Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Copyright © Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney 2016

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Design by Sara Wood and Allison Saltzman. Cover image © Shutterstock.com (book)

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for 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 e-books

Ebook Edition © May 2016 ISBN: 9780008165086

Source ISBN: 9780008133726

Version 2017-05-09

Dedication

For my family: my parents, Roger and Theresa;

my sister, Laura; and my brothers, Richard and Tony—

who all love nothing more than a good story, well told.

There was always this dichotomy: what to keep up, what to change.

—WILLIAM TREVOR, “THE PIANO TUNER’S WIVES”

That’s how I knew this story would break my heart

When you wrote it

That’s how I knew this story would break my heart

—AIMEE MANN, THE FORGOTTEN ARM

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part One: Snowtober

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part Two: The Kiss

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty–One

Chapter Twenty–Two

Chapter Twenty–Three

Chapter Twenty–Four

Chapter Twenty–Five

Chapter Twenty–Six

Chapter Twenty–Seven

Chapter Twenty–Eight

Chapter Twenty–Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty–One

Chapter Thirty–Two

Chapter Thirty–Three

Chapter Thirty–Four

Chapter Thirty–Five

Part Three: Finding Leo

Chapter Thirty–Six

Chapter Thirty–Seven

Chapter Thirty–Eight

Chapter Thirty–Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty–One

Chapter Forty–Two

Chapter Forty–Three

Chapter Forty–Four

Chapter Forty–Five

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

As the rest of the guests wandered the deck of the beach club under an early-evening midsummer sky, taking pinched, appraising sips of their cocktails to gauge if the bartenders were using the top-shelf stuff and balancing tiny crab cakes on paper napkins while saying appropriate things about how they’d really lucked out with the weather because the humidity would be back tomorrow, or murmuring inappropriate things about the bride’s snug satin dress, wondering if the spilling cleavage was due to bad tailoring or poor taste (a look as their own daughters might say) or an unexpected weight gain, winking and making tired jokes about exchanging toasters for diapers, Leo Plumb left his cousin’s wedding with one of the waitresses.

Leo had been avoiding his wife, Victoria, who was barely speaking to him and his sister Beatrice who wouldn’t stop speaking to him—rambling on and on about getting together for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. In July. Leo hadn’t spent a holiday with his family in twenty years, since the mid-‘90s if he was remembering correctly; he wasn’t in the mood to start now.

Cranked and on the hunt for the rumored empty outdoor bar, Leo first spotted Matilda Rodriguez carrying a tray of champagne glasses. She moved through the crowd with a lambent glow—partly because the setting sun was bathing the eastern end of Long Island an indecent pink, partly because of the truly excellent cocaine wreaking havoc with Leo’s synapses. The bubbles rising and falling on Matilda’s tray felt like an ecstatic summons, an invitation meant just for him. Her sturdy black hair was pulled away from the wide planes of her face into a serviceable knot; she was all inky eyes and full red lips. Leo watched the elegant weave of her hips as she threaded her way through the wedding guests, the now-empty tray held high above her head like a torch. He grabbed a martini from a passing waiter and followed her through the swinging stainless-steel doors into the kitchen.

IT WOULD SEEM TO MATILDA (nineteen, aspiring singer, diffident waitress) that one minute she’d been passing champagne to seventy-five members of the extended Plumb family and their closest friends and the next she was barreling toward the Long Island Sound in Leo’s brand-new leased Porsche, her hand down the front of his too-tight linen trousers, the fat of her thumb inexpertly working the underside of his penis.

Matilda had resisted when Leo first pulled her into a side pantry, his fingers cuffing her wrists while he pelted her with questions: Who are you? Where did you come from? What else do you do? Are you a model? An actress? Do you know you’re beautiful?

Matilda knew what Leo wanted; she was propositioned at these events all the time, but usually by much younger men—or ludicrously older men, ancient—with their arsenal of lame pickup lines and vaguely bigoted attempts at flattery. (She was constantly being called J. Lo in spite of looking nothing like her; her parents were Mexican, not Puerto Rican.) Even in this moneyed crowd, Leo was unreasonably handsome, a word she was quite certain she’d never employed for someone whose attention she was almost enjoying. She might think hot, she might think cute or maybe even gorgeous, but handsome? The boys she knew hadn’t grown into handsome yet. Matilda found herself staring up at Leo’s face trying to determine which variables added up to handsome. Like her, he had dark eyes, dark hair, a strong brow. But where his features were angular and sharp, hers were round and soft. On television he would play someone distinguished—a surgeon maybe, and she would be the terminally ill patient begging for a cure.

Through the pantry door she could hear the band—orchestra, really, there had to be at least sixteen pieces—playing the usual wedding fare. Leo grabbed her hands and pulled her into a little two-step. He sang close to her ear, above the beat, his voice pleasantly lively and rich. “Someday, when I’m awfully low, when the world is cold, I will dah-dah-dum just thinking of you, and the way you look tonight.”

Matilda shook her head and laughed a little, pulled away. His attention was unnerving, but it also made something deep within her thrum. And fending off Leo in the pantry was marginally more interesting than wrapping asparagus with prosciutto in the kitchen, which was what she was supposed to be doing. When she shyly told him she wanted to be a singer, he immediately offered that he had friends at Columbia Records, friends who were always keen to discover new talent. He moved in again and if she was alarmed when he stumbled a little and seemed to need to keep a palm on the wall to maintain balance, her worry evaporated when he asked if she had a demo, something of hers they could listen to in his car.

“Because if I like it,” Leo said, taking Matilda’s slender fingers in his, “I’d want to get on it right away. Help you get it to the right people.”

AS LEO DEFTLY MANEUVERED MATILDA past the parking valet, she glanced back at the kitchen door. Her cousin Fernando had gotten her this job, and he would be furious if he found out she’d just up and left. But Leo had said Columbia Records. He’d said, Always looking for new talent. When did she ever get opportunities like this? She would only be gone for a little bit, just long enough to make a good impression.

“Mariah was discovered by Tommy Mottola when she was a waitress,” she said, half joking, half trying to justify her behavior.

“Is that right?” Leo hustled her toward his car, scanning the windows of the beach club above the parking lot. It was possible that Victoria could see him from the side terrace where everyone was gathering and quite probable she’d already noticed his absence and was stalking the grounds looking for him. Furious.

Matilda stopped at the car door and slipped off her black-canvas work shoes. She took a pair of silvery stilettos from a worn plastic shopping bag.

“You really don’t need to change shoes for this,” Leo said, resisting the urge to put his hands around her tiny waist right then and there in plain sight of everyone.

“But we’re getting a drink, right?” Matilda said.

Had Leo said something to her about a drink? A drink was not possible. Everyone in his tiny hometown knew him, his family, his mother, his wife. He finished off his martini and threw the empty glass into the bushes. “If the lady wants a drink, we’ll find the lady a drink,” Leo said.

Matilda stepped into the sandals and gently slid one slender metallic strap over the swell of her left heel, then her right. She straightened, now eye level with Leo. “I hate wearing flats,” she said, tugging her fitted white blouse a little lower. “They make me feel flat all over.” Leo practically pushed Matilda into the front seat, out of sight, safely behind the tinted glass.

SITTING IN THE FRONT SEAT OF THE CAR, Matilda was stunned to hear her tinny, nasal voice coming through the car’s obscenely high-quality speakers. She sounded so different on her sister’s ancient Dell. So much better.

As Leo listened, he tapped his hand against the steering wheel. His wedding ring glinted in the car’s interior light. Married was most assuredly against Matilda’s rules. She could see Leo struggling to summon an interest in her voice, searching for something flattering to say.

“I have better recordings. I must have downloaded the wrong version,” Matilda said. She could feel her ears flush with shame. Leo was staring out the window. “I better get back,” she said, reaching for the door handle.

“Don’t,” Leo said, placing his hand on her leg. She resisted the impulse to pull away and sat up a little straighter, her mind racing. What did she have to sustain his attention? She hated waitressing, but Fernando was going to kill her for disappearing during dinner service. Leo was boldly staring at her chest. She looked down at her lap and spotted a small stain on her black trousers. She scraped at the spot of balsamic vinaigrette with a fingernail; she’d mixed gallons of it. Everyone inside was probably plating the mesclun and grilled shrimp now, squeezing the dressing from bottles around the edge of each plate into a pattern that was supposed to approximate waves, the kind a child would draw to indicate a sea. “I’d like to see the ocean,” she said, quietly.

And then, so slowly she wasn’t sure what was happening at first, Leo took her hand in his (for a foolish moment she thought he was going to kiss it, like a character in one of her mother’s telenovela shows) and placed it on his lap. And she would always remember this part, how he never stopped looking at her. He didn’t close his eyes or lean his head back or lunge in for a sloppy kiss or fumble with the buttons on her blouse; he looked hard and long into her eyes. He saw her.

She could feel him respond beneath her hand and it was thrilling. As Leo held her gaze, she applied a little pressure with her fingers and the balance of power in the car abruptly shifted in her favor. “I thought we were going to see the ocean,” she said, wanting to get out of sight of the kitchen. He grinned and put the car into reverse. She had his pants unzipped before his seat belt was fully fastened.

YOU COULDN’T BLAME LEO for the rapidity of his climax. His wife had cut him off weeks earlier, after she caught him fondling a babysitter in the back corridor of a friend’s summerhouse. Driving toward the water, Leo hoped the combination of booze, cocaine, and Wellbutrin would stall his response, but when Matilda’s hand tightened with resolve, he knew everything was happening too fast. He closed his eyes for a second—just a second—to collect himself, to stop the intoxicating image of her hand, her chipped blue fingernails, moving up and down. Leo never even saw the SUV barreling down Ocean Avenue, coming from the right, perpendicular to their car. Didn’t realize until it was too late that the screech he heard wasn’t Matilda’s voice coming from the sound system, but something else entirely.

Neither of them even had time to scream.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Because the three Plumbs had agreed on the phone the previous evening that they should not drink in front of their brother Leo, they were all—unbeknownst to one another—sitting in separate bars in and around Grand Central, savoring a furtive cocktail before lunch.

It was a strange kind of autumn afternoon. Two days earlier, a nor’easter had roared up the mid-Atlantic coast, colliding with a cold front pushing east from Ohio and an arctic mass dipping down from Canada. The resulting storm had dropped a record-breaking amount of snow in some places, blanketing towns from Pennsylvania to Maine with a freakishly early winter. In the small commuter town thirty miles north of Manhattan where Melody Plumb lived, most of the trees were still shouldering their autumn foliage, and many had been destroyed or damaged by the snow and ice. The streets were littered with fallen limbs, power was still out in some towns, the mayor was talking about canceling Halloween.

In spite of the lingering cold and spotty power outages, Melody’s train ride into Manhattan was uneventful. She was settled in at the lobby bar of the Hyatt Hotel on Forty-Second Street where she knew she wouldn’t run into her brother or sister; she’d suggested the hotel restaurant for lunch instead of their usual gathering spot, Grand Central’s Oyster Bar, and had been mocked by Jack and Beatrice, the Hyatt not landing on their list of venues deemed acceptable by some arcane criteria she had zero interest in decoding. She refused to feel inferior to those two anymore, refused to be diminished because she didn’t share their veneration for everything old Manhattan.

Sitting at a table near the soaring windows on the upper level of the hotel’s massive lobby (which was, she had to admit, completely unwelcoming—too big and gray and modern, some awful kind of sculpture made of steel tubing lurked overhead, she could hear Jack’s and Bea’s pointed ridicule in absentia; she was relieved they weren’t there), Melody ordered the least expensive glass of white wine (twelve dollars, more than she would spend on an entire bottle at home) and hoped the bartender had a generous pour.

The weather had remained unseasonably cold since the storm, but the sun was finally breaking through and the temperatures beginning to rise. The piles of snow at every Midtown crosswalk were rapidly melting into unnavigable puddles of slush and ice. Melody watched a particularly inelegant woman try to leap over the standing water and miss by inches, her bright red ballet flat landing squarely in the water, which had to be frigid, and filthy. Melody would have loved a delicate pair of shoes like those and she would have known better than to wear them on a day like today.

She felt a twinge of anxiety as she thought of her daughters heading uptown and having to navigate the treacherous street corners. She took a sip of her wine (so-so), removed her phone from her pocket, and opened her favorite app, the one Nora called Stalkerville. She hit the “find” button and waited for the map to load and for the dots that represented her sixteen-year-old twins to materialize on the screen.

Melody couldn’t believe the miracle of a handheld device that allowed her to track Nora’s and Louisa’s precise whereabouts as long as they had their phones. And they were teenagers; they always had their phones. As the map started to appear, she felt the familiar panicky palpitations until the tiny, blue pulsating circles and the word Found! popped up at the top of the screen, showing the girls exactly where they were supposed to be, at the SAT tutoring center uptown.

They’d been taking the weekend classes for over a month, and usually Melody tracked their morning progress from her kitchen table, watching the blue dots slowly glide north from Grand Central according to her meticulous directions: From the train station, they should take the Madison Avenue bus to Fifty-Ninth Street where they would disembark and walk west to the tutoring center on Sixty-Third just off Columbus. They were not to walk along the park side, but were supposed to walk on the south side of the street, passing by the parade of uniformed doormen, who would hear them scream for help if they were in trouble. They were strictly forbidden from entering Central Park or deviating from their route. Melody put the fear of God into them every week, filling their heads with stories of girls being snatched or lost, forced into prostitution or murdered and dumped in the river.

