,” the taxi driver said, knocking on the partition to stir me out of my trance. In a flash, I was back in the taxi, shaking with a rage I hadn’t felt in years.

How dare he die on me so young.

I had to wipe my trembling hand on my jeans before I could open my wallet and pay for the sickening ride.

2
Homefront

When I walked through my front door, I had to push every memory from that taxi ride out of my head. Lucy, in particular, would need me to focus on the excitement she’d had wearing the caterpillar costume made out of foam and pipe cleaners we’d worked on for days. Even after dinner, Lucy wouldn’t let me take off her green face paint from the caterpillar role until her daddy got to see her.

“Wade. You have to make a big deal about Lucy’s face,” I whispered. My husband arrived home about an hour after I had that night, work forcing him to miss Lucy’s kindergarten staging of Alice in Wonderland.

“Where’s my superstar?” Wade said to Lucy on cue, as he rushed into our bedroom with a bouquet of purple tulips he had picked up at the corner market for her. “I hate that I had to be at boring meetings at the magazine all day and miss your show!”

Lucy jumped up onto the bed to see him at eye level. “Daddy! I didn’t forget anything this time.”

He hugged her hard and then held her at arm’s length. “You have a little something green on your face,” he said in a mockserious way that made Lucy first furrow her brow and then break into a giant smile once she got the joke. Wade released her, and she snuggled back up beside me as he pulled off his work shirt and tie in one big motion, throwing both into the hamper.

That’s when a very strange thing happened. A casino chip with Five Thousand Dollars written on it fell out of his shirt pocket. I wouldn’t necessarily have noticed had Wade not dove for the chip like a linebacker. I didn’t let on that I’d seen it or the more alarming amount; instead I made a mental note of his unusually athletic attempt to hide it. Something inside made my heart break for no concrete reason except that it felt suspicious.

Once he got up off the floor and surreptitiously stuffed the chip into his khaki pants, I looked at my husband like I didn’t even know him. He grabbed Lucy and carried her back to her room sack-of-potatoes style.

I stood in the doorway of the bedroom in our cramped New York apartment mulling over that chip. We didn’t have five thousand dollars to throw around or to keep in our pants’ pockets. Wade was the editor of a flashy newsmagazine, but that didn’t mean we had a comfortable amount of savings. New York is like that. Everyone here except the Wall Street, one-percenter crowd is living on a financial edge where close to nothing is left over. My PR firm salary combined with his editor salary didn’t pay for much beyond a small apartment and two private-school tuitions. Five thousand dollars really mattered to our bottom line.

And Wade wasn’t a gambler. He didn’t hide things from me. We were opposites, but we came together at a safe place in the middle where I harbored a notion that trust was key. When I first met Wade, he had six people glued onto him like a snake charmer and still had enough juice to lure me across a room and into his comforting spell. And despite the distraction of a persistent flame from my past, and to be honest, partially because of that flame, I leaped into a frenetic New York City life with Wade, covering my eyes and holding my breath.

I heard Lucy screaming from the bedroom, “Daddy, air lift!” I entered and saw Wade hoisting her skyward, missing the light fixture by mere inches.

“Wade. Please! You’re going to hurt her on the light! And make sure you give Blake some attention before bedtime; he’s upset over …”

“Who gets every joy of the earth?” he asked as he threw Lucy up again, giving me the eye.

“Lucy!” she shrieked, falling back into his strong hands.

“And who was the best caterpillar in the show?”

“Daddy, there’s only ONE caterpillar!”

“And what girl does Daddy love best in the world?”

“Lucy!” They collapsed onto the bed, and Wade tickled her until she yelled out for him to stop, happy tears streaming down her face. Wade cradled her in his arms for a few more moments, singing a little song he had made up when she was a baby, then turned to me and held my face in his hands, dispelling any residual wifely annoyance over the casino chip I preferred to ask him about later.

“Allie, I know all you do to make the kids happy—making her costume so intensely the night before and keeping all your work pressures out of the kids’ lives—and I love you for it.” He kissed my nose. “And don’t worry about Blake; I know you’re worrying about him too. I see that concern in your face.”

“Yes, I’m worried about him. They don’t include him in so many of the little things his group does all day. All because of one kid who loves the power to exclude. I want so badly to call Jeremy’s mom again and—”

“You cannot do that again. No way. She is going to tell the kid exactly what you said on the call even though she promises to handle it discreetly. And that’ll just make Jeremy ostracize Blake more, and then you get busted for interfering. Fourth grade is rough, but he’s got to learn to handle his friendships on his own.”

“Wade, I know you are right, but his circle is edging him out again, and I don’t know how a nine-year-old is supposed to figure that out. They went to get snacks at the vending machine again at recess and told him he couldn’t come.”

“Well, I’m going to help him man up a little, and then he’ll work this out for himself.”

Another thing I loved about Wade: he knew exactly what our kids needed when they were down. What woman doesn’t love a man for that? But that casino chip would pop up again and, in time, signal a transgression no wife could ignore.

3
Power Jaunt

The next morning, I rushed to see my boss for fifteen minutes before a client meeting at New York’s famed Tudor Room. It didn’t help my mood that I was meeting him at a restaurant that operated more like a private club for high-octane achievers than a pleasant place for lunch. Absolutely nothing in my makeup or past experiences prepared me to hold my own in the ring with the wealthy gladiators who lunched there regularly; I just happened to be employed by one of them. I walked into the restaurant lobby with a confident stride, wondering if the people watching my entrance pegged me as an imposter.

My boss, Murray Hillsinger, a toadlike man, had already positioned his large bottom smack in the middle of a coveted corner banquette, twisting his jowls left and right to survey the scene from his primo lily pad. He was very proud to have his square corner banquette (even though it wasn’t as prestigious as the center round tables—those went to higher rollers with huger titles, companies, and net worths). I took a deep breath and walked over, smoothing my hair as I did so, trying to exude professional acumen, the only attribute I could for sure hold on to.

“Allie, come here. Glad you came before my lunch partner shows up.” He patted the leather next to him. “You’re going to do fine, kid.”

Like so many guys named Murray, it seems, he grew up poor on the backstreets—in this case, Long Island City, Queens. His nose was crooked from one too many fistfights, and his large forehead was now crowned with an unfortunate shoe-polish comb-over. The expensive loafers he sported were not designed for feet that caused the leather to crack in a fault line next to his big fat pinkie toe.

I moved my way around the seat on Murray’s right. “Relax. It’s going to go fine,” he told me as he chomped on a large cauliflower cluster drenched in green dip and roughed up the back of my hair like I was his kid sister. I was a kid when I started this job a decade ago in my early twenties, and neither he, nor I, to my dismay, ever got past that initial dynamic.

Georges—the famous-in-his-own-right maître d’ of the Tudor Room—rushed to the table, an invisible cloud of his cologne preceding him. Georges ladled more dip into the ramekin dish as he asked, “Would you rather I pour the sauce on your tie directly, or should I allow you to stain it yourself?”

The very French Georges knew that the powerful always favor those employees willing to show jocular insubordination. I watched as he moved off into the room, slipping from table to table making clever, and often hilarious, asides to the assembled men and women who pretty much ran every major hedge fund, real estate empire, and media conglomerate in Manhattan.

Murray sat at the helm of the biggest public relations firm in New York, Hillsinger Consulting, hell-bent on saving the reputations of most of the people in this very room, many of them guilty as charged for causing the recurring economic downturns that trickled down and crippled the rest of us. The Tudor Room was a new hotspot for these powerful warriors who dined in packs, many having migrated from the more clubby Four Seasons Grill Room. The new place was part lunch spot and part womblike secret society where they all felt cozy in their amniotic bubble—this protective coating thickening ever since they had been targeted by America for causing the biggest economic downfall since the Great Depression.

“Order something, Allie!” Murray barked, always solicitous in his own special way.

“Thanks, no food, my meeting is soon,” I said. “Besides, I’m too on edge.”

“About what? You’re tough. That’s why you got the big job,” Murray said, trying to prop me up for my meeting in fifteen minutes at the Tudor Room bar to placate the unreasonable newswoman Delsie Arceneaux. If I didn’t always have the keen sense that Murray believed in me, and if I hadn’t always witnessed him doing the mensch-y thing, like promoting all the smartest women in the office, I would have quit doing crazy things for him long ago.

Sitting at the bar, Delsie Arceneaux glanced over and winked at Murray through her signature large tortoiseshell glasses as she barked into her phone before our meeting started. She was the impetuous, African American news anchor of the “all Delsie all the time” cable news network, most famous for draping her fortysomething, voluptuous body over an army tank while she interviewed the commander of the U.S. forces in Kabul. The perennial glasses had been Murray’s idea to disguise her beauty queen looks and highlight her legitimate cerebral side.

“No,” I replied. “You got the big job. I service your requests and put your crazy notions on paper.” Today’s particular request was to placate a news anchor, known for alienating her staff by overriding their every decision and action. “Does she even know we are also representing the people who are asking her to speak …”

“Order some broth, Allie.” Conflict of interest was a concept that Murray Hillsinger found utterly tiresome. “Calm the fuck down. Nothing wrong with us booking our own clients for our other clients and taking a little cut on both sides.” He pushed the tan parchment paper menu too close to my face and pointed at the appetizers.

Georges came over to hover and pour two thousand more calories of dill cream into the dip ramekin.

“I don’t want any soup, Murray.”

“Give her the soup, Georges. She works too damn hard and deserves a little pleasure once in a while. You know the good one I mean. The light one, the brothy one. With those duck balls.”

“Foie gras wontons, sir.” Georges wrote the request down with his dainty fingers wrapped around the tip of a miniature gold pen.

“Really, Murray?” I pleaded. “Thirty-eight dollars for consommé I don’t even want?”

“She’ll have the consommé.” Murray looked at the maître d’ and then back at me. “You got some time before your meeting. It’ll settle you down. Gimme the lobster salad before my guest arrives as a little preappetizer. Double order.” Georges nodded and left the table.

“Why are the most famous people also the most neurotic about public speaking gigs? She looks into a camera and speaks to four million viewers and she can’t give a speech to two hundred people?”

He patted my hand. “All the news anchors do this. The camera is her guardian and her barrier. Without it, the live audience terrifies her. Just go handle her nerves for me. And have some soup.”

Next to me, a glamorous newspaper publisher in a sunny yellow Oscar de la Renta spring dress and matching bolero sweater raised her index finger in the air at Georges and mouthed Charge it to my account as she sashayed toward the door.

I leaned toward Murray, whispering, “I don’t need the soup because I don’t like to throw money away like all your friends in here.”

