Andrew reached into his pants pocket. “Just the bill.” My new martini glimmered at me, mockingly.

“Maybe we can get lunch or something?” I tried. “When we’re both in town that weekend.”

Andrew found the card he was looking for and passed it across the bar. He smiled at me. “I’d like that.”

I smiled too. “Thanks for getting this.”

“I’m sorry I can’t stay for another.” Andrew shook his watch free of his sleeve and raised his eyebrows at it. “I’m really pushing it here.”

“It’s cool, I’ll just sit here, drinking alone”—I sighed majestically—“enjoying people staring at me and wondering who I am and what I do.”

Mr. Larson laughed. “So I got a little saccharine. I’m proud of you, Tif.”

The windshield cracked a little deeper.

The bedroom door was shut, a shard of dark running parallel to the floor. Luke must have gone to bed early. I peeled off my leather dress and stood over the AC unit for a few moments.

I washed my face and brushed my teeth. Locked the door and turned off the lights. I left my clothes on the couch and crept into the bedroom in my bra and underwear—I had worn the nice ones. In case.

Luke stirred as I opened a drawer.

“Hi,” he whispered.

“Hi.” I unclasped my bra and let it fall to the floor. Luke used to tell me to just come to bed after I’d done that, but he didn’t anymore. I slipped into boxer shorts and a tank top.

I climbed underneath the covers. The air in the room was arctic and artificial, the window unit growling aggressively in the corner. The lights were off, but everything was visible thanks to the residual lights of the Freedom Tower, the Patrick Batemans cursing off their computers at Goldman Sachs’s sprawling headquarters, and I could see Luke’s eyes were open. You can’t find a pitch-black room in New York, another reason I love it here—the light from the outside world streaming in at all hours, assuring me there is someone awake, someone who could help me if something bad were to happen.

“Did you get what you want?” Luke asked, his voice flat as the running path along the West Side Highway.

I chose my words carefully. “It was good to talk to him.”

Luke rolled over, his back a judgment passed on me. “I’m going to be so glad when this whole thing is over and everything can go back to normal.”

I know the normal Luke misses, I know the Ani he wants to come to bed. It’s the Ani after a night at the Chicken Box, the Nantucket bar famous for its long line of shivering girls in Easter-egg-colored Calypso shift dresses. There is a bartender there, Lezzie. Her name is really Liz, but when you resemble a younger, only slightly thinner Delta Burke, dress in camo, and sport a ring through the fleshy partition of your nostrils, douche bag blue bloods think it’s Louis C.K. levels of comedy genius to nickname you Lezzie.

Luke’s friends’ wives get all twitchy and uncomfortable around Lezzie, but not me. It’s become the running joke in our group—send Ani up to get the drinks, she’ll come back with at least one free Life Is Good (a disgusting combination of raspberry vodka, Sprite, cranberry juice, and Red Bull) because Lezzie loves her. Luke loves her too—inasmuch as she exposes the vast difference between me and the other girls, with their swollen pearl earrings and Patagonia fleeces, pretty but smugly sexless. Luke got the girl who doesn’t squirm in the presence of a tough box muncher, the girl who actually gets a kick out of flirting with her.

“It’s my little Ani Lennox,” Lezzie says whenever she sees me. “How many diets?”

I’ll hold up my fingers to indicate the number of girls who want their Life Is Goods with diet Sprite and light Red Bull, and Lezzie will laugh knowingly and say, “Coming right up.”

While Lezzie assembles the drinks, Luke’s nose will brush the humid clump of my hair, and close to my ear he’ll ask, “Why does she call you Ani Lennox again?”

And I always tilt my head, giving him more of my neck as I say, “Because Annie Lennox is gay. And if I’m gay then she can fuck me.”

By the time Lezzie puts the cocktails on the bar, Luke is hard in his Nantucket red shorts, and I have to strategically walk in front of him as we carry the drinks over to the Booths and Griers and Kinseys.

“Ones with lemons are diet,” I say to the girls, the lie bringing a sadistic smile to my face. Lezzie loves to serve “diet” calorie bombs to high-maintenance bitches in size twenty-six white jeans.

We slurp a few down, enough to take the bite out of the air outside. Nantucket can get down to fifty, even forty degrees when the sun drops out of the sky, even in the fiercest crush of summer. Then we call up a cab and make our way back to the Harrison estate, where there are enough bedrooms to sleep the entire graduating class of Luke’s fraternity. Some people stay up to smoke pot, play beer pong, or microwave odd drunk person food combinations in the kitchen, but not me and Luke. No, we always go right to bed, my dress bunched around my waist before we even mangle the sheets. We decided long ago that I would always wear a dress to the Chicken Box, no matter how cold it is outside. Makes for easy access once we get home.

I’m always fascinated by Luke’s face as he grunts above me, the veins that appear, the way the blood rushes to his cheeks, filling in the spaces between his freckles so that it appears he has none at all. He never tries to make me come on these nights— it’s like he’s decided this ritual is purely for him—but I always do anyway. And that’s because I’m remembering the night, almost two years ago now, when Lezzie followed me into the bathroom and backed me into the wall, her lips surprisingly delicate and nervous on mine. The way she pushed her meaty thigh between my legs as I started to kiss her back, giving me something to press into, a place to dull the ache.

I debated telling Luke about it. Not because it was the right thing to do or any self-righteous bullshit like that, but because I couldn’t decide—would he be turned on? Or disgusted? Finding the freak sweet spot, that’s always been the perennial struggle with Luke.

Ultimately I decided against it. Maybe I would have told if Lezzie looked more like Kate Upton, maybe if she hadn’t chosen to kiss me right around the time I began to spoil like a forgotten carton of milk in the back of the refrigerator.

Still, I’m right there with Luke when he squeezes his eyes shut and howls his final call. I like when a guy stays inside of me after, but Luke shrivels up fast. Rolls on his back and gasps how much he fucking loves me.

I may never fully make my way out of the bourgey pit, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a trophy wife too. I’m just a different kind.

CHAPTER 10

I felt very still and purposeful after I’d been excused from Headmaster Mah’s office. I may have let Mr. Larson down like he would never let me down, but I couldn’t dwell on that now because the next step was clear. Get to Olivia. Apologize for causing a scene and getting her into trouble at home. Do whatever was necessary to get back into her good graces. I felt this was possible because it served Dean’s interests to keep me happy. Olivia would follow Dean’s lead, I was sure of it.

I tried to track her down before lunch. Looked under the door of her favorite bathroom stall, even. But no luck. My next opportunity was lunch. Which meant I had to get to her before the others sat down, which would be easy because Olivia was usually the first person holding court at the table on account of the fact that she never walked the lunch line. I found her in her usual seat, performing her favorite disordered ritual: shredding a Swedish fish apart at the tail¸ rolling the pieces into balls before popping them in her mouth. A half-moon bruise saddled the right corner of her mouth, and I felt sick. I wish I could say it was because the thought of what her father did to her roiled my stomach, but I was fourteen and selfish. That bruise was my funeral.