KATRINA

Katrina

EIGHT DAYS BEFORE

I opened my eyes to the glare of sun through the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. It took me a second to remember where I was, who I was with. Not an unfamiliar sensation these days. The first time it happened I'd panicked, thinking I'd blacked out, had something slipped in my drink. But no, I'd freely chosen to be there, in a strange bed.

Not that Doug was a stranger anymore—half a dozen dates, three nights together. In this brave new world of dating—where I had to google half the abbreviations, ENM, GGG—I think that counted as married. So far, it had been a steep learning curve. But I was figuring it out. And I knew that I liked Doug. That this could be the beginning of something.

I listened to him breathing deeply in bed beside me. This was the first time I'd stayed until morning. In fact, it was the first time since my separation four months ago that I'd shared the intimacy of a full night's sleep with any man. And that felt weightier than sex. And so here I was, at long last watching the sun rise with someone other than Aidan next to me. I waited for the guilt to set in. But instead I was overwhelmed with relief at having made it this far.

Doug and I had met at a firm outing, both on the clubhouse porch avoiding the golf course and reading the same book: Thinking Fast and Slow, which made him appear thoughtful but, I'd worried, might make me appear cold and unemotional—one of Aidan's routine complaints. But Doug had seemed only charmed by the coincidence. In fact, he seemed charmed by everything about me.

I didn't love that Doug was a senior executive for one of our client companies. A new client, and not one I worked with, but rules were rules, and romantic relationships between employees and clients were strongly discouraged, outright verboten without disclosure. But the thought of sharing details of my newly burgeoning sex life with HR was simply too much to bear. So I'd decided to conveniently forget how we'd met and remember that I was a partner—I was allowed to bend rules. It helped that Doug was also violating Darden Pharmaceuticals' policy against fraternizing. Maybe keeping it a secret even made the whole thing a little more exciting for both of us. And we did honor the confidentialities these rules were trying to protect—neither of us talked about our jobs.

I was just so glad to be dating someone I'd met in real life. Online dating had been mostly a disaster for me. Those dates got high marks if I managed to make it through an entire dinner. I found the whole process utterly alienating: "matching" with strangers; the stilted overly intimate messaging with someone you hadn't even met; the padded profiles that verged on outright lies. It had seemed like a necessary transitional endeavor, though—an ugly, awkward wrecking ball to my old life.

But Doug? He was a genuine possibility. He was funny and kind and incredibly smart. Like me, he'd come from nothing and worked ridiculously hard to get where he was. And, it turned out, we had plenty to talk about besides work. His daughter, Ella, was about Cleo's age, and Doug, a widower, struggled to connect with her in so many of the ways I did with Cleo. Ella was a singer, Doug a scientist turned businessperson. "A story of opposites," he'd said somewhat sadly on our first date. "I think it would bother me less if I wasn't trying so hard to bridge the gap." Doug was quirky and charming, too. He was teaching himself to make fresh pasta from YouTube videos and working his way slowly through the American Film Institute's top one hundred movies of all time. It didn't hurt that he was also extremely attractive, with thick salt-and-pepper hair, bright hazel eyes, and an infectious laugh. Not as gorgeous as Aidan, true—few men were—or as tall. But he wasn't nearly as self-centered, either. Doug was also (a little unexpectedly) excellent at sex, gentle in all the important ways and assertive in the right ones.

"You're awake?" he asked sleepily, turning over and wrapping an arm around my hip, his face still buried in the pillows.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Go back to sleep."

"Mmm, okay," he said, hugging me more tightly. "But only if you do." A second later his breathing had deepened again. Doug was sweet—that was what I liked most about him. Sweet and kind. Sometimes you didn't realize how much you needed something until it was offered to you. Turned out I was absolutely desperate for someone to be gentle with me.

I quietly lifted my phone from the floor. There would be work messages. There were always work messages, even at 9:30 a.m. on a Saturday. But no Cleo—of course not. She and I hadn't exchanged so much as a text in three months. Still, I always felt deflated when I scanned my messages and didn't see her name.