“It’s not about the money in this room. It’s about what you’ve accomplished.” He stole my nose with his finger like I was five years old. “M-E-R-I-T-O-C-R-A-C-Y, kid. ’Tis the beauty of this room. Money gives you power in here, but only if it’s ‘fuck you’ money you earned. There’s no one with Daddy’s inherited cash in here. Self-made or get the hell out.” Murray’s voice was thick, more truck driver yelling at someone to get out of the way than genius spinmeister. As Murray turned his head to wave with feigned friendliness to a rival, two little curls of hair behind his ears bounced out from the hair gel meant to smooth them down, making the flat part of his comb-over seem that much more incongruous.

I looked at my watch. Five more minutes before my meeting. Across the room, I saw Delsie throw the long end of her spring, lime-green cashmere scarf around her neck and behind her shoulder. “What about Delsie with her four-point-five-million-dollar annual salary you worked so hard to leak?” I asked. “It’s not about the money in here?”

“That broad’s got raw star power and black and white viewer appeal no one can touch. Delsie took over that cable network and got the ratings they’d coveted for years. No one can say she didn’t do that on her own.”

“On her own? Really? You believe everything you peddle, Murray? Delsie secretly pays us to doctor her appearances and often her scripts. Did you forget you have me fixing her lame copy at all hours?”

He smiled at me. “Even a fuckin’ genius like me can’t spin something out of nothing. Everyone in here has to deliver the goods.”

I didn’t try to argue. I knew he was right on some level: Manhattan did harvest a huge crop of people who came to this city from small towns across the land and rose to become the lead players in their fields of art, fashion, publishing, or banking. Most of those tried-and-tested winners were in this very room.

The consommé arrived, and I know Murray made me order it just to prove his point: that a foie gras wonton floating in a small bowl of duck broth could actually command a $38 price tag. I tried the broth first. It went down smoky, gamey, with a big hint of honey. Even though it was a clear soup, it was so rich that just two sips made me thirsty. Like their patrons, the chefs had also overachieved to create something outstanding: they must have roasted three hundred duck carcasses to produce the heft of this broth.

I smiled. “You’re right. I mean, it’s not worth thirty-eight dollars of my money for a small cup of soup, but if you can afford it, I guess, yes, it’s very special.”

Murray splashed his big spoon in my broth, spilled a little on the table, and slurped up some for himself. “No. It is worth that money!” He was almost yelling at me. “It’s supply and demand and the effort to …”

There were supersized personalities back home in Squanto, Massachusetts, for sure—many of them in fact. My own father had led the pack. He had had no money to speak of, but I remember so much about how he behaved around the house: he always had his fellow fishermen over after they’d all chartered their boats out or had come in from a day on the sea. Everyone would bring burger patties or beer and they’d sit around pontificating just as loudly and confidently as the men and women in this restaurant. My father was one of the loudest and most charming ones—boisterous and charismatic—but he didn’t think everyone had to agree with his every opinion just because he walked into a room.

“And don’t forget to tell Delsie I want her covering the Fulton Film Festival I’ve worked so fuckin’ hard to put on the map. Art films. Science. Action. Whatever. Fuck Sundance!” Murray picked up an entire lobster claw from his salad with his fingers, put it on half a roll, and mashed both into his mouth. “Mark my words, Allie, maybe you’ll never have big money or pick up the check. But you’re going to be respected ’cause you did something great. You saved people. You invented people. Your PR helped them reach their greatest potential.”

Creating illusions had never actually been my plan. My plan had been to write novels or long magazine essays, not use my MFA creative writing degree to craft press releases that got people out of trouble or made them appear to be something they weren’t.

“Take that guy over there for starters,” Murray yelled as he glanced over to the podium at the entryway of the restaurant where Wade stood to have lunch with a potential interview subject. My husband came to the Tudor Room as a way to network with important people he needed to put in the magazine or to entertain potential advertisers. He was able to play in the power brokers’ sandbox by charging every lunch to his parent company.

“Maybe,” I allowed. Across the room, Wade smacked Georges’s shoulder while whispering some delicious bit of gossip into his ear. I adored my husband’s ability to get everyone on his side, but his arrival also made me feel even more out of place here, like everyone but me had a code and language and sense of humor I could never quite grasp.

When I first met Wade, I was instantly drawn to the symmetrical, thick, blondish-gray waves in his hair that neatly rolled down the back of his head, ending about a quarter inch below his collar. As I watched him walk up the movie aisle that first night, he flashed his smile back at me, having noticed me a few seats down. I felt my stomach churn because the long hair reminded me of brawny guys on the Squanto fishing docks I’d grown up with. When he joined a group of rapt partygoers to grab a drink beside the bar in the lobby, I instantly felt left out. That’s the effect he had on a room: his circle was the one to be in—and most of us were on the outside looking in.

Murray beckoned for Wade to come over. “Well, for one thing, your husband’s the only prick cocky enough to walk in here in jeans, and not even Georges stops him.”

My husband did have an uncanny ability to skirt the rules without acknowledging them in the first place. A brass plaque on the coat check downstairs clearly read: Jacket required. Please refrain from wearing blue jeans at the Tudor Room. Wade had on very blue jeans, a white Oxford cloth shirt, a beat-up leather blazer, and black sneakers. He was a bit of a rebel in his industry by always going after people in print he seemed to be cozying up with on the social front. “Always bite the hand that feeds you” was his professional motto.

Wade glad-handed his way toward us as Murray watched him. “M-E-R-I-T-O-C-R-A-C-Y, baby, I’m telling you. Your husband isn’t known for having much cash on hand, but he’s a member of this crowd no doubt. That magazine he runs is still a juggernaut, despite the fact that it’s a fuckload thinner than it used to be. Maybe his parent company is deep in the red right now and he’s always going to be low on personal funds because what the fuck does an editor make? Peanuts in this city.” Murray slammed the table so hard that the cauliflower popped out of the basket. “But he’s got primitive power—he turned Meter magazine around from a piece of dilapidated dusty old shit into the absolute number one must-read for everyone in this room. The ultimate media macher.” I didn’t remind Murray that my husband, ten years my senior, did all that twenty years ago—before YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs, and online anything. People who still worked on real glossy paper in 2013 had far more uncertain futures than anyone in the room, even if Wade did everything he could to dispel that. “And he had the sense to marry you!” Then Murray added, “And if he ever doesn’t treat you right, I swear I’ll kill him.”

Wade walked up to our corner, kissed me behind my ear, whispering, “You look hot,” and slapped Murray’s back. I didn’t feel hot and I doubt he meant that. He said it because he always did want me to do well and didn’t like to see me stressed. I quickly sipped my last fourteen dollars of broth, eager to get out of the booth and over to the bar before Wade and Murray got into their exclusionary boys’ club banter.

“Thanks for the soup, Murray. I’ll see you tonight, Wade,” I said to them, as I stood and smoothed my knee-length black skirt. “Wish me luck making an insanely insecure woman feel satisfied.”

“Knock her dead,” Murray answered.

Wade raised an eyebrow at my tight skirt and looked at me tenderly. “You look gorgeous. You always knock ’em out.”

I whispered to him, “Thanks, honey. But I don’t. You’re blind.”

“You do.” He brushed my cheek. “And I’m going to go to my grave making you believe that.”

I crossed the room to go meet Delsie at the red-paneled bar wondering why both my boss and my husband were being so awfully nice to me. It was only when I had a clearer view of that bar that I noticed at first a spectacular pair of bare legs belonging to a beautiful young woman. Her snakeskin sandals wrapped around her ankles, mimicking the reptile that had been gouged to make them. She was sitting alone and scarfing down the famous Tudor Room line-caught tuna tartare served in a martini glass before her, when Georges whispered something amusant into her ear. She tossed her shimmering blond curls over her sexy belted white Ralph Lauren jacket, where they flowed down into a V-shaped back and brushed against the top of a very round bottom.

Without even saying hello, Delsie started in with this: “I can’t do a speech for Murray one more time at another one of his charity ventures. I know I agreed, but now I want to back out. He wants me to whore myself out for every goddamn cause he’s attached to.”

“Whoring yourself out?” I asked.

“Yes.” She was now extra pissy because no one was allowed to challenge her opinions either—a charming trait apparently shared by every patron in the room. “Whoring out. That’s what I said and, funny as it may seem to you, that’s what I meant.”

I breathed in a slow breath. “Delsie. Let’s just review why you agreed to do the speech, because ‘whoring out’ has the connotation of maybe you’re being used or maybe this wasn’t your choice. You hired us for more visibility, so we got you the keynote speaker at the Fulton Film Festival media lunch, which is a very prestigious affair. Yes, it raises money for journalism schools but …”

She looked at me sternly, as though she was considering whether to call Murray over to reprimand me.

I went on, giving her a pitch I’d given so many times. “You’re getting paid a large speaker’s fee as a professional to MC the event, Delsie. And it’s an important celebration that will only bring you recognition in a media spotlight I know you care about. You will be impressive, don’t worry about that.”

She backed down a tad. “Who’s coming? Anyone important?”

“Who isn’t coming?” I responded. “Anyone important who cares about the future of this city. The Fulton Film Festival brings a bunch of first-class films here over the next month, so you are boosting New York’s culture and getting a lot of good press while doing so.” I may have successfully delivered the gist of this very pitch, but I was not anywhere close to present during it. My mind and eyes were drawn to the young woman down the bar. She was looking right at us—something in her eyes made me shudder.

Her bare legs glistened like the maroon curtains that draped the front windows, filtering the harsh noonday light now bursting through the storm clouds. The soaring height of the glass walls made it feel like we were on top of the world, looking out over all Manhattan, even though we were at street level. This young woman took a long, slow sip of her iced tea, no hint that she was secretly uncovering the madness that would detonate around all of us in due time.

I glanced over at Wade, who gave me an encouraging little wave, the kind he gave Lucy when she went blank last fall on her three Carrot Number One lines for the Vegetable Play.

I pressed ahead, bolstered by all the times I had to push powerful clients onto a stage. “I’m not sure there’s a downside, unless you don’t like hanging out with movie stars.” I then stared into Delsie’s needy eyes. “You need more culture in your portfolio if you’re going to crack Manhattan, be somebody in this room. I assure you this is good old-fashioned PR for a nice Carolina woman like you.”

I couldn’t help but remain half in, half out of my pitch as my gaze locked once again on the man-eater down the mahogany bar. She looked like she was maybe twenty-eight, but I figured she was really a poised twenty-five-year-old. I stealthily neatened up my blouse and the belt around my waist. My outfit was much like hers—a pencil skirt, no stockings, high Stuart Weitzman sandal heels, and a Tory Burch white blouse—but the sex appeal differential was enormous. My five-foot-four-inch height didn’t exactly make for sexy, lanky legs. I did have nice, thick dark hair that fell a little below my shoulders and a passable pretty thirty-four-year-old face, but more because of my unusual blue eyes and dark hair combination than actual head-turning beauty.