“The Upper West Side is not exactly Calcutta,” her husband, Walter, would gently argue. But she got scared. The thought of them wandering the city without her protecting their flank made her heart thud, her palms sweat. They were sweating now. When they’d all disembarked at Grand Central that morning, she hadn’t wanted to let them go. On a Saturday, the terminal was full with tourists checking guidebooks and train schedules and trying to find the Whispering Gallery. She’d kissed them good-bye and had watched until she could no longer see the backs of their heads—one blonde, the other brunette. They didn’t look like visitors; there was nothing tentative about how they moved through the crowd. They looked like they belonged to the city, which filled Melody with dread. She wanted them to belong to her, to stop getting older. They didn’t confide every last thought or desire or worry anymore; she didn’t know their hearts and minds the way she used to. Melody knew that letting them grow and go was the proper order of life. She wanted them to be strong and independent and happy—more than anything she wanted them to be happy—but that she no longer had a fix on their inner workings made her light-headed. If she couldn’t be sure how they were moving through the world, she could at least watch them move through the world, right there in the palm of her hand. She could at least have that.

“Leo’s never paying you back,” Walter had said as she was leaving for the train station. “You’re all dreaming, wasting your time.”

Though Melody feared he was right, she had to believe he wasn’t. They’d borrowed a lot of money to buy their house, a tiny but historic building on one of their town’s most beautiful streets, only to watch the economy collapse and property values sink. The fluctuating interest rate was about to rise on the mortgage they already couldn’t afford. With little equity in the house, they couldn’t refinance. College was approaching and they had next to nothing in the bank; she’d been counting on The Nest.

Out on the street, Melody watched people tug off their gloves and unwind scarves, lift their faces to the sun. She felt a tiny surge of satisfaction knowing that she could spend the entire afternoon indoors if she wanted. The main reason Melody loved the bar at the Hyatt was because she could access it through an underpopulated, nondescript hallway connecting the hotel to Grand Central. When it was time for lunch, she’d return to the terminal through her secret corridor and head downstairs to the Oyster Bar. She would spend hours in New York City and not have to step one sensibly shod foot onto pavement, could entirely avoid breathing the Manhattan air, which she always pictured as rife with gray particulate. During her and Walt’s brief stint living in Upper (upper) Manhattan where the twins were born, she’d waged a ferocious, losing battle with the city’s soot. No matter how many times she wiped the woodwork with a dampened cloth, the flecks of black would reappear, sometimes within hours. Minus any verifiable source, the residue was worrisome to her. It felt like a physical manifestation of the city’s decay, all the teeming masses being worn down to grimy, gray window dust.

She caught sight of another woman across the room holding a wineglass, and it took a moment for her to recognize her own reflection. Her hair was blonder than usual—she’d chosen a lighter shade at the drugstore and hoped the color would soften the elongated nose and strong chin both she and her sister, Beatrice, had inherited from their father’s New England ancestors. Somehow, the strong features that worked in Bea’s favor (Madam X, Leo used to call Bea, after the Sargent portrait) just made Melody look unintentionally dour. She particularly resented her face around Halloween. One year when the girls were little and they were out shopping for costumes, Nora had pointed to an advertisement featuring a witch—not an excessively ugly one, no warts or green face or rotten teeth but still, a witch—standing over a boiling cauldron and had said, “Look! It’s Mommy!”

Melody picked her bar bill up from the table and handed it to the waiter with a credit card. He’s never paying you back, Walt had said. Oh yes he is, thought Melody. There was no way that one night of Leo’s stupidity, his debauchery, was going to ruin her daughters’ future, not when they’d worked so hard, not when she’d pushed them to dream big. They were not going to community college.

Melody looked at the map on her phone again. There was another private reason she loved the blue dots with their animated ripples so much; they reminded her of the very first ultrasound where she and Walt had seen twin heartbeats, two misshapen grayish shadows thumping arrhythmically deep inside her pelvis.

Two for the price of one, the cheerful technician had told them as Walt gripped her hand and they both stared at the screen and then at each other and grinned like the starry naifs they were. She remembered thinking in that moment: It won’t ever get better than this. And in some ways she’d been right, had known even then she would never feel so capable, so stalwart a protector once she pushed those vulnerable, beating hearts out into the world.

The waiter was coming toward her now with a worried look on his face. She sighed and opened her wallet again. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, handing her the Visa she’d hoped had a little more juice on it, “but this was declined.”

“It’s okay,” Melody said, digging out the secret card she’d activated without telling Walt; he would kill her if he knew. Just as he’d kill her if he found out that even though the SAT place in the city was cheaper than the suburban private tutor she’d wanted to hire, it was still twice as much as she’d admitted, which was why she needed the extra card. “I meant to give you this one.” She watched the waiter back at his station as he swiped, both of them holding perfectly still and only exhaling when the machine started spitting out a receipt.

I like our life, Walt had said to her that morning, pulling her close. I like you. Can’t you pretend—just a little—to like me, too? He smiled as he said it, but she knew he sometimes worried. She had relaxed then into his reassuring girth, breathed in his comforting scent—soap and freshly laundered shirt and spearmint gum. She’d closed her eyes and pictured Nora and Louisa, lovely and lithe, clothed in satiny caps and gowns on a leafy quad in a quaint New England town, the morning sun illuminating their eager faces, the future unfurling ahead of them like an undulating bolt of silk. They were so smart and beautiful and honest and kind. She wanted them to have everything—the chances she’d never had, the opportunities she’d promised. I do like you, Walter, she’d mumbled into his shoulder. I like you so much. It’s me I hate.

AT THE OPPOSITE END OF GRAND CENTRAL, up a carpeted flight of stairs and through the glass doors that said CAMPBELL APARTMENT, Jack Plumb was sending his drink back because he believed the mint hadn’t really been muddled. “It was just dumped in there as if it were a garnish, not an ingredient,” he told the waitress.

Jack was sitting with his partner of two decades and legal husband of nearly seven weeks. He was confident the other Plumbs wouldn’t know about this place, which was the former office of a 1920s tycoon, restored and reimagined as a high-end cocktail bar. Beatrice might, but it wasn’t her kind of spot. Too staid. Too expensive. There was a dress code. At times the bar could be annoyingly full of commuters who were in mercifully short supply on this Saturday afternoon.

“Version 2.0,” Walker said as the waitress placed the remade drink in front of Jack.

Jack took a sip. “It’s fine,” he said.

“Sorry for your trouble,” Walker said to the waitress.

“Yes,” Jack said as the waitress walked away, under his breath but loud enough for Walker to hear, “terribly sorry for making you do your job.”

“She’s just delivering the drinks. She’s not making them.” Walker kept his voice amiable. Jack was in a mood. “Why don’t you take a nice generous sip of that and try to relax.”

Jack picked a piece of mint from his glass and chewed on it for a second. “I’m curious,” he said, “is telling someone to relax ever helpful? It’s like saying ‘breathe’ to someone who is hyperventilating or ‘swallow’ to a person who’s choking. It’s a completely useless admonition.”

“I wasn’t admonishing, I was suggesting.”

“It’s like saying, ‘Whatever you do, don’t think about a pink elephant.’”

“I get it,” Walker said. “How about I relax and you do what you want.”

“Thank you.”

“I am happy to go to this lunch with you if it helps.”

“So you’ve said. About a thousand times.” Trying to provoke Walker was mean and pointless, but Jack was trying anyway because he knew that snapping at Walker would briefly loosen the spiraling knot of fury at his core. And he had considered inviting Walker to lunch. His family preferred Walker’s company anyway; who didn’t? Walker with his rumbling laugh and kind face and bottomless bonhomie. He was like a clean-shaven, slightly trimmer, gay Santa Claus.

But Jack couldn’t invite Walker because he hadn’t told the other Plumbs yet about his early September wedding to Walker, the wedding to which they hadn’t been invited because Jack wanted the day to be perfect and perfect for Jack meant Plumb-free. He did not want to listen to Bea’s worries about Leo’s accident or hear Melody’s lumbering husband telling everyone who might listen that his name was Walter-not-Walker. (That Jack and Melody had chosen partners with almost the exact same name was something that still rankled both of them, decades on.)

“I’m sorry I snapped at you,” Jack finally said.

Walker shrugged. “It’s fine, love.”

“I’m sorry I’m being an asshole.” Jack rotated his neck, listening for the alarming but satisfying little pop that had recently appeared. God, he was getting old. Six years until fifty and who knew what fresh horrors that decade had in store for his slender-but-softening physique, his already-fraying memory, his alarmingly thinning hair. He gave Walker a feeble smile. “I’ll be better after lunch.”

“Whatever happens at lunch, we’ll be fine. It will all be fine.”

Jack slumped deeper into the leather club chair and proceeded to crack the knuckles on each hand, a sound he knew Walker loathed. Of course Walker thought everything would be fine. Walker didn’t know anything about Jack’s financial straits (another reason Jack didn’t want him at lunch, in case the opportunity arose to tell Leo exactly how much the little escapade on the back roads of Long Island was costing him). Their retirement account had taken a terrible hit in 2008. They’d rented the same apartment on West Street since they’d been together. Jack’s small antique shop in the West Village had never been hugely profitable, but in recent years he felt lucky to break even. Walker was an attorney, a solo practitioner, and had always been the wage earner in their partnership. Their one solid investment was a modest but cherished summer place on the North Fork that Jack had been borrowing against, secretly. He’d been counting on The Nest, not only to pay off the home equity line of credit but because it was the one thing he had to offer Walker as a contribution to their future. He didn’t believe for a second that Leo was broke. And he didn’t care. He just wanted what he was owed.

Jack and Leo were brothers but they weren’t friends. They rarely spoke. Walker would sometimes push (“you don’t give up on family”), but Jack had worked hard to distance himself from the Plumbs, especially Leo. In Leo’s company, Jack felt like a lesser version of his older brother. Not as intelligent, interesting, or successful, an identity that had attached to him in high school and had never completely gone away. At the beginning of ninth grade, some of Leo’s friends had christened Jack Leo Lite and the denigrating name stuck, even after Leo graduated. His first month at college, Jack had run into someone from his hometown who had reflexively greeted him by saying, “Hey, Lite. What’s up?” Jack had nearly slugged him.

The door to the bar opened and a group of tourists barged in, bringing in a gust of air too cold for October. One woman was showing everyone her soaking wet shoe, a cheap ballet flat in a tacky shade of red. “It’s completely ruined,” she was saying to her companions.

“Silver linings,” Jack said to Walker, nodding to indicate the shoe.

“You probably shouldn’t be late.” Walker lifted his wrist, presenting the watch that had been a wedding gift from Jack, a rare Cartier tank from the ’40s in perfect condition. It had cost a small fortune; Walker had no idea. Just another thing to resent about Leo’s fuckup, how now Jack couldn’t help but mentally affix a huge neon price sticker to everything they owned, regretting briefly every single purchase of the last year, years, including all the not-insignificant expenses surrounding their otherwise idyllic wedding.

“I love this watch,” Walker said, and the tenderness in his voice made Jack want to fling his glass against the opposite brick wall. He could almost feel the sweet relief that would flood in as the leaded crystal smashed into a million tiny pieces. Instead, he stood and placed the glass back on the table, hard.

“Don’t let them rile you,” Walker said, placing a reassuring hand on Jack’s arm. “Just listen to what Leo has to say and then we’ll talk.”

“Will do.” Jack buttoned his coat and headed down the stairs and out the door onto Vanderbilt Avenue. He needed a little fresh air before lunch; maybe he’d take a walk around the block. As he muscled his way through the sluggish weekend crowds, he heard someone calling his name. He turned and it took him a minute to recognize the woman in the beret, grinning madly above a pink-and-orange hand-knit scarf, waving and calling after him. He stood and watched her approach and in spite of himself, he smiled. Beatrice.

BEATRICE PLUMB WAS A REGULAR AT MURPHY’S, one of the commuter pubs that lined the short stretch of Forty-Third Street perpendicular to Grand Central Station. Bea was friendly with the owner, Garrie, an old friend of Tuck’s from Ireland. Tuck approved of how Garrie pulled a pint and of how when the bar was quiet, Garrie would sing in his light and reedy tenor—not the usual touristy fare, “Danny Boy” or “Wild Rover,” but from his repertoire of Irish rebel songs—“Come Out Ye Black and Tans” or “The Ballad of Ballinamore.” Garrie had been one of the first to show up at Bea’s door after Tuck died. He’d taken a fifth of Jameson’s from his coat pocket and poured them each a glass. “To Tuck,” he’d said solemnly. “May the road rise up to meet him.” Sometimes, in the right light, Bea thought Garrie was handsome. Sometimes, she thought he had a little crush on her, but she didn’t want to find out—he felt too close to Tuck.

“You’re on the early side today,” Garrie said when she arrived a little before noon.

“Family lunch. I’ll take that coffee with a splash.” Garrie uncorked the Jameson’s and poured a generous amount into the mug before adding coffee. The sun was bright and low enough in the cloudless sky that it briefly blinded Bea as she sat in her favorite spot, next to the small front window. She stood and moved the rickety barstool into the shade and away from the door. It felt more like January than October. The room smelled like furnace and dirty mop and beer. “Aroma of the gods,” Tuck would say. He loved nothing more than a dimly lit bar on a sunny afternoon. The jukebox started up and Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby were singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Bea and Garrie exchanged a smirk. People were so reassuringly unimaginative.

Bea was eager to see Leo but also nervous. He hadn’t taken any of her calls at rehab. He was probably mad at all of them. She wondered how he would look. The last time she’d seen him, the night in the hospital, they’d been stitching up his lacerated chin and he’d looked wan and petrified. For months before the accident he’d looked terrible: bloated and tired and dangerously bored.

Bea worried today’s lunch was going to be confrontational. Jack and Melody were becoming increasingly unhinged about the situation with The Nest and she assumed they were both coming prepared to stake out their respective plots of neediness. What Bea needed from Leo was not her primary concern. Today, she wanted to keep her ordinarily disagreeable siblings somewhat agreeable, if only for one afternoon, just long enough to get Leo to—well, she didn’t know what exactly. Put some kind of plan in place that would placate Jack and Melody for a bit and give Leo enough breathing room so that he wouldn’t completely shut them down—or flee.

