She was going to forget about him, she told herself now, as she sat in his brownstone and breathed his air.

Chapter 9

Gwen ran the final uphill stretch of her route in Central Park, pushing Reagan in a stroller in front of her, as a twenty-three-year-old woman in a bright pink T-shirt shouted encouragement at her and the rest of the playgroup mothers. “Yes, mommies!” the twenty-three-year-old screeched. “Empower yourselves! You can do anything! No one is stronger than a strong woman!”

Whitney had gotten an invitation for a trial exercise class through her Instagram, which was adding followers so quickly that it made Gwen a little nervous, and had invited them all along. Gwen gritted her teeth and pushed herself as Whitney’s Lululemon-encased bottom worked away in front of her. She felt an urge to laugh. The mothers had tried taking a different stroller exercise class once before, back when they’d first formed the playgroup, and it had been a disaster, far too intense for their aching bodies.

But this time, as they slowed down for a few final minutes of cooldown yoga, they all exchanged grins, flushed with pride as well as with exertion. They were Amazons, Wonder Women, whose bodies could go through hell and then bounce back better than before. The instructor came around and gave them all high fives as they caught their breath. “Amazing job, mommies,” she said. “I’m going to have to go harder on you all next class.”

They headed for the park’s exit together, breathing in the first hints of spring in the air, pausing to wait for Amara, who was lagging behind to tend to a wailing Charlie. He had not been the biggest fan of whirling through the park with a bunch of sweaty women, voicing his displeasure at frequent intervals.

“Not bad, team! Remember the last time we took a class like this?” Whitney asked.

“Oh, my God,” Meredith said. “Ellie vomited!”

“Hey!” Ellie said. “I think I’d eaten some bad shrimp earlier that day. At least I didn’t just quit five minutes in like Amara and sit on a bench.” Ellie put on her best approximation of Amara’s accent. “‘Leave me here to die. Tell Daniel I love him.’” The woman all laughed.

“And Joanna—” Gwen said. She cut herself off as the laughter faded, the women all replaying the scene in their minds. Joanna had simply started weeping as they’d run up their first big hill, a gasping, full-body cry, and when Whitney had stopped to comfort her, Joanna had pushed away her embrace. Then Joanna had grabbed her stroller and walked out of the park without saying goodbye. (Yikes, I’m embarrassed, she’d e-mailed them all that night with some blushing emojis. Guess I’d better start hitting the gym more often! Joanna had been very good at writing e-mails that made it seem like everything was fine.)

Now a couple of other moms approached. One of them, her face as beet red as the juice she had pulled out of her stroller, tapped Whitney on the shoulder. “You guys were incredible,” she said. “I think I’ve seen your Instagram!”

“Whitney, right?” said the second mother. “Tell me your secrets!”

Whitney laughed. “Thank you so much,” she said, glowing with pride.

“Seriously,” the first mother continued, “you guys are so inspirational, and your babies are always so perfect and happy.”

“Well, except . . . ,” said the second mother, indicating her head in Amara’s direction and grimacing, then looking back at the playgroup with a conspiratorial grin.

“‘Well, except’ what?” Whitney asked, her voice sweet, her eye contact with the second mother unwavering.

“Oh . . . I—nothing,” the second mother said.

“Strange,” Whitney said. “Because it seemed like you were about to trash our friend’s baby. But that couldn’t be it, because surely there’s no possible world in which you imagined we’d be okay with that, right?”

Whitney looked around at the other playgroup moms for confirmation, and although Gwen had been privy to a Meredith-Ellie conversation or two in which they’d bitched about Charlie’s ability to ruin a perfectly peaceful afternoon and how surely there was a way for Amara to keep him a little more under control, now they folded their arms and glared at the other women. “Very strange,” they said in unison while Vicki and Gwen nodded. The first mother turned even redder than before in secondhand embarrassment, and the second mother wilted.

Amara came up to join the group, having calmed Charlie to the occasional whimper. “Thanks for waiting!” she said. “Shall we?”

“Let’s,” Whitney said, and waved at the other mothers. “Anyways, thanks for following the account! That’s very sweet.”

“And by the way,” Gwen said to the second one as everyone else began to go, “your baby is getting way too big for that stroller. It’s a wonder she didn’t fall out.”

After the playgroup had all parted ways, Gwen bounded up the stairs of her brownstone, Reagan in her arms. Gwen lived her life in an extremely regimented manner, but sometimes, when she was in a whimsical mood, she’d greet the portraits of her parents in the front hallway as if they were flesh and blood, leaning forward to kiss them on their oil-paint cheeks like she was a little girl again. She did so today. After a series of rough patches, everything had been going so well lately, thanks in large part, however improbably, to TrueMommy. She moved to pour herself a gin and tonic as a reward, then stopped herself. She had to pick up Rosie from school in forty-five minutes. And she didn’t need the drink. She wasn’t her father.

* * *

—

Gwen was six years old the first time she tasted gin. For Labor Day, her family had gone up to the Connecticut house, a mansion stretched like a beached whale along the shore in Westport. Her grandfather had bought the house in 1948 after he made his first million. Past generations of the family had been well-off enough—respected if nominal members of New York society, with a Mayflower relative to boot—but it was Gwen’s grandfather who had gotten into real estate development and blasted them all to the stratosphere.

Gwen’s father had grown up in the Connecticut house, the youngest of three and the only sibling to survive into adulthood. (His brother, Martin, died falling through the ice on a frozen pond at age nine, and his sister, Alice, hanged herself in her bedroom at seventeen as, downstairs, her parents argued about lobotomies.) Sometimes, on cold, windy nights, in certain rooms—the aforementioned bedroom, although it had been covered in heart-patterned wallpaper and turned into a playroom after a suitable period of mourning, or the wood-paneled library, where little Martin used to spin the creaky old globe and point out places he’d someday explore—you could feel the ghosts of the house come upon you, a chill rising on the back of your neck. Perhaps because of that, her grandparents had retired to Palm Beach, leaving Gwen’s father as the house’s owner, although Gwen’s family lived primarily in New York.