The woman down the bar then bit her thick, tomato-red lips, which matched the red lacquer walls, and walked over to us with great purpose.

She interrupted. “Excuse me for overhearing. I’d just like to say that Allie Crawford is known to have more innate PR business sense than anyone in this room.” She brushed her body ever so slightly against Delsie’s shoulder, whispering, “Including her boss, Murray Hillsinger. If you’re interested in doing something high profile, then I’d follow her advice and do whatever she wants.”

“Um, thank you …” This was all I could get out as she strode back to her barstool perch. At this point, I didn’t even know her name or have any idea why she wanted to help me.

Georges came over to address the beauty once again, her brown eyes sparkling back at him. He whispered something into her ear. At first, I assumed he might be having a little fling with her, but then I sensed that they were going over something. Out of his left blazer pocket, he took a casino chip and placed it discreetly in her purse. I saw a tiny piece of the chip, the top of a section with “Five” written on it, as in Five Thousand Dollars.

Also, as in the same goddamn chip that fell out of my husband’s shirt pocket the evening before.

4
Party in the House

The next night’s cocktail party had started like any other, with me determined to perform my wife and mother roles as best I could given the impending frenzy about to descend on my apartment. Wade liked to throw little get-togethers every month at our place to coddle Meter magazine advertisers and potential story subjects. Each party featured a brand-new cast of wannabes, has-beens, and already-ares. Our small apartment couldn’t accommodate a large crowd, so guests were on some lists, off others—every one of them anxiously trying to figure out the invite formula. Very smooth, very smart, very manipulative, very Wade Crawford.

I wanted to spend the whole night in bed with my kids and find time to be alone with my Blake and decipher why his friends were still excluding him. I had no desire to face this party and people who cared nothing about me, a hostess who couldn’t facilitate their upward mobility. All heads would be turned toward the glow of Wade the Sun King who might put them in his magazine. I grew up with people who might have had less money and power, but they certainly had better manners and knew to say hello and thank you to the wife.

Before the party even started, I thought about asking Wade if he knew the beauty at the Tudor Room who had helped me. He’d say he’d never seen her before, but when I would ask why she had the same casino chip he had tried to hide from me, he would refuse even to understand my question. I knew him so well this way. He’d walk down the hall and make it seem like nothing, when I sensed it was definitely something. He would then say his crowd often went to Atlantic City with Murray and various clients. First, I had to comprehend more on my own in order to be armed with a comeback for his denial.

Wade rummaged through his color-coordinated closet to find just the proper outfit to telegraph that he was festive, but relaxed. He brought out a hip lavender tie with a sky-blue shirt and asked, “Does this look inviting?” He pulled me into him. “Will it get me laid with my beautiful bride?”

“Yes, Wade. Exactly that,” I answered, noting that he seemed more desperate these days to get his look right. “Your purple tie is what does it for me.” Was he trying too hard to act solicitous or was I imagining things?

“Purple’s my favorite,” Lucy said, as she entered the room and hugged his thigh.

“Mine too, kiddo,” he said as he ruffled her hair, dragging her along with him to the mirror. For the finishing touch, Wade slipped on his black, “downtown” blazer with the little antique gold buttons. “Now come here and kiss me good night.”

I saw my chance and raced back to the kids’ room, where I found Blake punching his thumbs into his Nintendo DS with extra hostility.

“What’s with Jeremy today, honey? Did he respond or did you even explain to him you wanted to go this time? Did you use the money I gave you for your snack?”

“Mom. They went to get Doritos in the machines without me. I’m not going to ask why. It’s obvious. They didn’t want me to come.”

“Well, honey, I …”

“Mom. They didn’t want me to come. You can’t say anything that is going to make me feel better. After social studies, when I ask them to wait before going to playstreet and when I’m packing my bag, they always run out.”

“That is just so mean, honey.” I kissed my hurt little boy’s nine-year-old forehead and wished with all my heart I could take this blow for him.

“And don’t call his mom and tell him to be nicer to me like you did last time.”

“I won’t, I …” Of course that is exactly what I wanted to do.

“It makes me look like a snitch. She told him to play nicer and he told everyone I told on him, so don’t do it again. For real, Mom. Don’t.”

“I love you, honey. I’m here to talk if you want.”

“I said I don’t want to.”

I gently closed his door, mumbling to myself, “A mother’s only as happy as her unhappiest child.” Pained but resigned to let him stew, I ran into the kitchen to place thirty Trader Joe’s hors d’oeuvres on cookie sheets and into a warm oven. With the downturn having hit ad revenues hard, Wade’s magazine company had slashed his budget for home cocktail parties to almost nothing. They would only pay for a scant two college students, a mediocre bar, and the cheapest hors d’oeuvres from the frozen section. For every event, I had to fork out for flowers and a few extras with our own money. When I protested that these parties didn’t quite fit into our tight monthly budget in expensive New York City, Wade countered that he couldn’t make Meter successful if he couldn’t continue to network as he wished, and any and every time he wished.

The cut-rate bartender and server from the Columbia University Bartending service were late, and the wine and club soda cases were stacked in the cramped kitchen hallway untouched. Six thirty. It was getting awfully close to the seven o’clock game time and I realized the guests might actually arrive before the two servers did. I struggled to push the cartons a few inches across the floor so that I could maneuver around them and open the oven door.

In the oven, dozens of frozen miniquiches and spinach phyllo pies started to sweat off freezer burn as I pulled a chair up to the cupboard so I could reach above the fridge and get down two bottles of vodka. This being a New York apartment, table and shelf space in the living room were too valuable to use for cumbersome bar bottles when company wasn’t around.

Why I was the one about to break my neck reaching for a vodka bottle and stressing that our tonic and limes were low for his work party while Wade was lying around oblivious in bed tickling Lucy at 6:49 was a question most wives know the answer to.

My red silk blouse had started to show lovely little sweat stains around my armpits with all the aerobic activity I was performing in the kitchen. At 6:53, the server and bartender finally arrived from the Columbia campus, apologizing and blaming the poor subway service.

Back in my closet to select another shirt, I heard Lucy screaming with laughter and jumping high on the bed. Wade was trying to swing a pillow into her legs midjump so she’d flip down on the bed sideways. This always ended in tears. No matter how many times I begged them not to play this game, Lucy always wanted more.

“Wade, can you talk to Blake before the party? Jeremy and those mean kids are …”

Wade wasn’t listening. He was counting the timing of Lucy’s jump so he could slam her with the huge pillow as she pulled her feet up in midair.

“Wade. Are you listening?”

“Got you!” he yelled.

Lucy went flying ninety degrees sideways with the force of the pillow and was in full hysterics now. “Again, Daddy!”

Wade turned to me. “I got her. I told her we’d do it until I got her. Now I’ll go talk to Blake, but he’s not going to want to discuss it, I promise.”

“He could use some boosting from his father, so please go talk to him quick. I’m running around here like the Tasmanian Devil. I’m sweating, I look like hell …” I tore my shirt off and rummaged through my closet for another blouse that, by some miracle, wasn’t creased.

As I threw on a tight black sweater, Wade the design guru peeked back in and made this unwelcome suggestion: “That traditional red blouse was good with those spiky shoes. If you change to that more contemporary black look, you’re going to need a clunkier heel.”

When I shook my head at him, he walked over to me and kissed my forehead gingerly. “Sorry, honey, I know you try, but the outfit’s just not working. But I love you and if I wanted to marry a clothes designer, I guess I could have. Tonight, though, I need you to cope on the outfit because there’s a ton of fashion advertisers coming.”

Where I grew up, everyone wore shoes that sensibly confronted the environment, not the Fashion Nazis of Manhattan. What the hell did my crappy little hometown of Squanto on the Atlantic teach anyone about decor and style? My family resided in a small colonial home about five blocks from the docks where salt water and sand pervaded every room. We lived in winter boots or sneakers or flip-flops. I didn’t have a pair of heels until I went to Middlebury College, and I think I wore them five times total before I hit the judgmental shores of Manhattan.

“Which heel did you mean?” I yelled back at him. “And do you mean a sling-back sandal or a real shoe? Could you just come back here and show me? I’ve got to get Lucy settled now that you wound her up. If Blake won’t talk, make sure he’s doing his homework.” I was sure Blake was still on his Nintendo, and not ready to study at all, but I couldn’t really blame him, what with the students from Columbia now furiously clanging in the kitchen outside of the kids’ room.

“Which shoe exactly?”

But Wade was long gone.

“I wish Daddy would stay,” Lucy whimpered, with a whiplash mood swing to the dark side. This was the downside of their lovefest: she always craved more. I flashed momentarily on an image of my father walking out the door to his two prized fishing boats to cater to some wealthy summer tourists, past my outstretched five-year-old arms, off and gone, leaving me for days. When he came home and flashed that smile framed by his salty beard, it was as if he’d never left me with a mother who spent much of her day passed out from drinking in front of the blue glow of her television game shows.

My father’s charm, much like my husband’s, was so irresistible that I couldn’t help but forgive him the instant he reappeared at my bedroom door. No wonder Wade got whatever he wanted from me: I had had no practice staying angry with the man I adored most in the world.

“Blake’s just fine,” he announced. “Like I said, he doesn’t want us micromanaging all his friendships. Fourth grade is time to handle some stuff on his own.”

As always just before the parties started, Wade stood in front of the mirror once last time to admire his sporty frame. He flipped his tie over his shoulder while he smoothed down the front of his shirt. Working intently on his cool media master aura, he delicately brushed a piece of hair up over his brow.

Wade came from a small eastern town too, but, as an upper-middle-class accountant’s son, and an arrogant one at that, Wade’s lofty career aspirations seemed to be met anytime he damn well felt like it. His self-assuredness was another one of those interlocking parts of our relationship. Watching him in action helped inspire the part of me that feared I couldn’t achieve anything quite well enough.

“You know everyone’s name on the list, right, Allie?”

“I don’t know, Wade. I hope so.”

“This is important.” He rubbed my ear. “C’mon, babe. I know you’re freaking out about Blake’s bruised feelings and Lucy’s caterpillar costumes and that you are juggling a ton at work, but I rely on your uncanny ability to execute. Do me this little favor? I’ll owe you one.”

“Sure, Wade. I got it handled.” I wanted to help him out, but I was so fatigued that night. I gritted my teeth and carried on anyway, oblivious to the tsunami rolling my way.