I did have twelve texts from my assistant, Jules, passing on messages from clients, none nearly as pressing as they surely thought. My clients, with their kinds of predicaments, were so fueled by embarrassment and frantic for a quick fix that niceties like respecting weekends went right out the window.

I also had a text from my boss, Mark, asking if I could touch base with Vivienne Voxhall. One of my few female clients, Vivienne was the high-profile CEO of UNow, a new social media platform that was setting the world of college students on fire. UNow was designed to upend the Instagram obsession with likes and curated content. It was also designed to make money, a lot of money. Vivienne had run marketing for Spotify and iTunes and Hulu—she was one of the most successful women in the tech world, in part because she was also a coding savant who had street cred with the engineers. But she had an anger-management problem, as well, which most recently had resulted in her threatening to push a middling senior executive's chair "out of a window" if he rocked in it one more time while she was talking. In Vivienne's defense, he was apparently categorically awful to the women who worked for him. Vivienne didn't always have such noble targets for her rage, though. So far, she'd just been lucky enough to keep the stories contained. But now, this executive was threatening to go to the media if he wasn't given a C-suite role at UNow. Impressive chutzpah by any measure. And the timing couldn't be worse, given UNow's impending billion-dollar IPO.

Mark didn't know any of these details, of course. He was the hands-off firm liaison. I was the hands-on fixer. Given Mark's role as managing partner at Blair, Stevenson, it made sense for him to have plausible deniability. And I was to keep even the existence of my role confidential. That this was imperative was clear to me, though it was never stated explicitly. Mark no doubt assumed that I'd told Aidan. Spouses were tacitly exempt from most rules about confidentiality. But notably, it had never occurred to me to trust Aidan in that way, not even ten years ago, when I'd transitioned into the position. Nor had it occurred to me to see that lack of trust as problematic. I was used to secrets.

And so we had a system: Mark would give me the name and phone number of what was usually a high-level employee of an existing corporate client. Mark assured the client—generally the employ er of the wrongdoer employ ee —that I would make the problem go away. I didn't circle back to Mark until the mess was officially cleaned up. What happened in between was my business. But Vivienne wasn't above calling Mark in the middle of the night to get what she wanted when she wanted it. Typical of her to give me only minutes to respond before going over my head.

I spoke to Vivienne late last night, I wrote back to Mark. It's already sorted.

Vivienne was losing it over a voice mail from a New York Times reporter who was sniffing around. I had assured her, less than eight hours ago, that there was no way the Times was going to run a story about Vivienne without officially reaching out to her for a comment. One voice mail wouldn't be enough. The story would be on hold, so long as Vivienne didn't answer the phone. Another problem solved, at least temporarily.

My job could be satisfying that way, even if it meant regularly wading into some fairly murky waters. Were all of these wealthy, entitled people—some of whom had done some pretty unsavory stuff—deserving of a second chance? Probably not. But then, maybe I wasn't, either.

Through the vast, sparkling windows, the Hudson River glowed. Doug's view was spectacular, the apartment an impressive loftlike one-bedroom with polished ash floors. But Doug preferred the family house in Bronxville; the pied-à-terre made him feel lonely. Or it had, he said, until I agreed to stay over last night.

I slipped out of bed and tiptoed toward the bathroom, resisting the urge to put on my clothes first. My self-confidence in that particular arena was a work in progress.

When I came back, Doug was awake but distracted. He was sitting up, feet on the floor, eyes locked on his phone.

"Is everything okay?" I asked.

His eyes remained on his phone as he brought his other hand to the back of his neck and shook his head. "I just got the strangest message …"

"Work?" I asked as I walked around to the opposite side of the bed and grabbed my bra and shirt from where I'd thrown them the night before.

"No, no," he said, looking up at me. "There's some … We used this college counselor for Ella …"

I waited for him to finish his thought, but instead he rubbed his forehead. I came back to his side of the bed, tugging on my clothes as I sat down next to him.