She could feel the whiskey loosening her limbs, taking the edge off her nerves. She lifted her bag from the back of the barstool. Just feeling the heft of it gave her a little thrill. Bea was a writer. (Used to be a writer? Was a writer who—until very recently—had stopped writing? She never knew how to think about herself.) Sometimes, not often anymore, but occasionally at the literary magazine where she worked, someone would recognize her name. Beatrice Plumb? The writer? the conversation would optimistically begin. She knew the sequence by now, the happy glimmer of recognition and then the confused brow, the person trying to summon a recent memory of her work, anything other than her early long-ago stories. After a decade of practice, she knew how to head off the inevitable. She was armed with a fistful of diversionary dead-end replies about her long-awaited novel: a well-worn self-deprecating joke about writing too slowly, how if she amortized her advance over the years, it became an hourly wage best counted in half-pennies; a feigned superstition over talking about unfinished work; amused exasperation at her ongoing perfectionism.

From her oversized canvas bag she pulled out a deep brown leather satchel, one Leo had spotted while roaming around the Portobello Road Market in London years ago when she was in college and had starting writing in earnest. He gave it to her for her birthday. From the early 1900s, it was the size of a large notebook and looked like a miniature briefcase with its small handle and leather straps, like something someone might have carried around Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. She’d loved it and had thought of it as her lucky bag until it seemed all the luck she’d once enjoyed vanished. Weeks ago, she’d found the satchel on an upper shelf of a closet and took it to a local shoe repair to have one of the straps mended. They’d cleaned and polished the leather and the case looked almost new, with just the right patina of age and use, as if it had housed years of successful manuscripts. She undid the straps and opened the flap, taking out the stack of pages covered with her loopy handwriting. Bea had written more in the past few months than she had in the past few years.

And what she was writing was really good.

And she felt horrible.

YEARS AGO, when she was newly out of graduate school, Leo had persuaded her to work with him on the staff of a magazine he’d helped launch back when starting a magazine wasn’t pure folly. SpeakEasy was smart and irreverent enough to be slightly scandalous, which made it an instant hit with the insular world of the New York media, the precise community it ruthlessly mocked. Leo wrote a column every month, media news peppered with salacious gossip that freely ridiculed the city’s old guard, rife with inherited money and nepotism and ludicrously insular. The column made him a little bit famous and a whole lot disliked. The magazine folded after only a few years, but almost everyone from the original staff had gone on to bigger media ventures or bestselling novels or other highly respected literary pursuits.

For a long time, Leo had been the major success story. He’d corralled some of the younger staff to start an online version of SpeakEasy from his tiny apartment. He kept the snide voice and expanded the scope, targeting all his favorite objectionable people and industries, growing the business from one site to seventeen in the space of fifteen months. Only three years later, Leo and his partner sold their tiny empire to a media conglomerate for a small fortune.

Bea still missed the early SpeakEasy magazine days. The office was like a raucous summer camp where all the kids were smart and funny and got your jokes and could hold their booze. Back then, it had been Leo who’d pushed her to finish those early stories. It had been Leo who’d stayed up late dissecting her paragraphs, making everything better and tighter and funnier. It had been Leo who’d passed along her first story to SpeakEasy’s fiction editor (and her current boss, Paul Underwood) for its inaugural short story issue: “New York’s Newest Voices: Who You Should Be Reading.” It had been Leo who’d used the photo of her on the magazine’s cover (with the very SpeakEasy caption: “The editor’s sister wrote our favorite story, get over it”). That picture of Bea still popped up to accompany the occasional commemorative piece about SpeakEasy (“Where are they now?”) or the group of young, female writers, including Bea, that some journalist had infuriatingly dubbed “The Glitterary Girls.” The photo had been taken on Mott Street in Chinatown in front of a window of gleaming Peking ducks hanging from silver hooks, their still-attached heads all facing the same direction. Bea was wearing a bright yellow dress with a billowing skirt and holding a lacquered green parasol painted with tiny pink and white peonies over one shoulder. The long braids she still wore were a deep auburn then, pinned up at her neck. Chin lowered, eyes closed, profile bathed by the late-afternoon August sun—she resembled a modern-day annunciation. The photo was on the back flap of her first (only) book. For years, the green parasol had hung from the ceiling above her bed. She still had that yellow dress somewhere.

BEA MOTIONED TO GARRIE and he came over with more coffee and placed the bottle of Jameson’s next to her cup. She saw him eye her notes and then quickly look away. He’d overheard enough of her whining to Tuck over the years about the novel that never appeared to know better than to ask her about work, which made her feel even more pathetic, if that was even possible.

Leo had loved—and published—her first story because it was about him. The character she called Archie was a thinly disguised version of a young Leo, a funny, self-absorbed, caustic Lothario. The Paris Review published the second Archie story. The third was in The New Yorker. Then she landed an agent—Leo’s friend Stephanie who was also just starting out and who secured a two-book deal for so much money that Bea felt faint and had to sit in Stephanie’s office and breathe into a paper bag. Her story collection (the highlight of which, the critics agreed, were the three Archie stories—“delectably wry,” “hilarious and smart,” “whether you find yourself rooting for or against Archie, you’ll be powerless to resist his dubious charms”) sold quietly.

“It’s fine,” Stephanie told her then. “This is all groundwork for the novel.”

Bea wondered if Stephanie and Leo were in touch anymore, if Stephanie even knew what was going on. The last time Bea spoke to Stephanie was well over a year ago during an uncomfortable lunch downtown. “Let’s meet somewhere quiet,” Stephanie had e-mailed, alerting Bea to the difficult but not surprising conversation to come about her long-delayed, laboriously overworked novel.

“I can see the effort that went into this draft,” Stephanie had said (generously—they both knew not a lot of effort had gone into the draft in quite some time). “And while there’s much to admire here—”

“Oh, God.” Bea couldn’t believe she was hearing the stock phrase she’d employed so many times when she couldn’t think of a single thing to admire about someone’s prose. “Please don’t much-to-admire me. Please. Just say what you have to say.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.” Stephanie looked frustrated and almost angry. She looked older, too, Bea was surprised to note, but then she supposed they both did. Stephanie had fiddled with a sugar packet, tearing it a little at one corner and then folding the end and placing it on her saucer. “Okay, here it is. Everything I loved about your stories, their wit and ingenuity and surprise—everything that worked in those pages—” Stephanie broke off again and now she just looked confused. “I can’t find any of it in these pages.”

The conversation had plummeted from there.

“Are you breaking up with me?” Bea had finally said, trying to joke and lighten the mood.

“Yes,” Stephanie said, wanting to leave no doubt as to where she and Bea stood. “I’m very sorry, but yes.”

“I want my novel to be big,” Bea told Stephanie and Leo the night they celebrated her book deal, a long, boozy evening when her ebullience was so uncorrupted that she could shift a room’s atmosphere when she moved through, like a weather front.

“That’s my job,” Stephanie had said. “You just write it.”

“I’m talking about the canvas. I want it to be sweeping. Necessary. I want to play a little, experiment with structure.” Bea waved at their waiter and ordered another bottle of champagne. Leo lit a cigar.

“Experimenting can be good,” Stephanie said, tentatively.

Bea was very drunk and very happy and she’d leaned back against the banquette and put her feet up on a chair, took Leo’s cigar and blew three smoke rings and watched them float to the ceiling, coughing a little.

“But no more Archie,” Leo had said, abruptly. “We’re retiring Archie, right?”

Bea had been surprised. She hadn’t been planning more Archie stories but she hadn’t thought of them as retired either. Looking at Leo across the table, clearing her throat and trying to focus her vision through the smoke and champagne and those tiny spoonfuls of coke in the bathroom some hours ago, she thought: yes. What was that Bible verse? Time to leave childish things behind?

“Yes,” she’d found herself saying. “No more Archie.” She’d been decisive.

“Good,” he said.

“You’re not that interesting, anyway.” She handed him back his cigar.

“Not anymore he isn’t,” Stephanie said, and Bea had pretended not to notice Stephanie’s fingers moving higher on Leo’s leg and disappearing beneath the linen tablecloth.

How many pages written since then? How many discarded? Too many to think about. Thousands. The novel was big all right. Five hundred and seventy-four pages of big. She never wanted to look at it again.

She poured a little more Jameson’s into her cup, not bothering with the coffee now, and looked again at the new pages nobody had seen or even knew existed. It wasn’t an Archie story. It wasn’t. But it had energy and motion, the same lightness of language that had come so easily to her all those years ago and then had seemed to vanish overnight, as if she’d somehow unlearned a vital skill in her sleep—how to tie her shoes or ride a bike or snap her fingers—and then couldn’t figure out how to get it back.

Stephanie had left the door the tiniest bit ajar at their last meeting—if you have something new to show me, she had said, really new, maybe we can talk. But Bea would have to show the pages to Leo first. Probably. Maybe. Maybe not.

“When are we going to read about your life,” he’d said, a little testily, after she published the final Archie story, the one where she’d veered a little too close to his less desirable, more predatory qualities. Well, here she was. Using her life. How dare he object? Leo owed her. Especially after the night in the hospital. What happened last July had also happened to her. It was her life, too.

NORA AND LOUISA WERE WALKING along Central Park West, hand in hand, winded from running the three blocks from the SAT classroom, breathless with anticipation. “Here we go,” Nora said, squeezing Louisa’s hand. “Straight to a certain death or sexual servitude or both.”

Louisa laughed but she was nervous. Ditching SAT prep had started as a joke. “We could leave our phones in our lockers and just take off,” Louisa had said to Nora after one excruciating session. “The only person who cares if we’re here is Mom.” Louisa knew by the look on Nora’s face that she’d unwittingly put something inevitable into motion. They both hated the classes. The tutor who ran their group seemed barely older than they were and never took attendance or remembered anyone’s name or seemed to care who did what. “This is largely self-directed,” she’d say, sounding bored and uninspired while staring out a window that faced Columbus Avenue, looking as if her most fervent wish was to leap outside and stroll back into her precious weekend. “You get out of it what you put into it.”

“You’re a genius,” Nora had said to Louisa. “Let’s do it!”

“I was kidding. Mom and Dad are paying for this.”

“Everything is in the book!” Nora’d pulled out the enormous SAT guide. “They paid for this book. All that tutor does is read from the chapter and make us do the exercises. We can work on the train and at home. It’s not even that hard. We have another year before applying anywhere. We’re juniors.”

Louisa was tempted but nervous. She agreed the classes were lame, but she felt guilty. Something was up at home concerning money—there was always something up concerning money, there was never enough money—but this time seemed different and possibly more dire. Her parents spent a lot of time heatedly whispering and had even taken their discussion to the freezing and snowy yard the night before. But she knew once Nora set her mind to something that it was just a matter of time before it happened.

“Think of how beautiful the park will be today with the snow,” Nora said, petitioning the second they were out from under their mother’s watchful eye. “Snow in the city is evanescent. See? I just used an SAT word. Come on. Today’s the perfect day.”

Nobody stopped them when they bolted out of the building through a side door and ran down the street expecting to hear their names called at any second. They buried their cell phones deep in a locker in case their mother checked their location on Stalkerville (and she was their mother; she always checked their location).

Louisa hesitated. Melody’s admonitions about Central Park and its dark pathways full of nefarious men wanting vaguely disturbing and dangerous things genuinely frightened her. But Nora wanted to find a hot dog vendor and the carousel and Belvedere Castle and other things they’d heard about but never seen. She’d downloaded and printed a map before they left home. “We’ll stick to the main paths today,” she said, unfolding the map and pointing to the spot marked “Strawberry Fields Memorial.”

“Let’s start here.”

LEO PLUMB WAS LOST. He was not ordinarily an uptown guy and what he’d thought was a shortcut through Central Park had led him into an area he didn’t recognize. It didn’t help that the park was like a disaster area after the snowstorm. The snow and ice that had settled over the still-leafy trees had perilously weighed down the branches, destroying or damaging countless trees. Many of the park’s walking paths were like obstacle courses, slippery and littered with debris. A massive cleanup was under way, and the sound of chain saws reverberated from every direction. Some areas were closed off with police tape, necessitating circuitous detours; Leo was completely turned around.

He looked up at the sky, trying to spot the distinctive peaks and gables of the Dakota on the park’s west flank and take a bearing, but from where he was standing he could only see taller, unfamiliar buildings. Leo was running late for his appointment, the one he’d scheduled by phone the day he left rehab, to meet his old friend Rico at the Strawberry Fields Memorial. He had to find his way to higher ground. He used to know some trick about figuring out where he was in the park, something about numbers at the base of the cast-iron lampposts. He walked over to the nearest one. Yes! A small metal plaque affixed to the base was engraved with four numbers: 6107. Did that mean he was only at Sixty-First Street? But didn’t the “07” indicate something, too? East side or west side or smack in the damn middle? Fuck Olmsted and his meandering faux-bucolic pathways. He shoved his hands in his pockets and started walking in a direction that felt like he was heading west.

“IT’S COOL, I GUESS,” Louisa said, staring down at the black-and-white mosaic on the ground with the word IMAGINE at the center. She’d pictured something very different, with an image of John Lennon maybe. Or Strawberries. Or Fields.

Nora was bouncing on her toes, because she was excited and because it was cold. “Let’s head into the park. Look at this place. It’s full of people and families. The boathouse is right down that hill to the left.”

Nora was right. The park didn’t feel dangerous at all. It felt lively and bright. “It’s downright ebullient,” Louisa said, summoning another SAT word. “Lead the way.”

HURRYING AS QUICKLY AS HE COULD MANAGE given the scrim of ice coating the pavement, Leo finally came to a path he recognized. He could see the Dakota now. The path was ostensibly closed, blocked off with police tape, and beyond the tape an enormous broken branch of an old elm was swaying dangerously a few feet above the ground. He ducked under the tape and started to lightly jog up the walkway. It was steeper than it looked and the soles of his expensive shoes were paper-thin. As he maneuvered around some fallen limbs, giving wide berth to the elm, he slipped on a long, nearly invisible frozen puddle that cracked under his weight and before he could catch himself, both legs went out from under him and he landed on his backside. Hard.