“That’s my other best girl.” He kissed me quickly on the lips. “Now, Lucy, be a good girl, and I’ll sneak away to read you a book at bedtime.” She held out her pinkie and he looped his around it, beaming his love into her little face. Then he went into the living room to make sure the candles and music were setting the proper cool mood to match his look. I stood up and went down the hall to overcoddle and infantilize Blake some more—anything to delay my entry into the hordes of guests who would soon be shamelessly clamoring all over my husband.

5
That Woman Again

I maneuvered around the crush of people, placing small glass bowls of cashews and wasabi peas on every little table and windowsill to give the illusion that food was abundant. When I came back from checking on the latest batch of Trader Joe’s party treats, I almost tripped over Delsie Arceneaux’s gorgeous, cappuccino gams outstretched in the alcove corner. She nodded a lame attempt at hello to me, the woman who worked so hard to make her words clear and precise in every speech she’d given for the past two years.

I hovered around the cocktail bar and dropped some ice into a small glass while studying Delsie’s pounce technique with the still very horny seventy-two-year-old Max Rowland, freshly sprung from nine months in the white-collar division of Allenwood prison. He was one of our highest-paying (and highest-maintenance) clients. Murray had him invested in our film festival to diminish Max’s image as a tax-evading, greedy corporate criminal—one of those twofer conflicts of interest that Murray lived for.

“Tell me, Max,” Delsie purred, as she smoothed out her sky-blue Chanel knit suit with a short tight jacket and miniskirt. “How did you fare in there? Everyone was so damned worried about you and I kept telling them, ‘Puhleese. It’s Max. He’s what my daddy would call a high-stepper. He’s built an empire of parking lots with his own hands. He’s going to whip that prison population into …’”

Max, a heavyset Texan who started out in New York City at age twenty-one to make his equally outsized fortune, sank into the soft white corduroy couch. He placed his feet on one of the zebra-skinned Ralph Lauren ottomans that Wade had swiped from one of his photo shoots. “You’re rahhht,” he chuckled. “The food was crap, but the prison guys weren’t so dahmn bad. Have to admit, they kinda hung on my evereh word.”

“As we all do, Max.” Delsie’s librarian glasses only heightened the sexual potency that emanated from her every raspy, semi-out-of-breath word. She was positioned as if she were about to screw this old man’s brains out, hips arched back, chest thrust heavenward: her way of trying to score the first postprison interview. He hadn’t talked to the press since his release, and this was another win-win in the making if Murray could get him to talk to Delsie, since they were both clients.

The party was bursting with exclusivity, even though our apartment was situated on a busy block in the commercial West Twenties and not in a pricey location. We’d knocked out the wall between the dining alcove and living room, making a larger space that could accommodate a squished-up crowd. There was also a corner window off the green alcove that featured a giant beige couch and Wade’s home office desk, where the kinds of people who like to be cliquish tended to congregate.

Wade cared far more about the “stage” than I ever did, and he’d go to great lengths to get it just right on our tight budget: the exact shade of the red anemones, the black lacquer party trays he’d coveted enough to trek down to Chinatown to buy, the outfits the student servers wore (black shirts, black jackets, never ties, to exude the same Chelsea hipness as their host), the hors d’oeuvres (never crab cakes or smoked salmon—Mrs. Vincent Astor once told him a decade ago they gave the guests bad breath), and even the cocktail napkins (always in the same synergistic color as the cover subject’s dress, in this case a supermodel named simply “Angel”). High-gloss posters of the latest cover and photo spread hung like art on a blank white wall in our front entry. Angel’s dress was fuchsia, so was the Meter logo on the cover, as was the bold cover line YOU WANT ACTION?. And so were our cocktail napkins.

As I put ice-cold vodka to my lips, a shot of green in Wade’s general vicinity caught my eye, and I nearly dropped my glass. It was the gorgeous girl who had helped me at the Tudor Room bar the day before, all done up in a tight olive dress. She was talking in a highly animated fashion to a wealthy hedge funder sporting the facial expression of someone getting a lap dance. As I stared at her, she noticed, but then looked at Wade—whose back was to me—and nodded in the direction of the kitchen. She drifted down the hall. I found this strange. A woman I didn’t know was signaling to me in no uncertain terms that she was headed to my back kitchen … and what was she referring to about Wade exactly?

“It’s all okay, right, my love?” Wade shouted over the din, relishing that he controlled every last detail of the party turf and I didn’t care to. Even more guests had poured in and filled the loft space in what felt like seconds. “I checked on Blake. He’s fine, like he forgot all about Jeremy being mean. The party—going well so far, right?”

Yes, I mouthed without sound as I bit into a miniquiche that was warm to the touch, but cold on the inside. I took a deep breath and looked for the nineteen-year-old stoned-out server across the room so I could remind him to leave the next batch in the oven a bit longer.

“You sure?” Wade’s eyes searched the room. They moved toward the girl in green.

“Positive.” In that instant, with that one glance in her direction, I knew my instincts over that past year were correct and that I had to stop glossing over problems; while on the surface we were status quo, something beneath had changed for Wade. Warm on the outside, cold on the inside.

There had been a discreet but seismic shift in his smallest gestures: he used to let his eyes linger on mine, but tonight he broke the stare so he could steal a glance at this woman. I found his telling me I was so hot all the time inauthentic because he wasn’t acting on it. He used to want to make out in our elevator, even after the kids were born, last year even. Now his compliments were more frequent, but his kisses more like bird pecks.

“I’m going to check on the food. We seem to be running low.” Wade gave me another one of those hard-lip kisses, spun on his heel, and buzzed off after the impossibly hot woman, not even noticing me noticing him.

6
Bizarre Behavior

Mouth agape in a silent scream, I searched the crowd for Caitlin, my office right hand and friend, half hoping she had, and half praying she hadn’t, witnessed my husband chase after the gorgeous girl who’d helped me at the bar of the Tudor Room. I finally caught Caitlin’s eye, and she hopscotched over Delsie’s caramel, daddy longlegs to reach me.

“What’s wrong—other than this party, that is,” she said out of the side of her mouth. Her curly blond, 1920s bob slanted across her cheek as she smirked. “All the requisite douche bags are here. Wade must be very happy.”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to remain calm as I watched the hallway for the return of either my husband or that woman. “He’s happy with everything.”

Caitlin squinted at my creased brow. “But you’re not. What’s up?”

I couldn’t stop myself. “He just disappeared down the hall with a lovely young thing who actually was very kind and generous to me during my Delsie meeting. I’m sure it’s nothing. He wouldn’t … he’s just all hyper tonight with the …”

“Oh, he wouldn’t in his own home.” Caitlin crossed her arms. She looked intensely angry. “Aren’t the kids back that way?”

I certainly wasn’t expecting to have my fears of a cheating husband reignited that night. When Wade strayed that one time, he claimed he was “ignored and lonely” and that he’d made a monumental mistake with a photo assistant for Meter magazine while I was breast-feeding Lucy. It almost derailed our marriage. A onetime thing, he had promised. Not a day went by that I didn’t remember my pain when I figured it out. I had heard him talking to her one night about the sexy things he wanted to do to her—whispering in the bathroom with the door slightly ajar. He didn’t realize I was home and had overheard the entire conversation. I had crumpled my mushy postpregnancy body onto the bed, waiting for the call to end. And there was nothing he could say to refute it when he saw me minutes afterward. It took me a very long time even to sit next to him on a couch.

For months after that, he came home directly after work every night to assure me it was a “mistake” and that he understood he had nearly destroyed everything between us. I had chosen to believe that it was out of his system and in the past. Now I wasn’t so sure.

“Hold on. I’ll be right back. I’ve got to check on the food,” I lied. Why would that woman approach me at the Tudor Room, help me, connect with me so brazenly and out of the blue if she were fooling around with Wade? She’d even just hinted a minute ago with that nod in the direction of the kitchen that they were headed together somewhere back there.

What the hell?

I pretended to waltz into my kitchen, no big deal, just checking on the food, and found the college server frantically filling black lacquer trays with hot-outside, frozen-inside hors d’oeuvres. No sign of Wade. “Jim. Have you seen my husband?”

“Sorry, I’m really too busy to …” Jim shook his head, clearly exasperated trying to feed sixty people with one small oven and too few goodies coming out of it and too much pregig marijuana slowing down his executive functioning.

The laundry room door was shut, but I could see the light under the crack. Couldn’t be. I nervously checked our back bedroom. No sign of two adults, just my two kids on our king bed, hypnotized by the television.

“Ten more minutes and you have to get into your own bunks. I love you both!”

My heart in pieces, I marched back to the front of the apartment to where Caitlin stood, arms on her hips, ready to help me in any way she could.

“Where are they?” She had urged me countless times to stop letting Wade go out late so often when he’d already strayed once. “And don’t tell me you were checking on the food. I am going to help you figure this out.” She seemed almost more determined to uncover his behavior than I did, which I thought a little bizarre.

“I think they are in the laundry room,” I said, squeezing my hands while tears pooled in my eyes. I blinked them away. “It’s the only room I haven’t checked.”

“No way.”

“He’s not at the party. He’s not in the kitchen. They didn’t jump out the window or tuck in the kids. It’s the only room that makes any sense—there’s a light on in there.”

“You sure she isn’t some writer?” Caitlin asked. “Maybe she’s helping him write a toast?”

“She’s definitely not from Meter. She’s hot enough to be on the cover. Besides, I already wrote his friggin’ toast.”

“When are you going to stop doing that, by the way; he’s a grown man with dozens of writers at his disposal …”

“In the laundry room, Caitlin. Where I wash his children’s clothes.”

“If I were you, I’d try to catch him in the act.” She forced the words out of her mouth with spit flying. “We should go back there and fling that door open.”

“Not we, me. You’re too rash; you’ll screw it up,” I said. She started to protest, but she knew what I meant. “Keep people from going into the back of the apartment. I need to sort this out myself.”

I walked down the hall and sat on a kitchen stool while my eyes burned with humiliation over something too crazy to be true. As the student waiter took out the latest batch of crumbly phyllo hors d’oeuvres, they went sliding onto the floor.

“The floor is clean,” I said. “Pick them up, place them on the lovely lacquer trays, and serve them to the guests, Jim.”

“Really, Mrs. Crawford? I would never …”

“Really. Do it.”

I was so tense I couldn’t breathe, so I waited down the hall in a hidden corner and stared at the light under the laundry room door. If my husband and the girl came out together, I couldn’t yell at him in front of her and all the guests. Or could I? I had to think of some approach that would give me the advantage and find an unflappable new personality inside me to fuel it. If I didn’t persevere, I would never be able to maintain that I “had the goods” on him. It would only be hearsay and innuendo that could be easily refuted. Then I wondered: Why should I be waffling if I’m catching him in the act? Easy answer: because I didn’t want it to be true.