"And you're hearing from him now? Wouldn't that have been, like, three years ago?"

"At least," he said, quickly darkening the screen of his phone when I glanced over at it.

"Is there … Do you want to talk about it?"

"I don't even remember the guy's name … Advantage Consulting was the company." His voice drifted again. "Somebody is demanding money for … well, to keep quiet. About something I did not do."

I put a hand on his back. "Oh, I'm sorry. That sounds … upsetting."

Doug nodded. "Yes, and also … odd. We didn't pay for anything illegal. I mean, the guy hinted at options, sure. You know, ‘We could do more for a price.' But we never took him up on it, obviously." He frowned. "We didn't fire him, either, though. I guess we could have done that. Taken our business elsewhere. That probably would have been the more ethical thing to do."

"The message said they were going to claim you did do something illegal if you don't pay?"

Blackmail—now that was something I knew a thing or two about. I glanced down at his still-darkened phone. I wanted him to show me the message, so I could see for myself what he was dealing with. You could tell a lot by the way demands were phrased.

"Yes, that they'd report it to the police. And they said they'd tell Ella I bribed her way into Amherst, which honestly concerns me a lot more. The police will eventually figure out the truth. But Ella? This will be the perfect excuse for her to be done with me."

I knew that feeling, too. My own phone vibrated in my hand then.

Call me ASAP. Aidan, great.

Aidan loved to cryptically demand my immediate attention on weekend mornings when I might be indisposed. He knew it would work because I'd worry it had to do with Cleo. I was still Cleo's official emergency contact. I'd spent twenty years filling out the camp forms, school forms, doctor's forms, emergency forms for programs and classes and school outings that Aidan barely knew existed. So even now, if Cleo was sick or injured or incapacitated, it was my phone that would ring. But if she had some kind of crisis where she was able to pick up the phone herself? She'd call Aidan, no question. They were far closer. That had been true ever since Cleo was a teenager. But it was especially true since the whole Kyle situation.

"Now you look worried," Doug said, nodding toward my phone.

"I should probably go outside and take this," I said. "It's Aidan."

This time Doug put his hand on my back. "I'm sorry."

Doug got it, all of it. After only three weeks, I felt like he saw me in a way that Aidan never had.

"Can we get together again soon?" I asked as I stood.

Doug smiled. "I'm counting on it."

I dialed Aidan from the sidewalk on West Street, the memory of Doug's hands on me evaporating quickly in the chilly April air.

"Well, hello." Aidan's tone was sharp, the It took you long enough implied. "Sorry to tear you away from … whoever."

He did a convincing job of sounding wounded. Technically, it had been my idea to separate, though Aidan had essentially left me no choice. And Aidan did want to "work on things"—meaning he wanted me to forget what had happened and go back to pretending everything was fine.

But it was definitely my idea to keep our separation a secret from Cleo and to wait to do anything official, like divorce, until after NYU let out for the summer. She'd only recently dug herself out of the academic hole she'd fallen into during her time dating Kyle. I didn't want to be responsible for yet another setback. But it was also true that I knew a divorce, even a separation, would probably be the final nail in my coffin. Abandoning her beloved dad would be all the proof she needed that I was the awful, unfeeling monster she had cast me as during our most recent face-off.

"What's up, Aidan?" Sirens blared around the corner, one of those never-ending parades of fire trucks headed up the West Side Highway. I pressed a finger to my ear.

"It's about Cleo," he said.

"Really?" It was never actually about Cleo. "Tell me."

"Where are you? You sound like you're standing in the middle of the BQE. If this guy has an apartment that close to the highway, I'd get a new boyfriend."

"Aidan, what's the matter with Cleo?"

"Look, I'm handling it," he said.

"Handling what?"

"Don't yell at me."

"I'm not yelling." But he was right: I was kind of yelling. "Don't tell me this is about Kyle."