“Crap,” he said to a flock of sparrows twittering maniacally in the surrounding bushes. Leo stayed prone for a minute. He was sweating heavily even though his extremities were freezing. Above, the vivid blue sky belied the approaching winter; it was a spring sky, he thought, a sky full of promise. He almost wanted to close his eyes and forget about his meeting. (Meeting? He could hear the voice of his rehab counselor in his ear, her derisive tone, her familiar snort. Let’s call things by their real name, Leo. It’s a drug buy.)

As he sat up, he heard a commotion up the path. Two teenaged girls rounded the corner, heading downhill. Their heads were bent close; one was animated, talking quickly and gesticulating, the other was shaking her head and frowning. Leo liked something about the way the girls kept leaning into each other as they walked, almost as if they were tethered at the shoulder or elbow. The blonde looked up, noticed Leo sitting in the middle of the icy walk, and froze. Leo smiled to reassure them, gave a little wave.

“Careful,” he called out. “It’s treacherous down here.”

The blonde looked alarmed and grabbed her friend who was staring at Leo with—was he imagining this?—recognition. The three of them faced off for a moment, and then the blonde grabbed the brunette’s hand and both girls turned and hurried up the path.

“Hey,” Leo yelled. “I come in peace!”

The girls moved faster, holding on to each other’s arms for balance.

FOR A MINUTE, it seemed to Nora and Louisa that Melody had arranged Leo’s nearly mystical appearance, had planted him there to say: See? See what trouble lurks in the park? See how lucky you are that I’m your mother? They were always asking about Melody’s siblings, the siblings who lived in the city and seemed so interesting and exotic, especially their uncle Leo whose picture would sometimes be in the Sunday Styles section with Victoria, their glamorous aunt. (Louisa had tried calling her Aunt Victoria once at a rare family gathering and couldn’t tell whether the woman wanted to laugh or spit at her.) Melody looked pained when the girls would point out the photos, her face clouding with a mix of disapproval and disappointment. Her expression made the girls feel so bad they stopped mentioning the pictures, hiding them instead in a Tupperware container in their shared closet. Sometimes they’d ask their father about Leo who would only say, “He’s always been perfectly nice to me. Not much of a family man.”

And here he was. Leo. Flailing about like an upended turtle. (“He wasn’t flailing,” Nora said, dismissing Louisa’s attempts to describe the odd moment while they were heading home on the train later. “He was trying to get up. It was icy.” But Louisa was firm, Melody-like; newly out of rehab, she insisted, Leo should not have been in the park. He was supposed to be meeting his siblings for lunch!) At the top of the path they stopped and hid behind a tree trunk to spy on Leo.

“It’s totally him,” Louisa said.

“Should we say something?” Nora asked.

Louisa hesitated. She wanted to approach Leo, too, but thought they shouldn’t. “He’ll tell Mom,” she said. Nora nodded, mouth drawn tight, disappointed. They both held still, barely breathing, and watched Leo for a few minutes. He stood and brushed off his pants. He sat on a large boulder. “What is he doing?” Nora whispered as Leo stared up at the sky. She wished they were a normal family. She wished she could run down the path, waving, and he’d smile and laugh and they could spend the day together. Instead, here they were, cowering behind a tree. They didn’t have all the details of his trip to rehab, but they knew there was some kind of accident and that it was bad and involved drugs. “Who does blow anymore?” Louisa had heard her mother say to their father one night last summer.

“He might be buying drugs,” Louisa said, looking at Nora, worried. “Why else would he be all the way up here right before lunch?”

LEO SIGHED AND HOISTED HIMSELF UP, brushing twigs and dirt off his pants. He sat on a nearby rock, assessing the damage to his scraped palms. Something nagged at him, something about the girls. He’d really spooked them. He assumed his fall was inelegant, but couldn’t imagine that he looked dangerous. Why had they been so spooked? Kids probably weren’t allowed anywhere in the park without a parent these days—not even teens, not even boys. Those girls were probably already looking for a cop.

Dammit, Leo thought. What if they were looking for a cop? What if they thought he was drunk or worse and gave his description to the police who were patrolling for him right now? He couldn’t be caught with drugs. His lawyer had been crystal clear: Keep your nose clean until the divorce decree comes down. No travel. No suspicious spending. No trouble. Leo stood and headed toward the sound of traffic. At the top of the path, he turned a corner and finally knew exactly where he was. Central Park West was straight ahead. He could hail a taxi and go directly to Grand Central and not be late for lunch. If he made a right, he’d be at Strawberry Fields within two or three minutes.

He hesitated. Above him, an ear-splitting screech. He looked up to see three enormous crows, perched on one of the few trees that had already dropped its leaves. They were all squawking at once, as if they were arguing about his next move. Directly beneath, in the midst of the stark and barren branches and at the base of a forked limb, a mud-brown leafy mass. A nest. Jesus.

Leo checked the time and started walking.

CHAPTER TWO

Nobody remembered who started calling their eventual inheritance “The Nest,” but the name stuck. Melody was just sixteen when Leonard Plumb Sr. decided to establish a trust for his children. “Nothing significant,” he would tell them repeatedly, “a modest nest egg, conservatively invested, dispersed in time for you to enjoy but not exploit.” The funds, Leonard Sr. explained, would not be available until Melody, the youngest, turned forty.

Jack was the first to argue vociferously against this distribution, wanting to know why they all couldn’t have their share sooner and pointing out that Melody would get the money earlier in her life than everyone else and what was fair about that? But Leonard had given the distribution of funds, how much and when, a great deal of thought. Leonard was—and this was quite literally how he thought of himself, several times a day—a self-made man. It was the organizing principle of his life, that money and its concurrent rewards should flow from work, effort, commitment, and routine. At one time, the Plumbs of Eastern Long Island had family money and a decent amount of real estate. Decades of behavioral blunders and ill-conceived marriages and businesses run amok had left next to nothing by the time Leonard was in high school. He’d wangled himself an engineering scholarship to Cornell and then a job with Dow Chemical during a time he referred to, reverently, as the Dawn of the Absorbency Revolution.

Leonard had lucked onto a team working with a new substance: synthetic polymers that could absorb three hundred times more liquid than conventional organic absorbents like paper and cotton. As his colleagues set to work identifying potential uses for the new superabsorbers—agriculture, industrial processing, architecture, military applications—Leonard seized on something else: consumer products.

According to Leonard’s oft-repeated legend, the business he and his two partners started, advising larger corporations on how to use the new absorbers, was nearly solely responsible for daintier feminine hygiene products (which he never failed to mention in mixed company, mortifying his children), better disposable diapers (his proudest accomplishment, he’d spent a small fortune on a diaper service when the first three were babies), and the quilted square of revolting plastic that still sits beneath every piece of slaughtered meat or poultry in the supermarket (he was not above rooting through the garbage at a dinner party and hoisting the discarded square triumphantly, saying “Mine!”). Leonard built a thriving business based on absorbency and it was the thing he was proudest of, the fact of his life that lent a sweet gleam to all his accomplishments.

He was not a materialistic man. The exterior of his roomy Tudor house was scrupulously maintained, the interior one tick short of slovenly. He was loath to spend money on anything he thought he could fix himself, and he believed he could fix everything. The contents of the Plumb house existed in varying states of disrepair, waiting for Leonard’s attention and marked with his handwritten notes: a hair dryer that could only be held with a mittened pot holder because the cracked handle overheated so quickly (“Use with Care!”), outlets that delivered tiny electric shocks (“Use Upper, Not Lower!”), leaky coffeemakers (“Use Sparingly!”), bikes with no brakes (“Use with Caution!”), and countless defunct blenders, tape recorders, televisions, stereo components (“DO NOT USE!”).

(Years later, unconsciously at first and then deliberately because it made them laugh and was a neat, private shorthand, Bea and Leo would borrow Leonard’s note vernacular for editing manuscripts—use more, use sparingly, DO NOT USE!)

Leonard was a careful, conservative investor in blue chip stocks. He was happy to set aside some funds to provide a modest safety net for his children’s future, but he also wanted them to be financially independent and to value hard work. He’d grown up around trust fund kids—knew many of them still—and he’d seen the damage an influx of early money caused: abundance proffered too soon led to lassitude and indolence, a wandering dissatisfaction. The trust he established was meant to be a soupçon, a little something to sit atop their own, inevitable financial achievements—they were his children, after all—and pad their retirement a bit, maybe help fund a college tuition or two. Nothing so vast as to be truly significant.

Keeping the money tied up until Melody was forty appealed to Leonard for many reasons. He was realistic about the maturity—emotional and otherwise—of his four children: not commendable. He suspected if they didn’t get the money all at once, it would become a source of conflict between those who had it and those who didn’t; they wouldn’t be kind to one another. And if anyone was going to need the money earlier in life, Leonard imagined it would be Melody. She wasn’t the brightest of the four (that would be Bea), or the most charming (Leo), or the most resourceful (Jack).

On the long list of things Leonard didn’t believe in, near the top was paying strangers to manage his money. So one summer evening he enlisted his second cousin George Plumb, who was an attorney, to meet for dinner and hammer out the details of his estate.

It never occurred to Leonard that evening, as he and George leisurely made their way through two Gibson martinis, a superior Pommard, twenty-eight ounces of rib eye with creamed spinach, cigars and brandy, that in less than two years he would be felled by a massive coronary behind the wheel of his scrupulously maintained fifteen-year-old BMW sedan while driving home from work one late night. He never imagined that the bull market of the aughts, riding on mortgage-backed securities, would balloon the trust far beyond his intention, nor could he have foreseen how the staid but eerily prescient George would providentially transfer The Nest to the safer havens of bonds right before the market’s decline in 2008, protecting the capital that the Plumb siblings had watched, during the decade before Melody’s fortieth birthday, inflate to numbers beyond their wildest dreams. He never imagined that as the fund grew so, too, would his children’s tolerance for risk, for doing the one thing Leonard had repeatedly warned them not to do, ever, in any avenue of life, from the time they were old enough to understand: count the chickens before they hatched.

The only person who could access the funds early was Francie and in spite of her casual allegiance to Leonard while he was alive (or maybe because of it, she married her second husband practically within minutes of shedding her widow’s weeds), she abided by Leonard’s wishes to the letter. Her interest in her children, anemic when she was actually responsible for them, dwindled to the occasional holiday brunch or birthday phone call. Leo was the only one who had never petitioned Francie for a loan using The Nest as collateral. Jack and Melody and Bea had all asked at one time that she consider an earlier dispersal, but she stubbornly refused.

Until Leo’s accident.

CHAPTER THREE

The day Leo was released from rehab, a few days before the family lunch at the Oyster Bar, he went straight to his Tribeca apartment hoping to broker some civil temporary living arrangement with his about-to-be ex-wife, Victoria. That she had other plans became clear when his key no longer fit in the lock of the front door.

“Don’t bother fighting this one,” George told him over the phone. “Just find a hotel. Remember my advice. Lie low.”

Leo didn’t want to confess to George that Bea had taken his wallet the night of the accident. He’d arrived at rehab with nothing more than his house keys, his iPhone (which was immediately confiscated and returned to him the day he was released), and sixty dollars in his pocket (ditto). Standing at the Franklin Street subway station, paging through the contacts on his phone, he realized with deflating clarity how few people in Manhattan would be happy to lend him their sofa. How many friendships he’d let wane and diminish over the past few years while he and Victoria indulged each other’s miseries and spent money as if it were somehow magically regenerating. How few people would be sorry to hear he’d had some trouble and would hope for his recovery or return. He’d lived in New York for more than twenty years and had never not had a place to go home to.

The small piece of paper with a cell-phone number on it, pressed on him by his rehab roommate “just in case,” felt like a squirming minnow in his back pocket. He took the paper out, punched the numbers into his phone, and left a message before he had time to think about it, which was exactly the opposite of what he’d been incessantly lectured to do during his stay in Bridges, the recovery center where his family had dumped him for twelve endless weeks. He’d hated every minute of it. Individual therapy hadn’t been half bad; he’d vented practically nonstop about Victoria and had almost exhausted his bitterness over her avarice. He almost felt like getting rid of her was worth the enormous price tag. Almost. But he should have negotiated something about the apartment for the next week or two.

The wool jacket he was wearing was not nearly warm enough. The day was unusually cold for October. He was vaguely aware of an ominous weather report. The New York Post headline at the subway newsstand screamed SNOWTOBER! As Leo stood waiting for a return call on his phone, he watched two panhandlers at the subway entrance compete for change. On one side, an elderly homeless guy was holding a knit cap in his hand and exuberantly addressing passersby with a hearty Hello! Stay dry! Cold one today! And in what Leo thought was a particularly brilliant marketing move, exhorting all the small children to Read a book!

“Did you read a book today, young man?” he’d say. “Don’t forget to read a book!”

The kids would smile shyly and nod, chew on a finger while dropping a parent-supplied dollar bill into the paper bag at the guy’s feet.

On the opposite side, a young bareheaded musical student (smart, Leo thought, his head of streaked blond curls was impressive) had a violin tucked under his elongated chin. He was playing popular classical riffs, lots of Vivaldi, a little Bach, and was very popular with the ladies not pushing strollers; the older ones in their fur coats, the younger ones wearing headphones or carrying reusable shopping bags.

The pelting rain that had been falling all morning was changing over to sleet. Whoever was on the other end of the phone number hadn’t called him back yet. He didn’t have an umbrella, didn’t even have a hat, and the shoulders of his expensive jacket were soaking wet. He paged through the contacts on his phone again, looked at Stephanie’s name for a few seconds, and hit “call.”

“THINGS MUST BE WORSE than I’ve heard if you’re begging to cross the bridge to Brooklyn,” Stephanie said to Leo. She picked up after only the third ring.

“I’m not begging. I need to spend time with somebody normal, somebody I actually like.” Stephanie didn’t respond. She wasn’t going to make this easy. “What have you heard anyway,” Leo asked, “about my situation.” He braced himself. This was another reason he needed to see Stephanie, to figure out how much of the story was out there, see if George had done what he promised.