Just when I’d decided (correctly) that nothing else would do but to knock, the knuckles on my tightly clenched hand mere inches from the laundry room door, a groggy Lucy appeared in the kitchen in the lint-balled, pink Disney princess nightgown she’d insisted, going on two years now, she could not fall asleep without. “Where’s Daddy?” she murmured while rubbing her left eye. “I’m ready for my story.”

“Honey, you need to get back in bed. If you walk around and get all excited, you’re going to get overtired and …” And witness me catching your father in flagrante.

Blake suddenly appeared behind his sister. This was getting dangerous. “Mom,” he said. “I tried to tell her to get into her bunk, but she wouldn’t listen. She had to find Dad.”

“It’s okay, Blake. Tell you what. If you read her the Angelina Ballerina, that will count as the rest of the reading you need to do.” I kissed the top of Lucy’s head, turned her around, and watched Blake shepherd her back to their room. If this laundry room situation was as bad as it looked, I worried, how would I mitigate the damage on them?

“Allie!” Murray yelled next, gesticulating with his muscular arms in huge circles around my kitchen. I noticed a gold watch the size of a hockey puck on his trunklike limb. I looked past him to give Caitlin the “WTF” for letting him back here, but she was nowhere to be found.

Murray’s thinning comb-over looked slightly askew as he stopped to catch his breath. “Allie,” he wheezed, picking up a cheese stick and pointing it at my heart before he mashed it down his throat with the center of his palm. “Where the fuck is your husband?”

I shrugged. Murray rested his elbow on the island counter, displaying sweat stains across the creases of his dark blue shirt. The Columbia server couldn’t place the last phyllo spinach pies or the new fried wontons on the tray in front of him fast enough to beat Murray’s rapid-fire arm movements from tray to mouth, tray to mouth, quicker than a real toad would catch a fly with his tongue.

Murray spat the following in my ear as he scarfed down a few more. “Delsie thinks you’re fantastic! Your pitch worked and she is so happy to have you handling her writing for the big media pitch we’d put—”

“Thanks, Murray, but I need to deal with the party.” At that I left and hid down the hall to witness how Wade would exit the room now.

Then the unimaginable happened. My boss eyed the laundry room door, saw the light on underneath, and strode over to the room where my husband was possibly shagging his mistress. He banged on the door with the back of his fist. Murray made my day, and my soft spot for him grew.

“Wade, you crazy schmuck! You in there?! You got me wanting to toast your fabulous ass.” He rattled the locked doorknob.

“Right out, Murray. Just gotta finish one, more, thing, here …” Wade yelled nonchalantly from the inside as if he wasn’t about to explode into a young woman’s voluptuous mouth.

A full, long twenty-two seconds later—I know, because I counted—Wade appeared with his nose high, as if he wasn’t ever going to be accountable to Murray, or his ball-and-chain, for his bizarre shenanigans. Only I detected a hint of anger in his posture. It couldn’t have thrilled him to find the irascible Murray on the other side of the door—or to have to rush his eruption in there.

“You good?” Murray then smacked his back even harder, leaving flecks of phyllo and finger grease stains on Wade’s shirt.

From twenty feet down the hall, I tried to peek around them into the laundry room, but Wade gingerly closed the door and steered Murray in the direction of the party.

Wade didn’t see me watching him. “Yeah, just a loose … I had to go get a … ah, doesn’t matter, what the hell’s going on with you, Murray?” He turned to the waiter a lot more aggressively than appropriate. “How does a guy get a drink around here?” I could see beads of sweat forming on his slightly receded hairline. He was definitely pissed off.

“Right on it, sir,” Jim answered, straightening the bottom hem of his rumpled black jacket. That’s what was missing: Wade’s jacket.

Without waiting for his drink, or witnessing my presence, Wade put his arm around Murray’s shoulder and started recounting one of his half-fictional exploits. Murray guffawed as Wade turned on his conversational charm amid the adjacent living room chatter, which had reached a thousand-decibel pitch.

7
Wifely Conundrums

I was left drumming the wall behind me with my fingers while waiting for Ms. Reptile Shoes to exit my laundry room. Bile inched up in my throat as I tried to decide how to handle this. What was I supposed to do, march into our living room and ask Wade right then and there what it all meant? Was his telling me I was so hot all the time when we barely had sex anymore a clear sign that he loved someone else?

I got up the guts to walk back down to the laundry room door, but she opened it herself just as I arrived. There stood the Tudor Room woman with her hair perfectly coiffed, and her full lips smothered with gloss, lavishly but accurately, without the remotest hint that she’d been performing sexual tongue gymnastics minutes before. She returned my stare with simple, elegant composure.

Though fuming, I was also heartbroken by her beauty and what it must mean to my husband. “What the hell was going on in here?!”

She then did the unthinkable—she held out her hand. “Jackie Malone.”

“What the …” My eyes darted to the vacant scene behind her.

“Look, he’s all yours.” She stared straight at me. “It’s not what you think. You may not believe me now, but I was in there on your behalf. I was looking for something and he caught me.”

I studied her clothes for signs they’d just had mad groping sex. I had to admit that she did look completely unruffled. All I could see behind her was laundry neatly folded, and all I could smell was powder detergent—no scent of lust, no mess. “You’re telling me you were alone, locked in a room with my husband, and I’m supposed to believe nothing was going on in here?!!”

“Yes. Nothing. And more important …” She paused and held my arm. Then she said, “This is going to sound extremely improbable, but you are actually going to need to trust me.”

I yanked out of her grasp and whispered through clenched teeth. “Trust you? You just spent the last ten minutes locked in the laundry room with my husband who just walked out of here.”

“I told you. I was looking for something having to do with the men in your living room that you know nothing about. What they are doing is going to sap your finances, any stability you have, probably deplete everything you have saved. It’s not safe in any way. Nothing sexual was going on here. He came in and caught me looking for something in his jacket.” She pulled me into the laundry room.

“What were you looking for? And tell me about the casino chips you both seem to have,” I demanded, keeping one eye on the hall in case Wade returned.

“The casino chips mean nothing.” Jackie looked vulnerable for a moment and I took it as a sign that those chips were not an innocent prop in whatever game she was playing. “We’ve been to Atlantic City is all. Earlier, from the hall, I saw him take off his jacket back here, so I came back and I thought I might be able to find—”

“Allie?” I heard Caitlin before I saw her walking furiously in our direction, her miniskirt stretched to the gills over her tight little gymnast form, and her thick platforms loudly stomping on my floors. She was my close friend, but far too nosy to be invited into this scene. I walked farther into the kitchen and slammed the laundry room door behind Jackie so fast I wondered if I’d clipped her nose.

“Not now, Caitlin.”

She was inches from me. “All okay? Wade’s in the living room with all the men drooling over the hot fashionistas, and he looks pissed. Did you fight?”

“Can you go back to the party, please?”

Caitlin crossed her arms and planted her feet Mexican-standoff style. “I know you, and I know you’re not telling me something.” She looked at the closed door. “Did you find her?”

“I was mistaken,” I said, turning her around and pushing her in the direction of the party. “Go make sure Wade doesn’t have his palm on anyone’s ass, please.”

“Happy to,” Caitlin said, relishing the chance to catch my husband in another sticky situation.

With Caitlin gone, I opened the door and snuck inside to continue my line of questioning.

“Look, I need to know a few things besides the obvious question of why you were back here with Wade: Who are you? Why did you help me with Delsie? What was it you were looking for? What is Wade doing with which men that is going to take away our savings, as you supposedly contend?” Despite all my suspicions, in the far reaches of my anterior lobe, I did allow for the possibility that she was telling the truth.

“Not who. What. Documents and photos,” she answered tersely, still trying to size me up even as she scanned the floor. “Or a flash drive, that little stick that goes into the side of a computer.”

“I know what a flash drive is. Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“I told you. I’m Jackie.”

I leaned against the dryer, holding my throbbing head with one hand. “Stop being cute. I catch you red-handed with my husband. All this ‘I’m trying to help you’ shit looks like your way of getting out of the room. But I admit, it’s creative.” I was amazed I said that without my voice cracking. Once I feel like I might cry, my toughness evaporates instantly.

Jackie began folding the clothes that had scattered on the floor. “I’m sorry, I know this is confusing and really hard to believe, but I swear on my life that I’m not lying to you one bit.” She suddenly looked five years younger.

I stopped her manic folding with a pat on her hand and looked her in the eye. “What kind of documents and photos?” I considered the very remote possibility that she and Wade weren’t doing anything “wrong”; her hair was too perfect, her blouse too unwrinkled, her lip gloss too polished.

“Meet me at the Tudor Room bar tomorrow around five,” she said calmly, but with a hard glint in her eye. “You’ve got to keep this quiet, but if you find anything at all new in his papers and folders that seems like it wouldn’t be …” She started scribbling down her cell-phone number and passed it to me on a gum wrapper from her purse.

I stuffed it into my pocket, glad to have some kind of way to reach her should I find proof she and Wade were together; I could use it to confront him somehow. “Wouldn’t be what?” I asked in a tough and angry tone. “He’s a journalist, an editor of a general interest magazine. He could have any kind of documents dealing with every story under the sun on his desk. Movie stars, legal wars, political corruption, how the hell am I supposed to know … what isn’t safe? I pay the bills; it’s all there …” I whispered. “What the hell do you mean? And if I found something, you wouldn’t be getting it, just so you know. He’s my husband. You’re a total stranger.”

She laid it on the line in a way I could not avoid any longer, no matter how hard I tried. “Listen carefully. This whole deal has been going on a lot longer than you know. And you’re never going to understand how without my help.”

Really?

And then the beauty added this:

“And just so you know, I didn’t just get screwed in there, you did.”

8
Pulled Toward the Edge

Jackie Malone knew way too much about Wade. My mind was racing. This, their relationship—whatever that may be—must have been going on awhile now. As she teetered back into the party showing her lean, racehorse calves and the flash of lacquered red on her high-heeled soles, I couldn’t help but stare, vanquished, at the most amazing piece of ass I’d ever seen.

She didn’t just get screwed in there, but somehow I did?

Wishing there was a pill to make my legs grow longer, I went to my bedroom to take a little break and figure out my next moves. After I poured enough Visine in my eyes and cold water on my flushed cheeks to return to the living room, half the guests were gone. Jackie was nowhere to be seen. Other revelers were collecting their jackets and starting to head out. Caitlin was in deep conversation with a tall stylist who was so thin she looked like a praying mantis.

When Wade finally noticed the look on my face, he excused himself from a Russian supermodel stunner named Svetlana and hurried over. “Hey, don’t think I don’t know how exasperating these parties are for the wife.”

