There was no pretense of perfection now, no hope that the mothers would ever be Momstagram worthy again or that Claire would be able to show Vagabond that she was doing great without them. After all this time striving and striving to get famous, she would get her dream in the worst possible way. This particular moment of public humiliation was just the beginning of a long, brutal slog. She caught Amara’s eye and knew she was thinking the same thing.

“Well,” Amara said, out of breath. Improbably, that hint of mischief that Claire loved came into her expression. “I suppose we should really give them something to talk about.” And then Amara threw back her head and howled, her voice crackling with frustration and rage but also with a kind of liberation, a gigantic wordless “fuck you” to the expectations she’d worked so hard to meet.

When Amara stopped for a moment to take a breath, Claire let her own yell fill the silence, her throat arcing up and back. The other playgroup women paused to look at them. Then, one by one, they joined in too, one woman’s voice picking up where another’s left off to gasp for air so that the sound seemed endless, a pack of wolves tearing down the city pavement, ravenous and wild and not at all inspirational to anyone but one another.

Claire didn’t know exactly what would come next. But she felt achingly, thrillingly alive and glad that she’d have these women at her side to weather the storm.

As their screams gathered force and flew down the block, Gwen looked back at them in confusion. She glanced their way for only a second as she stepped into the intersection, but that was long enough. She didn’t see the taxicab coming.

Chapter 44

The media coverage afterward was fierce, as Whitney had predicted. The photo of the mangled baby stroller, the cash littering the intersection, was everywhere—websites, newspapers, cable news broadcasts. It was just New York news at first, but before long, it made its way across the country. Smirking TV hosts in LA made jokes about “The Poison Playgroup of Park Avenue.” (A ridiculous name, especially since Ellie was the only one of them who actually lived on Park.) One website, geared toward millennial moms, wrote clickbait content about it for weeks on end, their writers churning out article after article with SEO-geared headlines like “Who Is Claire Martin? You Won’t Believe What She Did Before the Poison Playgroup.”

It all got twisted into something else. The women had been chasing Gwen because they wanted to kill her, shrieking the whole time, tottering in their expensive high heels. They had pushed Gwen into the road. The überwealthy could be just as badly behaved, just as governed by base desires, as anyone else.

It was only by the grace of God that Gwen hadn’t died, that the stroller had taken most of the impact while she’d merely suffered a badly broken leg. Half a foot forward, and she would’ve been scattered all over the intersection with her cash. Instead, outfitted with an enormous cast, her body blooming with bruises, she told the police and the press everything she had threatened to reveal.

The reaction arrived in waves. First came the hatred, the searing e-mails calling them all cunts who deserved to die, the strangers on the street who approached them with cutting comments about their terrible parenting and how they’d chosen their waistlines over the health of their children, the people they actually knew who stopped talking to them. Then came a bit of a sympathy backlash as other women reached out privately to say that they’d been tricked by TrueMommy too, and the scope of the scam came to light. That clickbait website ran an article with the headline “The One Important Reason You Should Leave the Poison Playgroup Moms Alone.” Finally, and a bit surprisingly, came the offers. A publisher approached Whitney with a tell-all-book deal, but she turned it down. She didn’t want to tell all anymore, even though the money would have allowed her to stay in the city instead of heading to Jersey as her divorce was being finalized. (Grant had his pick of the women now that he was unexpectedly single again. Ladies were falling all over themselves to prove to the rich, handsome husband that not all women were as heartless as Whitney.) A producer even pitched them a reality show, claiming that they had the potential to be bigger than the Real Housewives. Meredith and Ellie were tempted by that at first, until all the others made it clear that there was no way in hell they’d participate. Still, Ellie and Meredith talked about it in secret for a few days more—maybe the producer would be interested in a “BFF duo conquering the world” type of deal?—until Ellie realized that she was pregnant with Baby #2, and everything became about that.

By the time October rolled around, the frenzy had died down somewhat. When Gwen’s and Teddy’s trials began, all the cameras would surely come out again, but for now, Amara and Claire could walk down the street in the late afternoon, largely ignored, to pick up Charlie and Reagan at day care.

The women all took turns pitching in with Reagan now. A beleaguered Christopher hadn’t wanted them anywhere near him and the girls at first. But after the nanny he’d hired leaked baby photos to the paparazzi, he warily agreed to let the women help out. Now they were determined that Reagan would get six bonus aunts in exchange for one fully present mom. A shit bargain, for sure, but better than nothing. They tried very hard not to judge if, say, Amara gave Reagan too much sugar or if Vicki failed to discipline a tantrum. They didn’t always succeed in supporting one another in all their flawed glory, but they were getting better.

As Claire and Amara walked into the neighborhood day care center, Charlie toddled over to Amara, tears streaming down his face, and she swooped him up into her arms. “The second day was a wild success, I see,” she said to the teacher, who gave her a patient smile in return.

“Hey, a little better than yesterday,” the teacher said. “Progress!”

Progress. Yes, there had been some of that, day by day, with Charlie, and with Daniel. That steamy, terrible August afternoon, she’d given the police a statement and then run all the way home to tell Daniel everything before he could hear about it on the news or from someone else. He’d thought she was joking at first, her kind and trusting husband, and she’d had to convince him that it was true, even as her quick-beating heart threatened to burst out of her chest and zoom around the kitchen because she was so terrified she’d lose him over this.

“Please, don’t divorce me,” she said when he finally took her word that she was telling the truth and grew still.

“Jesus, Mari,” he said. Then he stood up from his seat at the kitchen table and took her in his arms. “I’m not going to divorce you. I love you more than anything.” She started to cry with relief and with something else, an almost physical shock from her sudden sense of how lucky she was to have found him. He stroked her hair as she shuddered against his chest, the heat of his skin coming through his T-shirt. “But we’re starting marriage counseling, stat.”

Now, at the day care, another mother coming to pick up her kid shot Amara and the screaming child in her arms a look of empathy, just like Amara was any other mom with a difficult kid. Then, of course, the woman registered who she was and began to whisper to her friend. “Hi,” Amara called over to them. “Lovely weather, isn’t it?” The moms turned a little red and nodded.