“Hardly anything,” Stephanie said. “I heard you checked into Bridges. That’s it. Your consigliore is doing a good job. So how was it?”

“How was what?”

“The Carnival cruise,” Stephanie said, trying to decide how far she could push on the phone. Probably not very far.

“You are still not quite as funny as you think,” Leo said, trying to decide how much he’d have to cede before she invited him out. Probably not much.

“How was rehab, Leo? What else would I be asking about?”

“It was fine.” Leo’s fingers were starting to go numb in the cold.

“Are you all beholden to your higher power? Working through the steps?”

“It wasn’t really that kind of place,” Leo said.

“What kind of place was it?”

“Steph, I don’t know if you’ve looked out the window recently, but I’m standing outside in a monsoon of freezing sleet. I’m soaking wet. It’s really cold.” He stomped his feet a little to try to warm his toes. He wasn’t used to being in this situation, waiting on a request.

“Come out. You know where I live.”

“What subway do I take?” He cringed, hearing himself sound so eager and grateful.

“My lord,” Stephanie said, laughing. “Brooklyn and not via town car? I guess the mighty really have fallen. You know there aren’t tokens anymore, right? You have to buy something called a MetroCard?”

Leo didn’t say anything. Of course he knew about the MetroCard, but he realized he’d probably never bought one.

“Leo?” Stephanie asked. “Do you have enough money for a MetroCard?”

“Yes.”

“Come then.” Her voice softened a bit at the edges. “Take the 2 or 3 to Bergen Street. I’m roasting lamb.”

WHEN STEPHANIE’S PHONE RANG THAT AFTERNOON, she’d been throwing fistfuls of rock salt down her front stoop ahead of the purported storm. She knew before she answered that it was Leo. She was not a superstitious person, did not believe in second sight or premonitions or ghosts, but she’d always had an intuition around all things Leo. So she wasn’t surprised when she heard his voice, realized that some part of her was waiting for him to call. She’d run into his wife some weeks prior at a bistro in Soho and found herself on the receiving end of Victoria’s vituperative torrent—light on details, hard on recriminations.

“Good riddance to that narcissistic sociopath,” Victoria had said, sliding her arm through her apparent date’s, a television actor Stephanie recognized from one of those police procedurals. Victoria was vague when Stephanie asked why Leo was in rehab.

“Because he’s a coward?” she said. “Because he’d rather sleep it off in Connecticut and hope everyone forgives and forgets? As usual.”

“Forgives and forgets what?” Stephanie’d persisted. The bar was overflowing and the three of them, gently jostled by the crowd, were swaying as if standing on the deck of a boat.

Victoria stared hard at Stephanie. “You never liked me,” she said, crossing her skeletal arms and giving Stephanie the self-satisfied smile of someone who’d just realized the answer to a riddle.

“I don’t dislike you,” Stephanie said, which was untrue. She very much disliked Victoria or, rather, all Victoria represented, everything about Leo that was superficial, glib, careless. Everything about him that had gone so wrong once he sold SpeakEasyMedia and left everyone behind, including her. “I don’t even know you.”

“Well, know this, for when Leo inevitably reappears,” Victoria had said, leaning so close that Stephanie could smell garlic and shellfish and cigarettes on her breath, could see a tiny smear of dragon-red lipstick on one of her preternaturally bleached front teeth. “I’m getting everything, every last cent. Leo can rot in rehab or in hell for all I care. Pass it on.”

So when Leo called from the subway, sounding sheepish (by Leo standards) and needing shelter, she was curious. Curious to see if rehab had rendered him even the tiniest bit transformed—sober or renewed or regretful. She knew he was probably just the same old Leo, working an angle. Still. She wanted to see for herself.

And if she was being perfectly honest—and she was because she’d fought hard to value honesty above nearly everything else—she was flattered Leo had turned to her when he needed help. Grateful she was still on his list. And because of that, she’d have to be very careful.

LEO DIDN’T HAVE ANYTHING AGAINST BROOKLYN, he just preferred Manhattan, and he believed anyone who said they didn’t was lying. Still, as he walked from the Bergen Street stop into Prospect Heights and down Stephanie’s block, he had to admit that the rapidly falling snow did something decidedly romantic to the streets lined with nineteenth-century brownstones. The cars on the block were already hidden under a sodden layer of white. People were shoveling their walks and front stoops; the scattered rock salt looked like white confetti against the bluestone slate sidewalks.

Hands shoved in his pockets against the cold, Leo felt like a character from an Edith Wharton novel as he lifted the latch of the black iron front gate and walked past the gas lamplight in front of Stephanie’s house. The wooden shutters lining the curved bay window were open, and as he climbed the stoop, he could see into the living room where she had a fire going. He should have stopped to buy flowers or wine or something. He stood before the massive mahogany and glass front doors. Stephanie had hung life-size plastic glow-in-the-dark skeletons in the two center panes. He hesitated a minute and then rang the bell—three short ones, two long—the buzzer code they used for each other back in the day. One of the doors swung open. The skeletons clicked and swayed in the stormy breeze, and there she was. Stephanie.

He always forgot, when he hadn’t seen her in a while, how attractive she was. Not standard-issue beautiful, better. She was nearly his height and he was almost six foot. Her coppery hair and tawny skin made her a peculiar brand of redhead: no freckles, quick to tan if she ever spent time in the sun, which she didn’t. She was the only person he’d ever met who had one brown eye and one that was flecked with green. She was wearing admirably fitted jeans. He wished she would turn around so he could become reacquainted with her ass.

She greeted him by raising her hand, blocking him from crossing the threshold of the foyer. “Three conditions, Leo,” she said. “No drugs. No borrowing money. No fucking.”

“When have I ever borrowed money from you?” Leo said, feeling the welcome blast of heat from the house. “In the last decade, anyway.”

“I mean it.” Stephanie opened the door wider. She smiled at him then, offered her cheek for a kiss. “It’s nice to see you, asshole.”

CHAPTER FOUR

That Leo had messed up so enormously was disturbing but, his siblings reluctantly agreed, not surprising. That Leo’s fuckup had activated their disengaged mother to exercise her power of attorney and nearly drain The Nest, however, was shocking. It was the one threat to The Nest none of them had imagined. It had been, simply, unthinkable.

“Obviously it wasn’t unthinkable because I thought of it and your father set it up that way,” Francie said, the day she finally agreed to meet them, briefly, in George’s New York office, while Leo was still in rehab.

“It was our money, too,” Jack said. His voice wasn’t forceful as he’d intended, more whiney than outraged. “And we weren’t consulted or even informed until it was too late.”

“It’s not your money until next March,” Francie said.

“February,” Melody said.

“Excuse me?” Francie looked slightly taken aback to hear Melody, as if just realizing she was there.

“My birthday’s in February,” Melody said. “Not March.”

Bea stopped knitting and raised her hand. “I’m March.”

Francie did the thing she always did when wrong, pretended not to be and corrected whoever had corrected her. “Yes, that’s exactly what I said. The money doesn’t become yours until February. It’s also not completely gone. You will all get fifty thousand, more or less. Is that correct, George?”

“In that neighborhood, yes.” George was walking around the conference table pouring everyone coffee, clearly uncomfortable.

Melody couldn’t stop staring at her mother; she was starting to look old. How old was she? Seventy-one? Seventy-two? Her long, elegant fingers trembled a bit, the veins on the back of her hands were dark and prominent, the slackening skin marred with age spots, like a quail’s egg. Francie had always been so vain about her hands, demonstrating the reach of her fingers by bending them forward and touching the tips to the inside of her wrists. “Pianist’s hands,” she used to tell Melody when Melody was little. Melody noticed now that Francie consciously placed the left (which was slightly less mottled) atop the right. Her voice had thinned, too; the slightest difference in treble had crept in, not a rasp or a scratch, but a waver that troubled Melody. Francie’s decline meant they were all declining.

“You are still receiving a sum of money,” Francie continued, “that would make most people incredibly grateful.”

“A sum that is ten percent of what we were expecting. Is that correct, George?” Jack asked.

“Sounds about right,” George said.

“Ten percent!” Jack said, practically spitting across the table at Francie.

Francie removed a slender gold watch from her wrist and placed it on the table in front of her, as if putting them all on notice that their time was nearly up. “Your father would have been horrified by that amount. You know he meant the fund to provide a modest assist, not a true inheritance.”

“That’s entirely beside the point,” Jack said. “He set up an account. He deposited money. George managed it—very well. Now the deadline is approaching and it’s supposed to—wait a second—” Jack turned to George. “Leo still isn’t getting fifty thousand, is he? Because if he is? That is truly fucked.”

“Watch your language,” Francie said.

Jack looked at Bea and Melody, mouth agape, and spread his hands wide. Melody wasn’t sure if he was gesturing in frustration or beckoning them to join in the conversation. She looked over at Bea who was intently counting stitches on whatever it was she was knitting.

“We’re following the terms,” Francie said.

“Your mother is right about that,” George said. “Leo can refuse his share, but we can’t refuse to give it to him.”

“Un-believable,” Jack said.

Melody wanted to speak up, but she was stuck on how to address her mother. Her older siblings had started calling Francie by her first name in their teens, but she’d never been able to do it and something about saying “Mom” in front of Jack and Bea embarrassed her. Also, she was a little scared of her mother. Her mother was a little mean. For years, the Plumbs had told one another that their mother was just a mean drunk. If she would just stop drinking! they’d say, She’d be fine! Shortly before Leonard died, she developed some out-of-the-blue alcohol intolerance and did stop drinking. Cold turkey. (Years later, they would realize Francie’s sudden sobriety had to do with Harold, the conservative, teetotaling businessman and local politician she swiftly married after their father died.) They eagerly awaited her transformation only to discover that they already knew her true nature: She was just a little mean.

“Here’s the thing,” Melody said, clearing her throat and waving a little in Francie’s direction to get her attention. “We’ve been counting on the money and have made plans and—” Melody hesitated. Francie sighed and clanged her spoon around her coffee cup as if she were stirring in sugar or cream. She let the spoon drop and rattle a little on the saucer.

“Yes?” Francie said, gesturing for Melody to wind up. “You’ve made plans and—”

Melody froze, unsure of what to say next.

“This is a blow,” Jack said. “This is a financial blow on top of several financial hits over the past few years. Is it unreasonable to expect you—as Leo’s parent and given your means—to absorb some of this financial loss?”

Melody was nodding as Jack spoke and trying to gauge her mother’s reaction. There was a part of her, a tiny, contracted part of her, that thought maybe she could get her mother to help with college tuition.

“Leo’s parent?” Francie said, nearly looking amused. “Leo is forty-six. And you’re not the only one who has taken a financial hit over the past few years. Not that any of you bothered to inquire after us.”

“Why?” Bea asked. “Are you and Harold okay?”

Francie had folded her hands in front of her and was looking down at the table. She started to speak and then stopped. Bea and Melody and Jack looked at one another nervously. “Harold and I are fine,” she finally said.

“Well, then—” Jack started, but Francie put up a hand.

“We will be fine, but most of Harold’s money is tied up in commercial real estate, which is a soft market right now. Obviously.”

“And the money Dad left for you?”

“It’s long gone. We used it to shore up Harold’s business until we’re on an upswing.” Francie straightened her shoulders and raised her voice a little, like a teacher reassuring a room of students during a fire drill. “Everything will be absolutely fine when the market corrects the way it always does. In the meantime? We’ve had to cut back, too. Harold has his own children to consider. At the moment, our liquid assets are negligible, and that will be our situation for quite some time. We’ve all had to readjust our expectations and plans given the recent economy.” Francie leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, appraising her offspring. “Besides, Leo is your brother. It never occurred to me that you would not help him out of this dire situation—”

“A situation entirely of his own making,” Jack said.

Francie pointed a finger at Jack. “Your father set the conditions of the account so that I could tap into it in case of an emergency for this exact reason. This was a family emergency.”

“Which part qualifies as an emergency?” Jack said. “Leo’s years of no work and all play? His marriage to a world-class spendthrift? Crashing a Porsche he couldn’t afford because his dick was in a waitress’s fist?”

Across the table, Francie put the tips of her unsteady fingers to her eyelids, which were creased with a violet shadow making the lids look more bruised than anything else. “I don’t want to have this conversation again.” She opened her eyes and looked around the table, surprised, as always, when face-to-face with her children.

Francie knew she wouldn’t win any prizes for motherhood—she’d never aspired to any—but she hadn’t been this horrible, had she? What had Leonard wrought with the money he thought would just be a small dividend later in their lives? How had they raised children who were so impractical and yet still so entitled? Maybe it was her fault. She’d wondered that often enough, what mother hadn’t? She’d been twenty-five and married less than a year when Leo was born, and Jack and Bea had followed so quickly. She’d been overwhelmed to the point of being listless. And just when she felt she was coming back to her old self, gaining control of the situation—Leo was six, Jack four, Bea months away from three—everyone finally sleeping—and surprise! Melody. She was bereft when she found herself pregnant with Melody and for many years after, counting down the hours of the days until she could have a drink to dampen her anxiety. These days, she supposed, she’d be diagnosed with postnatal something and given a pill and maybe it would be different. Harold—solid, confident, reassuring Harold—had rescued her.

Maybe the fault was with her marriage to Leonard; their relationship had been fraught, disconnected (except for the sex, she still thought about having sex with Leonard, his unlikely voracious exuberance, her ability to be yielding and attentive in bed in a way she wasn’t anywhere else; if only they’d been a little more careful about family planning), and probably their parenting had suffered as a result, but had they really been different from anyone of their generation? She didn’t think so.

“Mom?” Francie was jolted back into the conference room by Melody’s voice, away from the pleasant memory of Leonard and the unlikely places they would couple when the children were little and everywhere and wanting her constantly. The laundry room with its locked door had been a favorite, the whirring and thumping of the washer and dryer giving them a certain auditory privacy. She still had a Pavlovian type of arousal when she smelled Clorox.