I squinted at him. He actually believed I was upset over the quiche temperature. “Murray and Max Rowland want me to go to Atlantic City. I really don’t want to go, but”—he shrugged his handsome shoulders, a willing pawn—“I should.”

“Wade, I need to ask you something,” I said, voice just unsteady enough that he’d notice if he wanted to, which he didn’t.

“Wade! Get your butt in here!” Murray yelled impatiently, banging on the opening from inside the elevator.

Wade gestured to Murray that he was right there in a sec. He turned to me and said, “Hey, can we talk tomorrow? I gotta go. Murray has fifteen clients out in Atlantic City who are going to buy ad space, big buys, and I need …” He wasn’t even looking at me.

“Who was the woman? You tell me and then you go.”

“What woman?” Wade said like I’d asked about a purple giraffe in our home.

“Wade. THERE … WAS … A … WOMAN … IN … THE … LAUNDRY … ROOM. I saw her leave after you left.”

“Oh God. She’s just some woman who hangs around the Tudor Room. She had papers from some event she’s trying to deal with and I had them in my jacket and I don’t know, she wanted …”

“You were in there with the door closed.”

“Wade!” Murray bellowed, now angry.

“Honey, it looks weird, I know. I just thought it best to talk to her privately not to raise suspicions because I know you get upset about beautiful women sometimes around me, and I’m just so sorry, my tactic did the opposite. She just wanted advice on how to handle one of the clients out there and I … I gotta go. I love you.” He rushed to the door. I knew I wouldn’t get anything out of him this way.

Caitlin glanced back at me and then sprinted to my side as I gathered unused little fuchsia napkins into a neat pile around the bar, anything to busy myself. “You don’t mind if I go home, do you?” she asked, her eyes searching mine for yet one more clue to what had happened. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, even as I pictured Jackie Malone with her legs entwined around my husband in Max Rowland’s Borgata-bound Atlantic City helicopter. “False alarm.”

Four minutes later, as the elevator finally banged shut for the two stoned Columbia University waiters I practically pushed out the door, I laid my head against my front door, knowing my husband would deny all of it.

With tears obscuring my vision and judgment, I walked over to Wade’s work alcove and feverishly riffled through every single piece of paper my husband had ever come into contact with. I encountered nothing unusual, except this fresh ache in my heart signaling we were headed nowhere good fast.

A FULL HOUR later, I slumped onto my corner sofa, feeling defeated and sucker punched, with a wrinkled-up photo in my hand of Wade and me taken from the night we met. When I found it, I’d crumpled it into a ball and thrown it into the trash can across the room. I loved that photo. It was black and white and taken in the moments after a screening. We’d been talking only about ten minutes, but he was craning his neck toward me as if he were completely transfixed by my very presence. I had retrieved the photo from the trash, and now I flattened it out on a big book in my lap. Then I just stared at it, at us.

I then watched the light beams of a dozen flickering votives meld together on the windowsill and told myself this: at the ripe age of thirty-four I did have to grow up and start facing realities I didn’t want to accept. One thing would never change: I would charge Wade up and he would, in turn, charge out the door to conquer and seduce the world. Problem was this: he was just too damn good at that seduction and unable to resist its bounty.

The photo in my trembling hand had been taken the night Hillsinger Consulting was working pro bono to promote a project to benefit veterans’ causes; we were launching a gorgeous little gem of a World War Two documentary and book series that would win several awards the next winter. With all the press I’d convinced to show up, the buzz in the room was radioactive.

At some point during the afterglow, Murray introduced me to my future husband, then wandered off into the movie lobby to revel in the accolades for my hard work: I’d gotten every important person in New York to the event. Wade and I fell into a deep conversation until the guy trying to sweep away the complimentary popcorn nudged us out. In our now crumpled first photo, we were in midstep, heads focused on each other, walking the aisle like we were already a done deal.

Wade had moved with an awkward charm as he escorted me out of the screening room and into the sea of guests, demonstrating a tender shyness I would never again see in him. “You must be hungry after pulling off this great event?” he asked, and I nodded. “We can get a table next door at the Gotham. Unless you would prefer the bar.” I liked the way his arm felt on my back as he guided me through the room. He was a good height for me, and lanky—the complete opposite build of James, the lifelong soul mate I would leave for Wade, who at that point was on month eleven of inoculating children in East Asia.

Truth be told, I didn’t really like lanky, but I thought maybe I could fall for this Wade guy anyway. The shoulders were strong and confident, which helped. His blondish long hair hinted he might be cool like the guys on the docks I grew up with; but he was also urbane: everything rolled up into one neat package I’d left my small seaside hamlet for. The city and its sophisticated inhabitants were there to save me, and I was as willing as I’d ever be. I was also trying hard to be as single as I could with James off discovering the world instead of my body.

We had walked into the bright lights of Gotham restaurant, a place bubbling with that exact sharp, pulsing New York City energy I’d grown to love. A pack of mortals waited at the bar—hedge funders, models, fabulous gay fashion editors, all looking very worthy of commandeering any table at any restaurant in New York. Yet the hostess led us swiftly past all of them to a romantic little corner complete with a lone red candle and a tasteful bouquet of purple poppies. Three people tried to get Wade’s attention on the way to our seats.

“What do they want?” I asked, as if I didn’t understand why on earth they would even want to talk to him. His magazine was crackling with popularity back then and I saw no need to massage his ego.

Now I’d put him in a position where this Wade Crawford I’d heard so much about would have to brag. And this was a little test: either he was going to be discreet about his placement on the New York totem pole, or he was going to be one of those insecure douche bags Caitlin and I always laughed about—the ones who felt compelled to highlight their prowess in yellow marker.

“I guess they want to be in the magazine,” he said, pulling out my chair and handing me my napkin. “Maybe they think it’ll help their careers. Who knows?”

That passed muster. Honest enough without showing off.

Before we could get settled into our unplanned date, a slick-looking thirtysomething in a shiny Hugo Boss suit sidled up to the table and slapped Wade on the back too hard.

“Hey, man, did you get the book? We’re already shopping it in Hollywood; I’m telling you, it’s The Perfect Storm meets Friday Night Lights. A race around the world that—”

“Joe. I got it. And I get it.” Wade winked at Joe, a man I guessed to be an agent. “And you know what?” He tilted his head toward me. “I’m on it too, but I’m in the middle of something here.” He high-fived the guy and turned around before Joe could say anything else.

During our nonstop conversation that night, Wade listened to me intently, fixing his gorgeous hazel eyes on me, nailing me with a crazy look on his chiseled face like he was completely smitten. “So I just commissioned a story on this company down in Texas that has really screwed over a lot of people,” he said while attempting to loop an olive out of the bottom of his lowball. “They were manipulating energy prices all along California by—”

I placed my head on my hand in mock disgust. “Corruption for $400. And the answer is: What is Enron?”

“So you know about …”

My laugh was light and happy. “Wade, I’m thrilled to have dinner with you, but, really, you just laid your cards on the table big-time.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, flustered, which, though I barely knew him, I surmised was a new feeling.

“You’ve obviously been dating women who don’t understand what you do. You don’t need to be surprised I’ve heard of Enron. It’s been front page in the New York Times for a week now. And by the way, you’re a little late jumping on the story.”

“I was just trying to …”

“I know, you were being polite, but, like I said, you’re kinda busted. You’d have to be a Victoria’s Secret angel not to have heard of Enron.”

He laughed out loud and looked at me like he was going to propose right then and there. “You got me,” he said with a devilish half-curved smile. My smallish breasts and short legs weren’t exactly the angel material he’d apparently been accustomed to, but I pressed on.

Despite his reputation for being an inveterate mover and shaker, only twice during the meal did I notice Wade scan the room. And though this may have been a record in restraint for him, he got up only once, to say hello to a table filled with young Hollywood somethings.

“I’m sorry,” he said as he returned. “I didn’t think I had to do any work tonight, but I have to whore myself out sometimes. Just tried to convince a young Hollywood schmuck he’s gotta do my cover instead of People magazine.” Wade looked a little desperate, like he’d taken the shafting personally. It was clear this guy’s ego was completely wrapped up in whom he could secure for his magazine, like a hostess fretting over the RSVP list for her party.

“Did he bite?”

“Not sure. The ugly truth is I now have to kiss the asses of a bunch of idiots a fair amount of the time to get what I want out of them.”

“What were you doing before you were kissing idiots’ asses?”

He choked a little on that one. “You know, sadly enough, that’s exactly how I spend most of my day. But it wasn’t always like this. I started out in my twenties working for the Boston Globe, which was a much more scrappy kind of journalism, and something I thought I’d always stick with. You know, not to sound too righteous, but the great stuff for any reporter—exposing politicians and corporate criminals, that stuff we thrive on.”

“Why did you leave?” I asked.

“I started writing longer pieces for magazines, and then I landed my first job as an editor, and the chance to rise was too powerful to pass up.”

“And that makes you melancholy for the hard news?”

All of a sudden, he sat very rigidly, as if trying to make up for something he’d just done wrong. “You know the way life pulls you away from your goals, before you know it’s happening? I have a different kind of influence working at Meter, I guess I could say, but it isn’t the same real sense of breaking news. I get to pick important people to go after and we do significant hard news pieces sometimes, but there’s a lot more celebrity stuff I never thought I’d get involved with. Truth is, for those people, a Meter cover can make someone’s career. It’s a major statement. Period.”

He took a sip of his drink and looked at me strangely, like I may have been the first woman he’d dated in a while with whom he could talk. He liked me. I could read it all over his face. “I’m not saying it’s me, you know. It’s the magazine, to be alongside more substantive pieces about movies, blue-blood scandals, and literary sensations. It’s a huge opportunity for that kid across the room, pure and simple, and he’s making me work for it when it’s usually the other way around. Yes, I got in this business to root out the bad guys, but now that I’m the editor, the bottom line keeps my job afloat and I have to focus on what the magazine needs, which is celebrity cluster-fucks.” He shook his head.

“Do you mind the ‘whoring’?”

He held my gaze. “You wanna know the truth?”

“Sure.” I didn’t dare blink.

“Put it this way: I don’t like to lose.” He placed his forearms flat almost to my edge of the table. “And I like to think I’m more of a high-class courtesan than a two-bit hooker.”

We talked into the night and I was amazed at my ability to hold my own with an accomplished editor ten years older than me. Yes, I felt like the imposter, as I often do even today around new people I meet in the city, but I also sensed this man before me needed to be tamed. He liked my point of view, he liked me putting him in his place, and he even liked not acting like a pretentious ass for once. I tried to make my PR work for Murray sound more serious than event planning, which was most of what I did at the beginning. Wade was interested in my job, but not as interested as he was in explaining his.

