“I grew up in Rye,” Luke said.

Whitney rushed to swallow her sip of wine. “I’m from Bronxville!” She dabbed a napkin at her mouth. “What high school did you go to?”

Andrew laughed. “Honey, I don’t think you were in high school at the same time as Luke was.”

Whitney threw her napkin at Andrew in mock outrage. “You never know.”

Luke laughed. “Well, actually I went to boarding school.”

“Oh.” Whitney deflated. “Never mind.” She opened her menu, and, like a yawn, everyone else had to too.

“So what’s good here?” Andrew asked. The candlelight twisted in his glasses, so that I couldn’t tell if he was asking me or Luke.

“Everything,” Luke said at the same time I said, “They do a great roast chicken.”

Whitney wrinkled her nose. “I just can’t ever bring myself to order chicken at a restaurant. And all that arsenic.” Stay-at-home mom who was also a fan of The Dr. Oz Show. My favorite kind!

“Arsenic?” I held my hand to my breast, the concern on my face an indication for her to go on. At Nell’s recommendation, I’d read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. My favorite strategy is to feign inferiority and encourage my enemy’s arrogance.

“Yes!” Whitney seemed very alarmed I didn’t appear to have heard this before. “Farmers feed it to the chickens.” She pursed her lips, disgusted. “It makes them grow faster.”

“That’s horrible,” I gasped. I’d read that same study—the actual study, not the scaremongering translation made viral by the Today show. This place wasn’t serving fucking frozen Perdue chicken breasts. “Well, I will definitely not order the roast chicken then.”

“I’m terrible!” Whitney laughed. “We’ve just met and I’ve already ruined your dinner.” She smacked her forehead with her palm. “I need to stop talking. But when you’re around a one-year-old all day, you just chatter chatter the moment you have some adult company.”

“I’m sure your kids love having you around.” I smiled, like I couldn’t wait for the day that would be me. No way she got that body by any fewer than three hours a day in the gym. No way she was going at this alone. But God help you if you asked about the Dominican nanny. They can make snide little digs about The Women’s Magazine all they want, but rearing children is real work, and you’d better duck if they so much as suspect that you’re dismissing all their real work.

“I’m so lucky I get to be with them every day.” Whitney’s lips were glossy with wine. She rubbed them together and put her chin in her hand. “Did your mother work?”

“She didn’t.” But she should have, Whitney. She should have let go of her little kept-housewife fantasy and contributed to our household. I can’t say it would have made her happier, but we didn’t have the luxury of considering happiness. We were broke, Mom signing up for new credit cards every other month to finance her Bloomingdale’s excursions, while the shoddy Sheetrock walls of our dramatic McMansion went rank with mildew we couldn’t “afford” to have removed. But you’re right, Whitney, she was so lucky she got to be with me every day.

“Mine either,” Whitney said. “It makes such a difference.”

I kept smiling. Like in the last push of a race, if you stop and walk now, you’ll never find your stride again. “Huge difference.”

Whitney tossed her hair gleefully. She loved me. Her shoulder brushed mine and her voice was low and flirty as she said, “Ani, you have to tell us. Are you doing that documentary?”

Luke draped one arm over the back of his chair and fiddled with his silverware. I watched the white slivers of light dance on the low ceiling.

“I’m not supposed to say.”

“Oh, that means you’re doing it.” Whitney swatted my arm. “That’s what they told Andrew to say too—right, Andrew?”

I have this recurring dream, where something bad has happened and I need to dial 911, but I’ve lost all control over my fingers. They keep slipping across the buttons (it’s always an old-fashioned landline I’m dialing from), and every time I realize, You’re having this dream again, but this time you’re going to outsmart it. Just take it slow, I think. You can’t mess this up if you take it slow. Find the nine. Push. The one. Push. The agony of needing some-thing so immediately but the ask has got to be patient. I needed to know immediately why Mr. Larson was doing the documentary. When? Where? What would he say? Would he talk about me? Would he defend me? “I had no idea you were doing it too,” I said. “What do they want from you? Just to weigh in as kind of an observer, or something?”

The arch in Mr. Larson’s lip deepened. “Now, Ani, you know I’m not supposed to say.”

Everyone laughed, and I had to force myself to join in. I opened my mouth to push some more, but Mr. Larson said, “We should get coffee or something and talk about it.”

“Yes!” Whitney chimed in, her excitement so genuine she disabled my own. Any woman who is that keen on her husband getting coffee with another woman, ten years younger to boot, has a rock-solid marriage.

“You should,” Luke added, and I wished he hadn’t said anything at all. Because his endorsement sounded so glaringly insincere following Whitney’s.

Whitney tripped on her way out the door. She caught herself and giggled that she didn’t get out much. That wine had gone straight to her head.

Mr. Larson had ordered an Uber after dessert, and a black SUV was waiting for them at the curb, ready to take them back to their sitcom-set home in Scarsdale. Whitney kissed me on the cheek and sung into the air, “So nice to have met you. Really, what a small world.” Andrew shook Luke’s hand and clapped him on the shoulder. Then Luke stepped away, opening a space for me to slip into and say good-bye. I stood up on my tippy-toes to press my cheek against Andrew’s and feign a kiss. He pressed his hands against my back, and when he felt the bare skin there, he pulled away as though I had electrocuted him.

We watched their car nose into traffic, and I ached for Luke to wrap his arms around me and hold me against his Turnbull & Asser shirt. If he’d done that, he would have felt that I was trembling.

Instead, he just said, “That was weird, huh?” and I smiled my agreement like I hadn’t just spun off my center and knew there was no going back now.

CHAPTER 6

The morning after Dean’s party I climbed into his Range Rover with Liam and two sophomores from the soccer team. Dean’s license was suspended (there was a fat stack of unpaid parking tickets in the glove compartment), but that didn’t stop him from whipping around town, tires squealing, DMX warning joggers to leap into the brush if they didn’t want to be mowed down on their evening run. Nausea boiled in my stomach when Liam got into the car and blatantly ignored the empty spot right next to me, choosing instead to sit in the front seat next to Dean. I’d tried to talk to him in the kitchen before we left to get breakfast and it hadn’t gone well.

“I don’t really know how I ended up in Dean’s room and I feel like I should say I’m sorry or something because I didn’t want to hook up with—”

“Finny”—Liam laughed at me, my nickname just one more thing of Dean’s he’d co-opted in his effort to assimilate—“come on. You know I don’t care you hooked up with Dean too.”

Dean called to him then, and he brushed by me, and I was glad for the moment alone to collect myself, the tears I forced back finding another channel in my throat, dissolving into a thin salty drip that left me feeling raw and burned in the torturous days that followed. When that finally cleared up, I was left with something much worse. Something that to this day seems to lie in wait, pouncing right at a moment that joy or confidence dares to dance. The memory that I had apologized to my own rapist, and he had laughed at me. You think you’re happy? You think you have anything to be proud of?—it always taunts—Ha! Remember this? That usually sets me right. Reminds me what a piece of shit I am.