“I can’t,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “You need to go get her.” He stood up and walked over to the window.

“I . . . ,” she said, remaining curled on the floor for one moment longer. Then she grabbed her underwear and buttoned up her dress, brushing her sweaty hair out of her face. She rushed into the bathroom, where Hope was pounding on the side of her stroller, the screen dead in front of her. As soon as Hope saw Whitney, she held out her arms, and her wails started tapering into whimpers. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry,” Whitney said, lifting her child out of her stroller and bouncing the wriggling, beautiful weight of her in her arms. “I’m here. I’m right here,” she murmured. She thought of the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History and wondered if Hope would retain something of this too, of this strange man in this strange hotel room, of the unsettling noises coming from the other side of the door while she’d cried and cried. A deep sense of shame spread through Whitney. “You’re okay,” she said as Hope’s whimpers faded too, then turned to call out into the bedroom, in case Christopher was worried. “She’s fine.”

She carried Hope back out into the bedroom to show him, but he was gone, the door swinging closed with a bang that started Hope’s cries right up again. And suddenly Whitney had gone from lover to mother, like a magic spell over which she’d had no control, the reverse of a fairy tale’s happy-ending transformation.

She’d only ever be a mother in his eyes now, and not a very good one at that.

Chapter 29

When she arrived in Whitney’s neighborhood, Claire pulled the hood of her gray sweatshirt over her coppery hair and put on her sunglasses. Then she found a bench on the border of Central Park, right across the street from the familiar limestone building, and sat down to wait, watching the entryway, feeling ridiculous.

Just as she was starting to believe she had made a colossal mistake, the doorman ushered Whitney out of the building, holding the door open for her as she pushed Hope in her stroller and flashed him a grateful smile. The man hailed her a taxi, and once it pulled over to the curb, Whitney, the doorman, and the taxi driver began the laborious process of collapsing the stroller, installing a car seat, and buckling Hope into it, Whitney profusely apologizing as the taxi driver stamped his feet with impatience. You couldn’t take a baby to a massage! She’d known Whitney was lying.

Claire hailed her own cab and slid into the back. “Good afternoon!” the driver said, cheerful, as loud Christian hymns played on the radio. “Where are you going?”

“Just follow that cab, please,” Claire said, peering out the window

“You got it, lady,” the man said, and glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but are you a follower of Jesus Christ?”

“Um,” Claire said. Whitney’s taxi took off, and Claire jabbed her finger toward it. “Oh, go!” Claire’s driver swerved into the middle lane to follow.

“I take that as a no,” her driver said, chuckling. “But it’s never too late to accept Him into your heart.”

The most stressful fifteen-minute cab ride of Claire’s life followed, during which she was torn between worrying that they were going to lose Whitney’s trail and that the driver was going to get them killed by following too recklessly, cutting in front of other cars and leaving a cacophony of honks in their wake. All the while, he kept up a steady sermon, offering to drive her to church any Sunday she needed, while she chewed her fingernails down to ragged shells of their former selves and the meter ticked steadily upward. She was on the cusp of something, she felt, as they screeched down Park Avenue and turned east, as the buildings changed from tall brick apartments to office buildings ornamented with glass and steel and the trees in the center of the road blurred together into smears of green. Should she confront Whitney—follow her into wherever she was going and blow the fucking whistle—or just go over to Amara’s right after this with the story?

Whitney’s taxi pulled over partway down the block on East Forty-seventh Street, and then Whitney began the whole car-seat-stroller process again, in reverse. Claire paid her driver with a quick pang of regret at the chunk that the ride took out of her still-recovering bank account, accepted with a distracted nod of thanks the business card he offered her for his church, and slid out of the cab. She ducked behind a mailbox and watched out of the corner of her eye as Whitney finished buckling Hope into her stroller, straightened her shoulders, and headed into the revolving door of a fancy stone building called . . . the Windom Hotel and Spa.

Fuck. What an idiot she was. Amara was right. She might as well type up some pamphlet about how Obama was a lizard person and start proselytizing on the street corner.

Vagabond kicking her out had turned her into the side character of her own life—the fine, forgettable one taking up space before the star attraction came along. Now, to make up for it, she was trying to insert herself where she didn’t belong. She’d been so desperate to be the hero of someone else’s story that she’d fancied herself a kind of Nancy Drew uncovering a vast conspiracy. Really, though, the only thing she had in common with Nancy Drew was that she was a fucking child. And like Amara had said, she needed to grow up.

It was too late to go back to the clothing store. She could use a drink, a little bit of fuzzy euphoria to block out the image of Amara shaking her head at her. She turned around and faced the intersection, scanning for the nearest bar that would be open at one P.M. on a Wednesday. There, right in between a pharmacy and a SoulCycle, was an Irish pub, beckoning like a siren at sea. Thank goodness for the Irish. She headed straight in, sat on a barstool, and ordered a whiskey soda, pushing her hood back.

The Shame Demons, those terrible, disparaging thoughts about her own self-worth, came to her, and she sat with them for a while as she let the whiskey slide down her throat, acknowledging all the insults they hurled at her. Why did she even care so much about what happened to this playgroup of wealthy, overprivileged women?

Because she was lonely. People were meant to have support groups, but somehow she cycled through communities—through megachurch and Vagabond—and ended up alone. Even Thea, her constant, no-nonsense champion throughout everything, had never called her back after the night Claire ran through Central Park, and when Claire tried calling her again to see if they were still on for dinner plans they’d made weeks before, Thea had answered, distracted, that she had to cancel, which was completely unlike her.

Bizarrely, Claire had felt at playgroup that that time could be different, that she’d finally cycled to the right place. She’d let herself imagine that she and Amara would grow closer as they grew older, and take strolls with their canes through Central Park together, and feed the goddamn ducks. God, maybe that was why people had children. Because they wanted someone who had to sit with them and feed the ducks, no matter how doddering or uninteresting they got. She wanted to take care of her new friends, but she had no idea how to do it, and so they’d all inevitably slip away too.