While he was coming to quick terms with the idea that he’d finally found an attractive woman who cared about his world of nonstop news and gossip, right away, I knew that I too certainly liked the idea of this Wade Crawford man before me. He fit a need, like a square peg into a square hole. His enthusiasm for life and work would soften my losses: my father in a plane to the ravages of an untimely blizzard and James to a burning obsession to save every child on the other side of the world.

New York glimmered around us that night, the way it can when spontaneity falls perfectly into place. After dinner, Wade escorted me to two downtown parties filled with cigarette smoke and writers. Someday I hoped to be like his writer friends who wrote long magazine stories and books that they’d mined from their souls. It was clear from every angle that Wade’s nonstop joie de vivre was more than contagious. He was sheer fun, and full of the possibility of escape, of renewal even.

He dropped me at my stoop at dawn, kissing me tenderly on the lips and disappearing into the early morning glow. As I watched him bounce down the street, all I could think was that he had Daddy’s electricity and confidence. And that suited me just fine.

NOW I THREW the photo on the side table, my heart tightening. Next I did some more sifting through his desk to look for something a young girl could categorize as “unsafe” and a clue to his affections for this same girl. No jewelry receipts, no trips to swanky hotels in South Beach, no damaging Monkey Business photos. Was it possible my wifely hunch was off? Was Jackie honestly trying to help me at the bar? And in my own laundry room?

Around Wade’s work alcove, I only found celebrity snapshots amid journalistic projects I knew he was working on—cocaine dealers in Tijuana, photos of well-known American CEOs at an exclusive conference in the Rockies, and a draft piece about a society murder in Argentina linked to the grandson of an SS Nazi officer—but nothing seemed secret or nefarious. Or they all seemed secret and nefarious, but that was the nature of Wade’s work: find twisted stories that drew people in.

And then, something hidden inside a book in his right desk drawer—an annual company report on Luxor computer chips—caught my attention. Luxor, a growing computer networking company, wasn’t the kind of flashy story Wade would usually go after. It was suspicious purely because it seemed so mundane. Was he investing someone else’s cash? The one thing any wife in any regular situation would think was normal to see in her husband’s desk—a company annual report—I found disturbingly abnormal.

It had rattled me enough that I unfolded the gum wrapper in my back pocket and sent Jackie a text.

ME: It’s Allie. Is this Jackie?

About thirty seconds later she texted:

Find anything?

ME: No. Nothing at all.

JACKIE: Can we meet? Tudor Room tomorrow?

Meet with a woman I’d like wiped off the face of the planet? Problem was the admonition she delivered as she exited the laundry room rang in my ears and I’d have to understand what she meant before she got whacked. Next, I froze. This was way too early. I had no business contacting her. I don’t know what I was thinking by texting her so rashly.

ME: Tomorrow no good. Just wanted to know this was you for sure.

I googled her immediately, but I couldn’t find any information on her. No digital footprints at all.

I sensed only this: Jackie Malone used her sexual appeal to drive men over the edge. What she did with that power once they were plummeting, I did not know.

9
No Choice but the Grindstone

The cold light of day sobered my brain as I sat at my desk a week later. I was doing my best to focus on the screen in front of me, open to a blank page, the cursor pulsing like an impatient suitor. At least this was something that was all mine, not a writing task to boost a demanding client’s career or image. Two months earlier, I had gathered my courage and submitted an old script I’d left for dead to a Tuesday night screenwriting class at New York University. I’d assumed I’d get rejected, but to my surprise, I got in, and this week’s assignment was in danger of being late if I couldn’t concentrate and begin it.

I’d write a few sentences of dialogue, but when I couldn’t find the word I was searching for, my marriage angst would cloud my head instead, and then the beaming faces of our two children would break my heart more. A week had passed, and I hadn’t made a move yet to meet Jackie. I wanted to lie low, find clues, consider my actions before I jumped too fast. Asking Wade how he knew her would yield another obfuscation until I could prove something solid.

I was very tempted to text Jackie again and meet her. She might say something to use as a comeback when Wade denied doing something with her. I also had to figure out what her bizarre warnings meant, if anything.

Yet, if I contacted her, how would I be able to tell if Jackie were lying? Was she possibly just blowing my husband in there? Maybe this wild-goose chase to find documents was nothing more than a game of distract-the-wife.

One thing was certain: I had to face the fact that I’d been feeling on edge with Wade—I believe now because I felt him pulling away. Before we were in sync; now he and I weren’t. He made the motions, he’d kissed my ear at a party in a sexual way like he wanted me so badly, but then when we were alone, he was too tired and spent. Part of me was used to winding him up and letting him go. Yet this clarity slowly signalled something new: he was either having an affair or just didn’t feel the same about us. I felt hurt and confused and angry and more than a little aggressive toward this Jackie woman.

“Allie.” Caitlin popped her blond head into my office. “Selena asked me to tell you that Murray wants you in there in ten minutes.” I glanced at the clock in the corner of my screen. How had it become 9:25 so quickly? Now I’d never get any pages polished before class. “Are you okay? Why are your eyes red?”

“Nothing. I’m getting a cold.”

“You sure? You need to talk?” she asked softly.

“There’s no news. I left early this morning.”

“Was he out again?” she asked, fuming.

“Yes, gambling I guess, or entertaining.”

Caitlin snorted. “Like there’s a difference?” She put her hands on her hips. “And you still haven’t filled me in on the laundry room episode last week. Why was he hidden away in the middle of his own friggin’ party when he’s usually the guy holding court?”

“It’s too long a story, Caitlin.”

She walked to my desk and splayed her arms out on the other side of it, with her chin resting on my computer screen. “One thing you have to tell me. What exactly is going on or not going on with you two? You and Wade look like robots together every time I see you. Believe me, I study you guys. I keep telling you that.”

I put my head in my hands. “I love what I loved about him from day one: his irreverence, his magic touch with kids, but I just feel out of sorts with him right now. It’s weird, like I’m questioning some things … it’s nothing. We’ll be fine.”

“Questioning what? Your love for him?”

“No, but you know Wade isn’t easy to be married to; he’s so all over the place all the time. The flip side of that is I love how exciting he is, but suddenly I’m thinking about things I’d shut out before.”

“Like what?”

I straightened up my back. Caitlin always pushed so hard on everything, there was no use resisting. “Like way back when, even on our wedding day, maybe, perhaps, I may have seen some things I didn’t really digest.”

“What the hell? What did you see back then?”

“His hand on my bridesmaid’s rear end for starters.” I laughed slightly; somehow it seemed ridiculous in that instant of lucidity. Every few days during that spring I felt something click, like those lenses eye doctors roll down over eyes to test and then sharpen the patient’s vision. With each slow click, everything comes into focus a notch better.

“No!” Caitlin walked over to my desk and crossed her arms. “Really? Back then? You never told me that.”

“Well, I was putting on my veil in an anteroom and I saw him ushering Kathy Vincent down the hall and his hand was practically on her butt and I just thought, ‘Oh, gee.’ But then I just plowed forward into unholy matrimony. I couldn’t begin to process that.”

“And you think the girl from the party and he are … and you should be suspicious always after the cheating with the photo assistant during the breast-feeding moment?” Hard to fool Caitlin, not that the dots would be that difficult to connect for a sixth grader. Maybe I just hadn’t wanted to.

“Well, kind of like maybe I’ve been in a blur with work and kids and now he’s just distracted and not that focused on me and …” Click.

“Listen, Allie, when you marry an ego like Wade, there’s a limit to the intimacy you are going to feel. You weren’t overlooking that one. It’s all about him. You had to know that going in.”

“It’s like I don’t rock his world the way I used to.”

“Does he rock yours?” Caitlin sounded weirdly like she hoped he didn’t.

This was the seminal question of the day I wasn’t ready for. It literally stung. I felt an acidic chemical shoot up my body, tighten my heart, and give me an instant headache. Caitlin laid it all on the line right then and there in a way I’d never really let myself fully consider.

How and when did he rock my world?

What did this guy actually give to me? For a horrible, terrifying, very honest moment, I thought to myself: Was I just wanting and needing to rock his so much I don’t even know the answer?

“Caitlin, I don’t know about rocking my world. Of course he has or did or does at times,” I blurted out to convince both her and myself. “I’m so distracted by catering to his man-baby needs and getting the kids fed while I’m handling every Murray explosion to be able to answer that honestly right this second.”

“He’s fucking around again, isn’t he?” she asked. “I will literally chop off his dick if he is.”

“Jesus, Caitlin! You didn’t listen to what I just said!”

“I certainly did, but I’m not so sure that you did. How can you say one day you love his magic touch and the next that it’s so hard to be with someone like him?” She perched on the desk’s edge and looked straight at me. “Are you fucking around?”

“Don’t be crazy,” I answered, rubbing the pain out of my forehead and wishing she would leave.

“There is definitely something that you’re hiding from me.” She looked at me long and hard. “You have to tell me. I live for this stuff, you know that. There’s none in my life, God knows.”

I smiled at her. “It’ll happen soon for you when you’re not expecting it, Caitlin. He’ll just pop out of nowhere.”

“Wouldn’t know it if it happened, haven’t had a guy even look at me in a year,” she said.

“What are you talking about? Guys like you; you just don’t see it.”

“No, Allie. You don’t get it: guys don’t like me. I’m the fun best friend, not the one they want to take home.”

“Well, then we’ll work on it.” I glanced at her bulky shoes and thick, muscly thighs peeking through her skirt. “We’ll soften your look a little or something. I promise he’s just around the corner. Let me just deal with the monster down the hall first.”

I grabbed a pen and paper and quickstepped down the short hall to Murray’s corner office.

SELENA, A CURVACEOUS Colombian woman, and one of the only beings on the planet who didn’t fear Murray Hillsinger, nodded me in with a roll of her big eyes and a pursing of her huge shiny lips lined in dark pencil. My boss was clearly not in a good mood. All I needed.

“I don’t give a shit who he thinks he is,” Murray roared into his phone as I entered. He waved me to the straight-backed chair next to the black leather couch where he tended to hold court. I crossed and recrossed my legs while his tirade continued. His yellow tie dotted with little purple crowns didn’t quite cover his belly, which protruded in a horizontal glob over his belt. “You gotta say what I tell you to say publicly or you’re screwed. Plain and simple. I hate to state the obvious, but the cover-up is always worse than the crime, buddy. Just admit your mistake and move on. Otherwise you’re toast. Trust me, that’s what you’re paying me for. I’ll get a good reporter to take your mea culpa. Someone important. I know: I’ll get Delsie Arceneaux to do it for you. Sound good? She’ll be gentle.”

Arrayed on the coffee table was Bouley Bakery’s freshest assortment of chocolate croissants and buttery Danish and muffins, delivered daily the minute Murray arrived. As he listened to the diminished soul on the other end of the line, he gestured toward the coffeepot for me to pour him a refill. I felt like a stewardess.