And here they were—her children. Three of them, anyway. Jack, who had emerged from the womb aloof and self-contained. He was always trying to sell Francie some inferior kind of antique for her house, something from his shop that was overvalued and overpriced. She didn’t know if he was dumb or if he just thought she was.

Beatrice had seemed like the easiest of the four, but then she wrote those stories. Francie was proud when the first one was published, ready to buy dozens of copies and show them to her friends—until she read the story with a character who was meant to be her, a mother described as “distant and casually cruel.” She’d never mentioned the story to Bea, but she still remembered bits—a woman who “viewed the world through a prism of bottomless desire; her sole fluency, disappointment.” Luckily, her friends didn’t read those kinds of magazines anyway; they read Town & Country, they read Ladies Home Journal. Bea’d always had her secrets, always. Francie wondered what was going on in that bowed head now as her hands flew with needles and yarn.

And Melody. Maybe she would slip Melody some cash, enough for some Botox or a facial or something to brighten her pallor. She was the youngest and somehow the most faded, as if the Plumb DNA had thinned with each conception, strong and robust with Leo and each child after being—a little less. She couldn’t claim to be close to Leo, but he was the least needy and, therefore, the one she thought of with the most fondness.

She’d helped Leo because Harold had insisted she take care of the situation as swiftly as possible. He didn’t want any of his multiple business partners, already skittish in the current financial environment, to associate him with a publicly humiliating and possibly financially gutting lawsuit. George’s connections, the family’s long-standing reputation locally, and a fat check got the job done. But she’d also taken pleasure in her magnanimous gesture. She’d felt, for a change, capable and maternal. She liked being able to wipe the slate for Leo and offer him a second chance. She believed in second chances, sometimes more than first chances, which were wasted on youth and indiscretion. Her second marriage was the one she deserved even if it was a little staid, a little lacking in drama and the physical connection she had with Leonard. But Harold was good to her; she was taken care of; her “bottomless desires” satisfied.

And still she had to contend with this execution squad of her own children, complete with Madame Defarge at the head of the conference table. Who was casually cruel now? This was how it had always been: Nothing she did was good enough; what she did for one disappointed another. She couldn’t win. When would it end? She searched their faces again, looking for some sign, some small indicator that they’d come from her and Leonard. Aside from physical traits, the easiest mark to hit, she could see nothing. Nothing. All she could think was, I don’t recognize a single one of you.

“Mom?” Melody said again.

“This is a conversation you need to have with Leo,” Francie finally said. “I’m sure he will be able to repay you as soon as he’s settled with Victoria. I understand he’s selling nearly everything—the apartment, the artwork. Isn’t that right, George?”

George cleared his throat, made a little steeple with his fingers, and squinted as if a bright ray of sun had suddenly appeared in the windowless conference room. “He is, but I have to tell you that most of it is going to Victoria.”

“What do you mean by most of it?” Melody said.

“I mean, pretty much all of it. There will be some left, enough to tide him over for a bit, help him get settled until he finds a job.” George paused, knowing he was delivering more bad news. “As you can imagine, Victoria could have made things quite difficult and this was how it shook out.”

“What about Leo’s insurance?” Melody said. “Shouldn’t he have some kind of liability coverage?”

“Yes, well, that was another unexpected complication. It seems Leo had lapsed payment on quite a few bills, including insurance.”

Jack massaged his temples as if tending to a migraine. “So let me recap. Essentially, all Leo’s assets are going to paying off Victoria to get rid of her, keep her quiet, whatever, and all of our money is going to the waitress because of Leo’s mess.”

George shrugged. “I would phrase it in a more nuanced fashion, but essentially? Yes.”

“Matilda Rodriguez,” Bea said.

Jack and Melody looked at Bea, confused. “Her name,” Bea said, impatient. “You could at least use the waitress’s name.”

“Are you humming?” Jack said, turning to Melody.

“What?” Melody startled. She was humming. It was a nervous habit, something she did when she was worried or anxious. She was trying not to think about the accident. “Sorry,” she said to the room.

“You don’t have to apologize for humming,” Bea said. “For God’s sake.”

“It’s that song from Cats,” Jack said. “I want to scream.”

“Before we wind up,” Francie said, cutting off the all-too-familiar bickering, “I’d like to acknowledge all George’s work. I won’t get into the specifics, but suffice it to say that getting Leo to rehab, negotiating the settlement, doing what needed to be done—at the local level—to take care of this, keep it out of the paper, was a superb effort and we’ve been remiss in not thanking him yet for his truly excellent effort, the speed and the efficiency and so on and so forth.” She nodded at George, like a monarch recognizing a loyal subject.

“We were lucky,” George said, avoiding looking at Bea, whose hands had stilled. “Things broke our way. And your mother is right. This could have been much, much worse. I file this one under ‘best-case scenarios.’”

“I guess we have a slightly different filing system,” Melody said.

“This is in all our best interests.” Francie stood and pulled on her coat. Melody had to stop herself from reaching over to touch the rich navy fabric. “We don’t want this all over the East End.”

“I don’t care what’s on the East End,” Jack said.

“Me neither,” said Bea, aware that the meeting was about to wrap up and maybe she’d been just a little too quiet.

Francie was wrapping a lavender scarf around her neck. Melody stared. The scarf was so light and diaphanous it reminded her of a passage from a children’s book she used to read to the girls when they were little, about a princess who had a dress that had been spun by moths from moonlight.

“Your scarf,” Melody said. “It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you.” Francie looked surprised. She fingered the cloth a little and then unwound the scarf, folded it into a neat square, and pushed it across the conference table until it was in front of Melody. “Here,” she said. “Take it.”

“Really?” Melody, in spite of herself, was thrilled. She had never owned anything quite so delicate. It had to be expensive. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Francie said, pleased to see the appreciation on Melody’s face. “It’s your color. It will brighten the pallor a bit.”

“Have you spoken to Leo lately?” Bea asked Francie.

Francie watched Melody wrap the scarf around her neck. It wasn’t her color, but it still looked nice. She motioned for Melody to come closer and she adjusted the ends of the scarf, tucking them into place. “There,” she said. She turned to Bea. “I spoke to him last week. Briefly.”

“Is he okay?” Bea said.

Francie shrugged. “He’s Leo. He sounded perfectly fine, considering.”

“Does he understand your intentions?” Jack said. “That your incredible generosity on our behalf is not a gift but a loan?”

“I’m sure Leo doesn’t need to be told to be accountable for the money; he’s not dumb.” Francie was pulling on her gloves now.

“But he’s Leo,” Jack said. “He’s supposed to magically start caring about what happens to us?”

“We should give him a chance,” Bea said.

“You’re all delusional,” Jack said. He sounded more tired than angry now.

Francie’s brief sense of accomplishment over gifting Melody the scarf evaporated. She gave no one in particular a brittle flash of smile. “I’ll make sure he gets in touch with you as soon as he’s back in the city,” Francie said. “I can do that.”

“And then what?” Jack asked.

Francie shrugged. “Invite him to lunch.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Meeting at the Grand Central Oyster Bar was part convenience—Melody disembarked at Grand Central, which was halfway between downtown where Jack and Leo lived and Beatrice’s place uptown—and part nostalgia. On the rare occasion when the elder Plumbs had brought all four children into the city, they had always dined at the Oyster Bar, summoning plates of oysters with exotic names—Chincoteague, Emerald Cove, Pemaquid—and steaming bowls of oyster stew. The Plumb siblings loved the bustle of the dining room (where they never sat) and the ordered efficiency of the sprawling, no-reservations needed, sit-down counter (where they always sat). They loved the dramatically vaulted ceilings covered in ivory Gustavino tiles and the strings of white lights that managed to make the space feel both lushly romantic and slightly antiseptic.

Melody had arrived early to intercept her brothers and sister before they found seats at the counter. She’d made the bold move of reserving them a table in the dining room. She was sick of the counter; it was hard for a group of four to talk when sitting in a row unless they got an end spot, which rarely happened. They needed to talk today, and she’d always wanted to eat in the dining room, sitting around a table, like civilized New Yorkers would. But Leo was late and the maître d’ would only seat a complete party. They’d ended up at the counter fending off the waiter with orders of shrimp cocktail and Coke.

“We could have just said we were three and then pulled up a chair when Leo comes,” Jack said. “If he comes.”

“He’ll be here,” Bea said.

“You’ve spoken to him?” Jack asked.

“No, but he’ll be here.”

Melody was glumly opening another pack of oyster crackers. The maître d’ had snapped her head off when she’d asked if he’d save them a corner table. “Madam,” he’d said, sourly, “please enjoy yourself at the counter seats.”

“Have you spoken to him?” Jack asked Melody.

“Me?” Melody said, surprised. “No. Leo never calls me.”

“I got an e-mail from him at work on Friday,” Bea said. “But since he’s not here yet, maybe we should talk about what to say when he does get here.”

The three of them squirmed on their stools a bit, eyed one another warily.

“Well,” Melody said. “I—”

“Go on,” Bea said.

“I think we should, obviously, make sure he’s okay.” Melody spoke haltingly; she was unaccustomed to going first. Jack looked dubious. Bea smiled encouragingly. Melody sat up a little straighter. “I think we inquire after his health. Find out where he’s staying. Offer our support.”

Bea was nodding along to everything Melody said. “Agreed,” Bea said.

“And then?” Jack said, pointedly.

“And then I guess we ask about The Nest,” Melody said. “I don’t know. How would you like to start?”

“I’d like to hand him an invoice and ask him when he’s paying it,” Jack said.

Bea swiveled on her stool to face Jack. “Are you guys in some kind of financial trouble? Is Walker not working or something?”

Jack let out an exasperated puff. “Walker is working. Walker is always working. I would like to offer Walker the opportunity to not work for a bit. Eventually. As in next year, which was our plan and has been our plan forever—that Walker could cut back and we’d spend more time in the country …” Jack trailed off. He was not comfortable talking to his sisters about any of this. He wanted to get Leo alone and make his pitch for payback priority without the other two interfering.

“I’m worried, too, you know,” Melody said. “Soon we’ll be paying college tuition. You can’t imagine what it costs now. And the house—”

“What about the house?” Bea asked.

Melody didn’t want to talk about her house, about Walter’s completely insane and unacceptable idea about her house. “It’s expensive!” she said.

Bea waved at the waiter and gestured for drink refills. “I get that this stinks for all of us,” she said, “but I also know Leo. If we go on the offensive today—” She shrugged and looked back and forth at Melody and Jack. “You know I’m right. He’ll just avoid us.”

“He can’t avoid us forever,” Jack said.

“What are we going to do?” Bea said. “Stake him out? Garnish his nonexistent wages? Beg?”

“I think Bea’s right,” Melody said.

“Since when has being nice to Leo worked?” Jack said. “Since when has anything successfully forced Leo to not put Leo first?”

“People change,” Bea said, opening up another pack of oyster crackers.

“More often, people stay exactly the same.”

“I still don’t understand why he didn’t fight Victoria on the apartment and everything else,” Melody said. “Why he didn’t try harder to recover something.”

“You don’t?” Bea had a flash of that night in the ER, Leo’s face, his sutured chin, the whispers and moans on the other side of the curtain, the sobbing parents in the hallway, the mother quietly keening and fingering a rosary. “I do,” she said. “You would, too, if you’d been there.”

Melody became very invested in fishing a wedge of lemon from her soft drink and not thinking about the waitress. They’d been out of town the weekend of the wedding and had missed the entire mess. Jack had missed it, too; he never attended family functions. Melody needed to keep her energy focused on where it mattered: her daughters, her husband, her home.

“Oh, please,” Jack said. “That’s hardly the whole story. Something else is going on.” He was creating tiny origami-like folds on one corner of the paper placemat. “This is Leo we’re talking about. He’s got money hidden away somewhere. I know it.”

“What do you mean you know it?” Melody said. “You have proof?”

“No, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. I know it in my bones. Think about it. Since when has Leo been afraid of a fight?”

“Bea? What do you think?” Melody said.

“I don’t know,” Bea said, but the same thought had occurred to her. “How would that even work?”

“Oh, there are ways,” Jack said. “It’s surprisingly easy.”

The waiter was circling them now, annoyed. They’d decimated countless packs of oyster crackers, and empty cellophane wrappers and crumbs littered the space in front of them. Bea started gathering the crumbs into a small pile and brushing them onto a bread and butter plate.

“He’s not coming,” Jack said.

Bea checked her phone. “He’s just on Leo time.”

Then, as if on cue, Bea saw Melody sit up a little straighter and raise her left hand and nervously fluff her too-blonde bangs. A tentative smile lifted the lower half of her face. Jack straightened, too. His jaw slid forward the way it did when he was feeling defensive, but then he stood and gave a beckoning wave and before Bea could turn around, she felt a hand on her shoulder, its familiar heft and quiet preferential squeeze, and her heart did a tiny two-step, a little jig of relief, and she turned and looked up and there he was: Leo.

CHAPTER SIX

The day Leo landed on Stephanie’s stoop, she immediately put him to work moving firewood from the half cord piled in her backyard to a smaller area on the deck off her kitchen and under a plastic tarp, in case the storm turned out to be as nasty as the weather report was predicting. As Leo stacked wood, his phone buzzed. It was his slip of paper calling back and, lo and behold, the voice on the other end was an old, familiar dealer, Rico. They exchanged quick pleasantries and hurriedly arranged to meet at their usual spot—in Rico’s car parked off Central Park West, near Strawberry Fields, three days hence, immediately before the family lunch. Nothing major, a little weed to relax; maybe some Vicodin. Maybe he wouldn’t even go. Maybe he’d try to stay clearheaded for a few more weeks, see what that was like. Leo liked options. Stephanie stuck her head out the door and asked him to bring some wood into the living room. As he moved through the parlor floor, he admired what she’d done to the house, how she’d preserved everything old but also made it feel modern, entirely her own.

