“I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“You were the reason he couldn’t get a fair trial. You, that story you wrote, those lies.”
“I reported the truth,” Nell said. “Every line, every word, all backed up by verified facts. I’m sorry if you—”
The widow’s hand was a blur. She grabbed Nell’s cardboard cup from the desk and flung it in her face. Ice-cold coffee splashed in Nell’s eyes, ran down her cheeks, soaking her blouse in wet rivulets. Nowak, a high school fullback turned sports reporter, was just a second too late. He clamped down on her arm, the empty cup tumbling to the floor, and dragged her backward as the big woman started to scream. Nothing to it, just a word salad of pure outrage, every slur she could think of and threats of lawsuits, threats of car bombs, threats breaking down in a guttural howl of grief as two more staffers jumped in. They wrestled her toward the exit with tears streaming down her ruddy cheeks.
“You okay?” Tyler asked.
Nell flicked her fingertips, sending droplets of coffee flying.
“Fine,” she said. “It was cold. Wasn’t going to drink it anyway.”
3.
Later that night, in the heart of Manhattan, Seelie Rose stared at her ghost in the darkened glass.
A light summer rain came down, drizzling against the floor-to-ceiling window, turning her reflection into a phantom smear. The hard angles of her face lingered, unanchored and drifting with the night wind. Beyond her ghost sprawled the canyon of Fifth Avenue and the curated, tamed wilderness of Central Park.
It was a little after one in the morning. She couldn’t sleep. Five floors below the window ledge, brake lights flared wet and scarlet. Restless insomniacs, taxi drivers, night crawlers on their way to work, punching the third-shift clock. Anonymous in the dark, just like her. There were eight million people in this city. A number big enough to swallow you whole.
Seelie’s bare toes curled against the grainy plank flooring. She’d slipped out of bed a while ago, slithering from under the weight of Arthur’s arm. He snored, sprawled across half the king-sized mattress, draped in silk sheets the color of spilled burgundy. She always wondered if those were his usual sheets, or if he changed them just for her, the same way he changed his hairstyle and his cologne every time his wife went out of town.
She was on business in Singapore, chasing the cash to pay for their fifty-million-dollar condo. He only talked about her when he was looking to expiate his sins. “She’s sleeping with her assistant,” he told Seelie once. “Has been for years. She knows that I know. We just work around it. We can pretend we’re faithful as long as we don’t force the subject.”
“Does she know about me?”
The guilty shift in his eyes told her the truth.
“I’m sure she does. More or less. She doesn’t know my, you know. My…tastes.”
Seelie had arched a groomed eyebrow at that. “Tastes?”
His gaze dove like a burning plane, crash-landing somewhere around the toes of her ratty sneakers. Seelie understood what his awkward silence meant. He only had a few possible responses to that question, and she didn’t think teenage runaways from Buffalo or girls with freckles, dark bangs, and chunky black glasses were the specific “tastes” he was talking about.
He always slipped her some cash on her way out the door. Never a payment for services rendered, just a friendly gesture from a friendly guy. That time there had been an extra fifty dollars cushioned on a bed of twenties. She wasn’t too proud to take his guilt money; she had bills to pay.
Now he slept, filling the kidney-shaped curve of the bedroom with the residue of his dreams. Bookshelves lined one of the walls, stocked from floor to ceiling. Perfect hardcovers, unbroken spines. Crazy, to have all those books and not read them.
Everything Seelie owned sat in the tortoise-green hiker’s backpack at the foot of the bed. Clothes, toiletries, survival gear. She always made room for a single book. Some she had read once, some until they fell apart, and she would swap them with the people she couch-surfed with. Friends called her “the librarian.” She floated between different worlds, different tastes, and she was the vector that brought unfamiliar stories to new homes.
Last week she’d borrowed a shower and a cot at an artists’ co-op in SoHo and swapped a Jack Kerouac for a book of essays by Joan Didion. She had paid for a friend of a friend’s couch with a little company and traded the Didion for a vintage Stephen King potboiler. King had found a new home on a bookshelf in a Brooklyn basement, and she’d walked out with a fresh bruise on her hip, another on her belly, and a well-read copy of Das Kapital.
“What are you reading that junk for?” Arthur had asked her. She wanted to say that she was trying to understand how the book’s former owner could talk for three hours straight about equality and egalitarianism and the need for all people to stand together as one, and then paint bruises on her pale skin once the lights went out. She wanted to say that, but Arthur liked to pretend he was the only man she knew.
“Learning things makes me happy,” she said. Still the truth.
“Communism’s bullshit.” He waved, taking in his world, his condo, his capital-S Stuff. “You don’t get a place like this by going commie. I can tell you that for damn sure.”
“‘To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.’” She tilted her head at the blank look on his face. “Lao Tzu? The Tao Te Ching?”
“Huh,” Arthur had said. Then he wanted to take her to bed, and she let him. Arthur never left bruises. He was apologetic in bed, treating her like she was made of spun glass, like he was terrified of his own weight and his clumsy hands but still couldn’t help touching her. He called her princess, the word like a mumbled mantra. Princess, princess, princess. Naming her, defining her, just the way he wanted her to be. She played her part until he fell asleep.
She should sleep, too, she knew. Arthur’s wife was coming home tomorrow night and Seelie’s eviction from paradise was imminent. She thought about taking a shower alone, luxuriating under Arthur’s stainless-steel Kohler fixtures, bathing in the warmth and steam until the last of her muscles unclenched. Maybe then she’d—
A knock sounded at the door.
The bedside clock read 1:12, glowing green numbers hovering in shadow. Arthur stirred with a whiny little groan, fighting to stay asleep.
Another knock, louder this time. Now Arthur was awake. More awake than she had ever seen him. It was like someone flicked a switch in his head. He sat up, burgundy silk sheets slithering down his hairy gut, his eyes wide. He jumped out of bed and yanked a cashmere robe over his shoulders as he padded to the door and checked the peephole.
Seelie hovered near him, uncertain. This was weird behavior. Then again, her life was a sliding scale of weird behavior.
“Arthur?”
“Shh,” he hissed. He waved at her. “Get dressed.”
He was already halfway across the room, heading for his office. Seelie pulled on her concert T-shirt and wriggled into artfully ripped black jeans. He clicked the office light on. The knock sounded a third time. Whoever it was, they weren’t going away.
Seelie scooped up her backpack and followed Arthur. This was his man cave, a small den with a million-dollar view of the park, appointed with the bric-a-brac of Arthur’s favorite hobby. Miniature redcoat and patriot soldiers clashed across two tables of hand-painted terrain, tiny puffs of stained cotton representing the smoke of a Revolutionary War battlefield. Along one wall, a frayed and flame-seared flag hung securely under a pane of glass, faded with the passage of decades.