"Kyle? This has nothing to do with him. I think you made sure of that."

"Luckily."

"Not sure Cleo sees it that way."

Of course she didn't. The mess with Kyle had pushed things between Cleo and me from dicey to outright hostile. I'd threatened not to pay for school unless she broke up with him—her deadbeat drug dealer boyfriend. Her rich deadbeat drug dealer boyfriend. But every time I thought about how aggressive my threat had sounded, how angry and punitive, I felt worse. In my defense, Kyle had gotten Cleo mixed up in dealing drugs. Not using, luckily, just dealing. But still. Kyle, a trust-fund drug dealer, who was probably only doing it in the first place to piss off his rich parents.

Cleo had mentioned casually to Aidan that Kyle was doing "a little dealing" on campus. To Aidan's credit, he'd told me right away. At which point, I'd muscled my way to the bottom of the situation. And I did what I do best: I made the problem go away.

First by forcing Cleo to break it off. Then by going directly to Kyle to drive my point home. Neither Cleo nor Aidan knew about that second piece, of course; nice corporate law partners don't show up with cops, making illegal threats. And the threats I'd made to Cleo herself had given her more than enough reason to stop speaking to me. Still, I'd do it all again if I had to.

"Anyway, it's not Kyle," Aidan went on. "Cleo asked to borrow money."

"Money?"

"She is a college kid, remember? Being a little over budget isn't like a shocking turn of events." But I could tell he was holding out on me. There was the tiniest hint of concern in his voice.

"I don't understand. How much money?"

"Well … you need to stay calm."

"I am calm, Aidan," I said, biting down hard on the inside of my cheek.

"Two thousand dollars."

"Two thousand dollars?" I was officially shouting. "What could possibly require that kind of money? Kyle is involved, obviously."

"That's not obvious at all. Cleo told us she broke that off, and I happen to believe our daughter. Once in a blue moon, you could actually give someone the benefit of the doubt, Kat." Aidan's tone was thick with self-righteousness. "That's always been your problem—you assume the worst about people."

That wasn't even necessarily untrue, but I wasn't the focus of this conversation. "Please tell me you asked Cleo what the money was for."

"No."

"Not even ‘Hey, what's the two grand for, considering you used to be a drug runner and all?'"

"I don't believe in shaming people for their mistakes, Kat. I don't think that's love."

Aidan had a terrible way of nailing things even when he was completely in the wrong.

"I'm concerned, Aidan," I said, keeping my tone calm. "I really think this could have to do with Kyle."

"So what if it even does! You can't control everything, Kat—the makeup, the clothes, who she's dating. Fine, maybe she's even making another mistake. She's in college, and that's what college kids do! Anyway, look at where strong-arming her has gotten you. Cleo is a human being. She has feelings."

Aidan's aim was impeccable.

"Yes," I said, gritting my teeth. "I am aware our daughter has feelings. Please go back and tell her you have to know what she needs the money for. Ask her about Kyle specifically. I'm sure she'll tell you the truth, Aidan. She trusts you." Flattery—I knew Aidan's soft spots, too.

He was quiet for a long beat. "Okay … I can do that," he said at last. "But first there is something else I need to talk to you about … not related to Cleo."

"And what's that?"

"Financially … I've, um, run into something of a cash-flow issue with the film."

Now it was my turn to be quiet. Aidan would help with Cleo … if I gave him a loan? He hadn't said that explicitly, of course. He didn't need to.

"Hello? Kat, are you there?" Aidan asked. "I mean, I don't think I'm being unreasonable asking for a favor, considering we were married for nearly twenty-two years. And considering you're the one insisting on breaking up our family. I'm just trying to survive."

"Right," I said quietly.

"Well, are you going to answer me? This is serious."

I cleared my throat. No, he wasn't going to get me to do what he wanted by making me feel like I was a bad person, not anymore. "Yes, Aidan," I said. "I'll answer you about the money for your film. As soon as you find out what the hell is going on with our daughter."