Stephanie’d had the foresight to buy at the end of Giuliani’s reign as mayor, only weeks after 9/11 during what would turn out to be the tiniest of real-estate dips. When she moved to the block on the wrong side of Flatbush Avenue, the non–Park Slope side, everyone—including Leo—thought she was crazy. One of the houses on the corner was occupied by a thriving drug business. Her house had ugly metal gates on the front and back windows. The door off the kitchen, leading to an unused and rotting deck, had been cemented shut with concrete blocks. But the day she looked at the building, she noticed city workers planting cherry trees along her side of the street, which she knew signaled an active neighborhood association. There was a decent garden floor rental beneath the owner’s triplex. And then there was the sheer size of the place—she could fit three of her Upper West Side studios into the first floor. As she wandered the neighborhood that day, she counted three couples with strollers. Her agency was thriving, and she’d always lived frugally, saving as much as she could. She offered the asking price.

“When did you get such good taste,” Leo asked her. “Where’s all that crap from IKEA I had to help you put together.”

“You aren’t the only one who grew up and started making money, Leo. I haven’t had that IKEA furniture for years.” She walked into the living room from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, happy to admire her house along with him. She loved her house; it was her baby.

“Italianate, right?” Leo said, examining the ornate marble mantelpiece. The center medallion of the mantel was a carving of a young girl. Marble curls of hair fell around her face, her nose was long and straight, her gaze direct, her lips full. He ran his thumb over the mouth, feeling the hard edge of a tiny chip at the center of the lower lip; the imperfection made the young woman’s mouth both damaged and oddly alluring.

“Isn’t she perfect?” Stephanie said. “Most mantels I’ve seen have carved fruit or flowers. I’ve never seen another face. I like to imagine she meant something to the person who built this house. Maybe she was a daughter, a wife.”

“She reminds me of someone.”

“Me, too. I can’t ever think of who.”

“She has nice tits.”

“Don’t be gross.” Stephanie knew Leo was provoking her.

“Sorry.” He moved over to the fire and threw more wood onto the flames, watching it flare as he agitated the embers with an iron poker. “She has a lovely décolletage. Better?”

“Stop staring at defenseless Lillian’s breasts.”

“Please don’t tell me you’ve given her a name,” Leo said, shaking his head. “Please tell me someone else named her Lillian.”

“I named her Lillian. Sometimes we chat. Don’t touch her breasts.”

“Truly, I’m not that hard up.” He sat on one of the sofas flanking the hearth, scanning the room for signs of a male presence. “No more Cravat?”

Stephanie couldn’t help smiling a little. Cravat was Leo’s nickname for one of her post-Leo boyfriends, a guy who’d lived with her once and briefly and had made the unfortunate choice one evening of wearing a velvet jacket and a silk cravat to a book party. “He hasn’t lived here in years.”

“Not enough room for all his smoking jackets?”

She shook her head. “Do I really still have to defend one bad wardrobe choice from years ago?”

“I also recall a summertime straw fedora.”

“You always did have great recall for anything that made you feel superior.”

“What can I say? I’m not a hat and cravat guy.”

“Turns out we have that in common.”

Leo removed his damp shoes and put them close to the hearth to dry a little. He put his feet up on the coffee table. She sat down opposite him. “You always knew how to pick them,” Leo said.

“I had some great picks.”

“Like who?” Leo said, encouraged by what could have been a slightly flirtatious turn in her tone.

“Will Peck.”

“The firefighter?”

“Yes, the firefighter. That guy was great. Easy.”

Leo was genuinely stunned. He’d met the firefighter once, remembered him as being disturbingly good-looking and fit. An ex-marine or something equally stalwart. “Setting aside physical strength, which I will cede to the marine—”

“Don’t be such a snob. Will’s an intellectual, a Renaissance man.”

“A Renaissance man?” Leo couldn’t keep the mockery from his tone.

“Yes. He traveled. He read. He cooked. He made things.”

“What? He whittled? No, no, I forgot, we’re in Brooklyn. He knitted? Did he knit you that sweater?”

“Hardly,” Stephanie said. “This sweater is Italian cashmere.” She pointed to a custom bookcase lining the opposite wall, one Leo had admired earlier for its graceful economy. “He built that.”

“Okay. I give,” he said. “It’s a nice bookcase.”

“It’s a fantastic bookcase.”

“So why isn’t he here if he’s so great?”

“Probably because his wife hasn’t kicked him out of his apartment yet.”

“Right,” Leo said. He deserved that one. He couldn’t stop looking at the bookcase, which was, he had to admit, pretty fantastic.

“And he wanted other things.” Stephanie was quiet for a minute, thinking about what good company Will was and how she hadn’t been able, ultimately, to make him happy. She still ran into him sometimes with his new wife. She didn’t think they had kids, yet. She looked up and thought: Leo!

And then, Careful.

The storm outside was intensifying. The streets were quiet, devoid of pedestrians and traffic. The whole city seemed to be huddling against the weather. The fire cracked and hissed and warmed the room. Leo started to relax for the first time in weeks, for the first time since the accident, really. He missed Stephanie, the ease between them, her solid and comforting presence. Sitting across from him, in the light of the fire, she blazed with health and well-being and good humor.

“I can’t believe you sold your business,” he said.

“I can’t believe what a hypocrite you are.”

“I’m not a hypocrite, I speak from experience. I never should have sold out.”

“You’re just saying that now. I remember those days. You were thrilled by that fat check. Also, I’m not selling out. I was acquired. My life is just going to get a lot easier. I can’t wait.”

“I’m telling you,” Leo said. “That was the start of the end for me.”

Stephanie shrugged and took a clementine from a bowl on the table, started peeling it. “You could have stayed. Nathan wanted you to stay.” Nathan Chowdhury had been Leo’s business partner at SpeakEasyMedia. He’d worked behind the scenes, running the money side of things, and had stayed after the acquisition; now he was CFO for the entire conglomerate. As far as Stephanie was concerned, the beginning of the end for Leo wasn’t selling SpeakEasy, it was acquiring Victoria and all that came after—namely, nothing.

She still remembered the day he’d told her he was planning to sell, the day she’d visited him at work during a period when they were trying—and nearly managing—to be “just friends.” Victoria had walked into his office. “Hey,” she’d said to Leo, lifting her eyebrows a bit, her smile even and smug. Stephanie heard it all in that one word: hey. The intimate monotone of Victoria’s low register. A kind of hey that said they’d woken up in the same bed that morning, probably could still smell each other on their hands. The hey wasn’t inquisitive or demure or apologetic; it was territorial. Stephanie had heard that hey before, coming from her very own foolishly cocksure mouth. After Leo sold SpeakEasy and married Victoria, he’d practically fallen off the face of the earth. The last thing in the world she needed from him was life—or business—advice.

“You should have called me,” Leo said.

“Why would I have called you, Leo? When was the last time we spoke?” Stephanie wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of telling him that she had called. She’d left a message on his cell and someone identifying herself as Leo’s personal assistant had called back. “Assisting what exactly,” Stephanie had asked the girl, who sounded sixteen. “Does Leo have a job?”

“Leo has a number of projects in the works,” the girl had said. She sounded ridiculously tentative and nervous. Stephanie suspected she was using the assistant ruse to discover the identities of all the women on Leo’s incoming call list. Well, good luck to her, she thought. “Can I tell Leo what this is in reference to?” the girl had asked. Stephanie had hung up and never called back.

“I’ve called you,” Leo said.

“Before today? Two years ago.”

“That’s not true.”

“Two years.”

“Christ,” Leo said. “Sorry.” He laughed a little. “If it makes you feel any better, I stopped being interesting about two years ago.”

“I didn’t feel particularly bad about it to begin with, but thanks.”

He frowned and looked at her, still unbelieving and a little pained. “Two years? Really?”

“Really,” she said.

“So come over here and tell me what else you’ve been up to,” he said, patting the place next to him on the sofa.

HOURS LATER, after they’d eaten the lamb and replenished the firewood and she filled him in on the recent publishing news and gossip, after he’d finished clearing the table and loading the dishwasher (poorly) and rinsing some pots (even worse), he opened another bottle of wine and she dished out bowls of ice cream and they moved back into the living room.

“Are you supposed to be drinking that?” she asked him, pointing to the glass of cabernet.

“Technically, I guess not,” he said. “But booze is not my issue. You know that.”

“I don’t know anything, Leo. You could be shooting heroin for all I know. In fact, I think I did hear something about heroin at some point.”

“Completely false,” he said. “Was there excess? Yes. Do I realize I should probably steer clear of speed? Yes. This”—he raised the glass—“is not my problem.”

“So are you going to tell me what happened? Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” Leo said. He wasn’t sure what Stephanie had heard that she might not be telling him. George assured him everything was sealed tighter than a drum. He’d paid a fortune to keep Victoria quiet, but he didn’t trust anyone. Stephanie let the silence gather some momentum. Out the front window the snow accumulated, a pile six inches deep balanced precariously on the rail of a neighboring stoop. A lone car crept down the snowy street, fishtailing a little as it went. She could hear the kids in the house behind her out in their yard screeching and laughing. Their dad was yelling: “Don’t eat the snow! It’s dirty.”

“We don’t have to talk about it, Leo, but I’m a good secret keeper.”

He felt the images from that night starting to surface: the sound of the car’s brakes, the bite of salt air, the incongruous voice of Marvin Gaye coming from the SUV that hit them, urging him to get it on. He wondered if he should talk about it. He hadn’t even tried at fake rehab. He wondered what Stephanie would say if he just unloaded the whole story, right then and there. At one time, they’d told each other everything or—he mentally corrected himself—she told him everything and he told her what he thought she needed to hear. That hadn’t gone very well.

“Leo?”

Leo didn’t even know how to start talking about it. He stared at the carved face on the marble mantel and realized why it was familiar, the swoop of hair, the slender patrician nose, the appraising gaze. “She looks like Bea,” he said.

“Who does?”

“Lillian. Your stone companion. She looks like Bea.”

“Bea.” Stephanie groaned and covered her eyes.

“She’s not bad looking. Bea.”

“No, it’s not that. She’s called me a few times and I’ve been avoiding her. Something about new work.”

“God. Not the novel.”

“No, no, no. I told her a long time ago that I wouldn’t ever read that novel again. I told her, in fact, that she needed to find a new agent. Her message said something about a new project but—I just can’t.” Stephanie stood and started picking up their empty bowls of ice cream, the tranquil mood broken. “This is one of many reasons I’m happy to be part of a bigger operation,” she said. “I can’t stand feeling responsible for the formerly talented. It’s too upsetting. I can pass her off to someone else who won’t have any qualms about shutting her down.”

Thinking about Bea being shut down by some unnamed assistant made Leo feel unexpectedly wistful. He wasn’t surprised when her first stories ended up being some anomaly of youth and fearlessness (thanks to him), but she had to be at the end of her rope by now. And she’d been Stephanie’s first notable client, the person who’d made editors and other new writers take a very young Stephanie very seriously. He didn’t like to think of Bea stuck working with Paul Underwood at some obscure literary journal, living in that apartment uptown by herself. It was hard to think about all his siblings for different reasons, so he didn’t. Right now, it felt like there was nowhere for his thoughts to alight that wasn’t rife with land mines of regret or anger or guilt.

“You’re right,” Stephanie said, standing and staring at the mantel. “She does look like Bea. Shit.”

“Don’t go,” Leo said.

“I’m just going to the kitchen.”

“Stay here,” he said. He didn’t like the sound of his voice, how it wavered a little. He really didn’t like the sudden, rapid acceleration of his heartbeat, which prior to this moment he’d associated with a certain class of stimulants, not a living room in Brooklyn in front of the fire with Stephanie.

“I’ll be right back,” Stephanie said. Leo seemed to go slightly pale and for a moment he looked lost, almost frightened, which briefly alarmed her. “Leo?”

“I’m fine.” He shook his head a little and stood. “Is that your old turntable?”

“Yes,” she said. “Put something on. I’m just going to rinse these.”

In the kitchen Stephanie could hear Leo flipping through her record albums. He yelled to her from the living room. “Your taste in music still totally sucks.”

“Like everyone else in America, my music is on my computer. That’s the old stuff. I just brought the turntable up from the basement a few months ago.”

Leo was reciting from the album covers: “Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, Huey Lewis, Paula Abdul? This is like a bad MTV segment of ‘Where Are They Now?’”

“More like, guess who joined the Columbia House Record Club when she was eighteen.”

Leo flinched a little hearing Columbia Records. He shook it off. “Ah, here we go,” he said.

Stephanie heard the turntable start to spin and the familiar scratch, scratch of the needle hitting the album grooves. Then the weirdly dissonant first notes of a piano and the slurry, graveled voice of Tom Waits filled the house.

The piano has been drinking

My necktie is asleep

Stephanie hadn’t heard that song in years. Probably not since she and Leo were together. The album was probably Leo’s. He would wake her up on his hungover mornings (many mornings; most mornings) singing that song. He would pull her sleeping self into his arms, his semierection pressing into her back. She would half-heartedly try to burrow farther down into the bed, clinging to sleep and the reassuring feel of Leo’s limbs holding her close.

“You stink,” she would groan, feigning more irritation than she felt, not even really minding his funky breath. “You smell like my uncle Howie after a night at the bar.”

He would sing into her ear, his voice pockmarked from whiskey:

The piano has been drinking

Not me, not me, not me

AT THE SINK, she started to rewash the roasting pan that Leo had left with a film of grease on the counter and tried to reconcile the Leo in her living room with the Leo she’d last seen almost two years ago, out one night with Victoria; they’d both seemed hammered. This Leo was slimmer and in spite of what she’d heard—and occasionally witnessed—about his recent years of late nights and marital troubles and general rabble-rousing, he somehow looked younger. He was quieter, more subdued. Still funny. Still quick. Still beautiful.