Murray suddenly threw the phone down the length of the couch, grabbed a giant blueberry crumb muffin, tore off the top, and bit a large section from it, spraying balls of sugar everywhere in the process. “I’m so happy Delsie is ready to emcee the Fulton Film Festival media lunch, and some panels. It’s like some light went on for her after your pitch and she’s excited. But now we gotta create even more buzz. Remember I got Max Rowland to invest in the festival, so he’ll have his jail buddies break my kneecaps if we mess this up.”

“Okay,” I said and wrote more buzz on my notepad. Murray always liked people to take notes, no matter how simple his demands. He knew damn well the buzz we were going to find was already in the pipeline. The Fulton Film Festival was practically running itself.

“Whatever you have, I’m not impressed, it’s not enough for Delsie or Max—”

“Murray,” I interrupted. “Why did you get that criminal Max Rowland to invest in a do-gooder festival like ours and put extra pressure on us to please him as well? I’m managing so many projects I don’t know if I have the time to …” My home situation was sapping so much energy out of me that I could barely listen to his commands, let alone execute them.

“Bullshit. You got spunk and intelligence.” He counted these attributes on his fingers without releasing the raspberry pastry in his grip. “You like to argue. Delsie likes that. I like that. I need to be told when I’m off base.”

For the past ten years, Murray had never once listened to me when I told him he was off base. I put down my pen.

“So what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to promise me everything will go okay with the festival.”

“First of all, as much as you’d like me to be, Murray, I’m not your mommy. And second, why do I have to go it alone? Why can’t you be more involved?”

“You are to deal alone with Max on festival business; I’m not doing it anymore. Have a pastry. You’re too goddamned thin.”

Why was every man in my life acting like a little child who had to have everything the way he wanted just now? Maybe I courted them. That thought depressed me as I thought about making an effort to expunge the next generation of too many man-babies. I decided I’d let Blake handle his friend issues on his own and give him praise when he did.

I turned to Murray. “You have to talk to me about the other business with Max Rowland; he’s a felon so I deserve to know you are being careful, or I refuse …”

Selena peeked into the room and said, “Sorry, Mr. Hillsinger. Your mother. Line two. You know how she reacts when I say you’re in a meeting so the light will be blinking until you pick up.”

“Shit!” Murray slammed the table. “Never satisfied. She’s working on me now to go to the Venice Film Festival at the end of summer, thinks she’s a film expert because her son has a few fuckin’ famous clients in Hollywood.” He picked up the receiver and completely changed the tone of his voice. “Yes, Ma.” He sounded like a little boy and slumped his shoulders. “Yes, sure, Ma. I’ll work on it. I thought you’d like the idea of Boca with your girlfriends again, but Venice it is.” He slumped deep into his sofa at her latest request. “No, Ma. You know the hotels are all booked. No, Ma. Doesn’t matter what they say, the Cipriani isn’t the only good one, but, yes, Ma, I’ll try to get you a room, but please remember if I can’t deliver for you, it’s because it’s been booked for celebrities for a year now.”

He had to pull the phone away from his ear as she reacted to that bit of news.

“Ma, I’ll try to get you in. I’ll call you later.” Pause. “Yes, I love you.” He put down the receiver.

“How come you look like a dejected eight-year-old every time you talk to her?”

“Because she terrifies me, that’s why,” he admitted in total defeat. “She purposely asks for the hotel that’s booked out five years in advance. They want Clooney and DiCaprio in the Cipriani that week, not my mom in her fuckin’ fanny pack and Mephisto shoes! Jesus.”

I looked at the explosion of crumbs in front of me and shook my head. “Do you want me to write something specific for Delsie’s speech at the festival?”

“You decide what to put in it. You wrote those great environmental speeches when I hired you. A kid out of college who writes speeches with that much impact, I want going full tilt on this.”

“Okay, Murray. And there were a lot of people I wrote them with; it wasn’t all me.”

He dusted his hands and heaved into a standing position, getting ready to dismiss me. “I don’t give a shit if all your environmental writing success back then was genetic talent from your dad’s love of the sea, or dumb luck on timing with the globe going green and the fuckin’ terrorists controlling all the oil. Point is, you’re gonna do what I ask and you’re the best writer I got … and I’m very indebted to you, even though I don’t say it enough.”

“Of course, Murray,” I said, my feelings for him warming back up as they invariably did.

“Look, kid,” he said. I turned at the tender sound in his voice. “Your dad would have been proud. Too bad the good die young and he never saw your work promoting a cause that championed the ocean he lived in.”

“Something like that.”

He put his arm around me, ushering me out. “I remember when I first heard you give a speech. I knew that instant you could coach all my clients and write all their speeches. You sounded like a senator: junior fucking Barbara Boxer or something. Just don’t get all lesbo on me.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I mean, that short hair, all tough …”

“I don’t think Barbara Boxer is known to be gay; I think she—”

“I don’t give a fuck about whether she is or isn’t. Just don’t start takin’ yourself too fuckin’ seriously.” He grabbed his cordless phone, started punching numbers into it, and looked at it as though it were shouting obscenities in his ear. “Goddamn it, Selena, get in here and dial this thing.”

Selena scurried in, her Kardashian ass bouncing up and down like a beach ball, and took the phone while Murray finished lecturing me. “I want you to write more press releases on each film to create more press buzz for everything we do here. You know, groundbreaking shit lesbo senators pay attention to.”

Selena handed him the phone and waited to be sent back to her desk. She looked at me in solidarity. Murray wasn’t finished.

“Get me every goddamn cable news screamer screaming about the high-gloss, high-fuckin’-quality festival.”

Now he was just being ridiculous. “Nobody on cable news cares about art and culture. They’re too busy yelling at each other. We’re on the right track, Murray. We’re doing fine. We’re getting good coverage already this week …”

“Max?” he said into the phone, swatting one hand at Selena and me. “That brunette looked like she could fit your balls and your dick in her mouth! After your behavior last night in A.C., you fucking owe me fifty grand and two whores, you old bastard.” Gales of laughter followed. I honestly had no idea if Murray was joking around or making a factual statement to the criminal client who seemed to be invading our lives more every day.

10
Necessary Reckoning

When I got back to my office, Caitlin was lounging on my couch reading a report she’d pulled out of the hot pink computer bag I’d given her for her twenty-ninth birthday last winter.

“What was so earth-shatteringly important?” she asked.

“Murray wants me to get more press for the whole film festival, since the pitch to Delsie went so well and because now he’s got Max financially invested in it,” I said as I sat at my desk and clicked on my computer screen. I scrolled through what looked like a hundred e-mails that had come in since I’d left. “You know, just more buzz.”

“Murray always wants more attention,” she pointed out. “No amount will ever satisfy him, you know that.”

“Yes, I know that. That’s why my job sucks.”

Caitlin sat up and threw the report onto the coffee table. “That’s a piece of crap. Anyway, whatever you did or didn’t do right, all that matters is that what you said seemed to work for him.”

I stopped what I was doing and looked at her. “Really, Caitlin, that’s all that matters?” Caitlin and I spent so much time together all day long that we often went into sister mode. I felt like picking a fight with her just because she was in front of me.

She tilted her head. “That’s not what I meant.” She lay back on the sofa. “You’re good at what you do, but you should be concentrating your anxiety on your other talents. Maybe you’d get further, faster, and be able to leave this place.”

“Why?” I asked sarcastically. “You angling for my job?”

“Jesus, Allie. Chill,” she said. “Why would you say that, when all I’m doing is showing my support for your writing?”

“Sorry. I was kind of joking, or trying to,” I said. It had been unfair of me; she was right.

She grinned, apology accepted. “I read your reports and speeches every day. They sing compared to everyone else’s around here. You should be using your clout with Wade or Murray to move your own fiction writing career along and stop worrying about the little stuff that Murray is always going to take credit for anyway.” She settled in for a little lecture. “If I had access to Murray’s connections like you do, or to Wade’s, I’d be working them harder is all. If I was writing a script about a surrogate mom, like you are, I’d be asking Wade to show it to Sarah Jessica Parker, poster mom for surrogates.”

“Are you out of your mind? I’m not involving Wade in my writing career. I want to do it my way.”

“Fine. Do it all slow and appropriate. But just remember slow and appropriate usually gets beaten at the box office by swift and shrewd.” Caitlin started balancing a pillow on her feet. This woman could never sit still. “Max is meeting with the festival team and Murray again tomorrow. You could go and get Max to invest in your script.”

“That’s not possible,” I said, meaning the Max meeting and not the immature notion that a script I hadn’t even finished yet could be pitched. Murray didn’t lie to me. That’s one thing I could count on. “Murray isn’t going to talk business with the festival people for a while. He wants me to handle it all.”

“Well, it said FF on his calendar for tomorrow. They’re meeting at some hotel in the West Forties. I’m sure of it.”

I was shocked anew at her espionage. “How do you know FF is film festival?”

“Well, they are the initials for starters, and I asked Selena, because I’m really nosy and she told me yes, but that I shouldn’t say anything.”

I let that sit. Caitlin was always on my side, but a little difficult to control. I just had to channel her energy into productive areas, like this revelation that my boss had lied about not getting involved in festival business. Her skill was often valuable, but it made Caitlin seem at times much more than five years younger than she was. “You’ve got a package waiting for you up front,” she said, bouncing toward my door. “You want me to go get it? Maybe it’s Wade trying to get on your good side.”

“Oh my God, Caitlin! You talk like a cattle auctioneer! Yes, go get the package. Jesus!” I sat at my desk thinking that something with my boss wasn’t sitting right. He told me he wasn’t doing festival business with Max Rowland anymore, then he has a private meeting about it without telling me? Was every man in my life cheating on me in one way or another?

Click.

Caitlin sped out of the room and returned just as quickly, holding a box wrapped in dark brown paper, peppered with an absurd number of crooked postage stamps, and my address written in a familiar script. I ran a finger across the handsomely scrawled Par Avion, and I knew instantly the provenance. I opened it up. No card, but just as I expected: a pair of black silk long johns. I hadn’t heard from James since the last pair.

Caitlin peeked over my computer again. “Who the hell sends long underwear in May?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Oh. It’s something. Just something you don’t want to tell me.” She smiled, completely softening up. That, and knowing she was getting nowhere. “It’s okay. I still adore you. Keep your secrets. But if you want an ear, I’m here for you.” She had the sense to close the door behind her and leave me alone, wry amusement written all over her face.

James again. Through the years, he would always try to make me feel protected by sending a pair of long johns like these with a note saying: I will always keep you warm and safe. Part of me would immediately begin to feel better just remembering his words.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.