She shook her head. She was not, absolutely was not, going to get swept into Leo’s orbit again. In fact, she’d better set down some hard and fast rules about how long he could stay. And she needed to run upstairs and make up the pullout sofa in her office.

Then, Leo was behind her. A hand on her shoulder. “Want to dance?” he said.

She laughed at him. “No,” she said. “I most definitely do not want to dance with you. Also? You are terrible at washing dishes. Look at this.”

“I’m serious,” he said. He lifted her hands out of the soapy water in the sink.

“Leo”—she held herself rigid—“I was clear.” Her posture was combative, but he could hear something new in her voice, a fleeting hesitancy.

He inched closer. “You said no fucking. I respect the no-fucking rule.” Leo was entirely focused on her. His desire was physical, yes (it had been twelve weeks, not counting a couple of breezy flings with the rehab physician’s assistant in the weight room), but he also remembered how much he’d loved this part, getting past her prickly exterior, cracking her wide open like unhinging an oyster. He hadn’t thought about it in a long time, how satisfying it was to watch her steely carriage collapse a little, hear her breath catch. How good it felt to win. Fuck the firefighter.

She sighed and looked past him, out the rear windows, into the Brooklyn night and the snowflakes ecstatically spinning in the beam of the floodlight on her back deck. Her hands were wet and cold and the warmth of Leo’s fingers around her wrists was disorienting.

Leo couldn’t read her expression. Resigned? Hopeful? Defeated? He didn’t see desire yet, but he remembered how to summon it. “Steph?” he said. She smiled a little, but the smile was sad.

“I swear, Leo,” she said quietly, nearly pleading. “I’m happy.”

He was close enough now to lower his face to her neck and breathe in her skin, which smelled as it always had, faintly of chlorine, making him feel as if he could swim into her, assured and buoyant. They stood like that for a minute. He could feel his racing pulse gradually slow and align with the reliable rhythm of her constant heart. He pulled back a little to look at her. He ran his thumb along her lower lip, the same way he had with the marble carving earlier, only this time the lip yielded.

And then, from the backyard, an enormous crash splitting the outdoor quiet like a clap of thunder. Then flickering lights. Then darkness.

CHAPTER SEVEN

When Leo arrived at the Oyster Bar, he worked some magic with the surly maître d’. Within minutes the Plumbs were seated and had unconsciously arranged themselves around the red-checkered tablecloth according to birth order: Leo, Jack, Bea, Melody. They shed coats and hats and made a little too much of ordering “just water and coffee.” Leo apologized for running late and explained how he was staying with a friend in Brooklyn (Stephanie! Bea realized), and he’d taken the wrong train and had to retrace his steps. Obligatory chatter about how Brooklyn had become so crowded and expensive and why was the subway so unreliable on the weekends anyway and, well, the weather certainly didn’t help, snow in October! Then they all fell uncomfortably silent—except Leo, who seemed utterly calm while appraising his brother and sisters, who all looked back at him, ill at ease.

The three of them wondered how he did it, how he always managed to be unruffled while putting everyone else on edge, how even in this moment, at this lunch, where Leo should be abashed, laid bare, and the balance of power could have, should have, shifted against him, he still commanded their focus and exuded strength. Even now, they were deferentially waiting, hoping, he would speak first.

But he just sat, watching them, curiously attentive.

“It’s good to see you,” Bea finally said. “You look well. Healthy.” Her light affection made Jack’s shoulders relax, Melody’s face unclench.

Leo smiled. “I’m happy to see you all. I am.”

Melody felt herself blush. Embarrassed, she put her hands to her cheeks.

“I guess we should get right to it,” Leo said. In the taxi down from Central Park, he’d decided to address the unpleasantness head-on. He realized, somewhat surprisingly, that he’d given precious little thought to this moment during his long weeks at Bridges. He’d been so focused on Victoria and the dissolution of their marriage that he’d failed to consider the repercussions of Francie’s actions. To be fair, he hadn’t entirely understood Francie’s actions until a couple of weeks ago. When George first told him that his mother was funding the Rodriguez payout, Leo’d had a brief moment of hope that she was using her own—or Harold’s—considerable resources. Alas.

“I know you want to talk about The Nest,” he continued, satisfied to see their surprise at his direct approach. “So first, I want to say, thank you. I know you didn’t have to agree with Francie’s plan and I’m grateful.”

Bea looked at Melody and Jack, who both shifted a little in their seats; they all looked confused and troubled.

“What?” Leo said, processing what was happening a minute too late.

“We hardly had any choice in the matter,” Jack said.

“We didn’t know until it was done,” Melody said.

“Really?” Leo turned to Bea. She nodded.

Ah. Leo leaned back and looked around the table. Of course. He mentally berated himself for that bit of miscalculation while, briefly, experiencing a wave of elation because Francie had acted so decisively and singularly on his behalf. But Leo quickly realized he was wrong about that, too. Francie hadn’t come to his rescue; no doubt she’d rescued herself—and Harold. Leo could hear Harold now, his adenoidal voice going on and on about what was all over the East End.

Bea warily watched Leo absorb this new bit of information. “I tried calling you, Leo,” she said. “Many times.”

“Right,” he said. “Okay.” This complicated things.

When Leo and Victoria were first engaged, shortly after he sold SpeakEasy and “went on sabbatical” (as he thought of it) and after she refused to consider a prenup, he’d opened an offshore account during one of their diving trips to Grand Cayman. He’d acted on a whim while she was off shopping. The account was perfectly legal, and although he’d planned on telling Victoria about it, he found himself not telling her. He thought of it as a little insurance, a private pension of sorts, maybe a way to keep some of his money protected in case of a stormy day. As his marriage began to deteriorate, he started bolstering the balance. One upside to the prodigious way he and Victoria spent money was that she stopped noticing where the money went. A few thousand here, a few thousand there; over the years it added up. He thought about the money all the time and the day he would just pick up and leave. What had kept him from doing it years ago was the hope that Victoria would tire of him first, fall in love with someone else and leave him so he could avoid a financially decimating divorce. When it became clear she never would (why couldn’t he have married someone just as beautiful but not so strategic?), he surrendered fully to the more libertine aspects of his life. He wasn’t sorry to see the diminishing balances on their joint accounts. So even though the accident had been a humiliating and unfortunate event, it had also—in a strange way—loosened him from the life he was already desperate to escape. For months he’d expected Victoria’s lawyers to find and triumphantly expose the funds, but nobody had. He had nearly two million dollars hidden away, almost exactly what he owed The Nest. He’d never touched a penny of the low-interest savings account; it was safe and sound. Liquid. If he replenished the fund to pay his siblings, his two million would be divided by four. The math hardly worked in his favor.

“I wish I had the money sitting somewhere and could write you all a check,” Leo said. He placed his palms flat on the table and leaned forward, looking each one of them straight in the eye. He hadn’t run a company for all those years without learning the art of a quick recalculation, without learning how to work a table. He still mostly needed to bide time. “But I don’t. I’m going to need some time,” Leo continued.

“How much time?” Melody said, a little too quickly.

“I wish I had the answer to that,” Leo said, as if having that answer was his most fervent desire on earth. “But I promise you this: I am going to start working immediately—and hard—to rebuild. I already have some ideas. I’ve already started making some calls.”

“What’s the plan?” Jack said. He wanted specifics. “Is there a way for you to borrow the money you owe us? Pay us off and owe somebody else?”

“Very possibly,” Leo said, knowing that his chances of getting anyone to lend him money at the moment were nil. “A lot of things are possible.”

“Like what else?” Jack said.

Leo shook his head. “I don’t want to throw out a lot of what-ifs and maybes.”

“Do you think you might have the money—or at least some of it—when we were expecting to get it?” Melody asked.

“In March?” Leo said.

“February. My birthday’s in February,” Melody said, too panicky over how the conversation was going to be indignant.

“I’m March,” said Bea.

“Right.” Leo beat out a little rhythm on the table with his thumb and pinkie. He looked like he was doing a complex equation in his head. They all waited. “How about this?” he finally said. “Give me three months.”

“To pay us?” Jack said.

“No, but to have a plan. A solid plan. I don’t think I’m going to need three months, but you know how tough financing is these days.” He directed his last comment at Jack. “You’re a business owner.” Jack nodded in solemn agreement. Bea suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. Leo. He really was full of shit. “And figure in the holidays, when it’s tough to pin people down. I think I need three months to come up with options,” he said. “Ideally, more than one option that will have you seeing full payment as soon as possible. I’m not promising February, but I am promising that I’ll work as hard as I’ve ever worked on anything to try and make good.” He looked around the table again. “I’m asking you to trust me.”

PART TWO

CHAPTER EIGHT

Paul Underwood ran his literary magazine, Paper Fibres, from a small warren of offices up a worn flight of stairs in a slightly sagging building that stood in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. He’d bought the four-story brick front before the Dumbo section of Brooklyn became DUMBO, when the masses of migrating Manhattanites had been priced out of Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill but still had their hearts set on the aesthetically pristine, historically important, and relatively affordable brownstones of Park Slope or Fort Greene. He’d stumbled into the small wedge of a neighborhood one bright summer Saturday after walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. Leisurely heading north, he’d found himself wandering through the industrial blocks and admiring the streets of blue-gray Belgian bricks laid out in appealing patterns, threaded through with defunct trolley tracks. He’d noted with approval the absence of expensive clothing boutiques, high-priced coffee shops, restaurants with exposed brick and wood-burning ovens. Every fourth building seemed to be an auto body shop or some kind of appliance repair. He liked the vibe of the place; it reminded him of Soho back when Soho had energy and grit, a little theatrical menace. Down by the waterfront a sign indicated that the scrubby park populated with crack dealers and their customers was slated for expansion and renovation, and he noticed that the same developer had signs all over the neighborhood heralding the arrival of warehouse-to-condo conversions.

Standing on a corner of Plymouth Street that afternoon, in the waning days of the twentieth century, listening to the clank and rattle of truck beds as they rumbled over the approach to the Manhattan Bridge to his north, watching the sun illuminate the massive arches of the Brooklyn Bridge to the south, Paul Underwood saw his future: a For Sale placard on a seemingly abandoned corner building. At the top of the building’s reddish-brown façade he could make out the faded, white letters of a sign from the long-defunct business the dwelling once housed: PLYMOUTH PAPER FIBRES, INC. He took the sign as an omen. He bought the building the following week and started his literary journal, Paper Fibres, the following year.

Paul lived on the top floor of the building (two bedrooms, nicely renovated, meticulously furnished, spectacular views) directly above the Paper Fibres offices, which were crammed into the front half of the third floor. The back half of the third floor and the entire second floor housed two modest but increasingly lucrative rental apartments. At street level there was a lingerie store. La Rosa didn’t sell fancy lingerie, nothing lacy or push-up or see-through, but what Paul thought of as old-lady lingerie, matron underwear. Even the plastic torso mannequins in the windows looked uncomfortable, bound tightly with brassieres and girdles that resembled straitjackets with their rows of steel hooks, dangling elastic belts, and reinforced shoulder straps. Paul had no idea how they stayed in business, had never seen more than one customer in there at a time. He had his suspicions, but the rent check was on time every month so as far as he was concerned La Rosa could launder hosiery or money, or sell whatever they liked to the odd selection of male customers who usually left empty-handed.

Paul went to great pains to keep his home and work life separate. He never brought work “upstairs,” he never appeared in the Paper Fibres offices in what he thought of as civilian clothes, always dressing for the commute one quick flight down. Every morning he put on one of his exquisitely tailored suits and chose a bow tie from his vast collection. He believed the butterfly shape beneath his chin provided a necessary counterweight to his overly long face and inelegant hair, which was baby fine, mousy brown, and tended to stick out around his ears or at the crown.

“You can get away with colorful ties,” his ex-wife had told him, diplomatically referring to his rather unremarkable features—gray eyes that were more watery than striking, thin lips, a soft, almost puttylike nose. Paul never minded his ordinary looks. They lent a valuable invisibility in certain situations; he overheard things he wasn’t supposed to hear, people confided in him, errantly judging him harmless. (His looks didn’t always work in his favor. There was the recent lunch, for example, which he’d scheduled with a young poet after their e-mail exchanges had turned flirtatious. That she’d been disappointed in his appearance versus the muscular wit of his correspondence had been abundantly clear by the look on her face. Well, he’d been surprised, too. Surprised to discover that she didn’t remotely resemble her author photo with its glossy hair, hooded eyes, and come-hither glistening lips.)

Paul valued routine and habit. He ate the same breakfast every day (a bowl of oatmeal and an apple) and then went for a morning walk along Fulton Ferry Landing. On weekdays he never deviated from his route, becoming an expert chronicler of the waterfront in all its seasonal mutations. Today the wind was fierce, battering the hearty souls brave enough to be outside; he leaned into it, pitching himself forward and wrapping his scarf more tightly around his neck. He loved the river, even during the grim New York winter, loved its steely gray shimmer and menacing whitecaps. He never tired of the view of the harbor; he always felt lucky to be exactly where he was, the place he’d chosen to belong.

As he headed toward the far edge of Fulton Ferry Landing, Paul saw Leo Plumb’s familiar figure sitting on one of the benches closest to the water. Leo and Paul had taken to walking together every so often. Leo looked up and waved. Paul picked up his pace. He’d actually begun to look forward to the days when Leo would join him at the bench. Stranger things had happened, he supposed.

PAUL HAD BEEN LIVID when SpeakEasy magazine folded and Leo hadn’t invited him to help start the website that would eventually grow into SpeakEasyMedia. Leo hadn’t taken everyone from the print magazine, but he’d taken those generally considered the sharpest, the most desirable, and Paul had always believed himself to fit squarely in that category. Maybe he wasn’t the most talented writer, the most fearless reporter, but he was reliable and capable and ambitious and shouldn’t all those things count for something? He met deadlines, his copy was pristine, and he pitched in where needed even when it wasn’t his responsibility. He did everything you were supposed to do to earn the things you wanted. He was nice

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