My head was spinning. We’d still never talked about why Burke was sober.

“Drugs, mainly,” he continued, reading my mind. “It was a while ago. I lost both my parents in a plane crash when I was a teenager, which made it worse. Drinking was a catalyst for the harder stuff, so I quit everything. But it’s under control now. Has been for a while. I’m grateful for that. But I get it, Skye.” His eyes—a shock of blue, but gentle—landed on mine. “Childhood loss leaves its mark. For me, it was addiction; for you, it’s an OCD compulsion, but whatever it is—it’s a force that swallows you whole. And that feeling of powerlessness—that you’re a puppet and somebody else has got the strings—it never fully leaves you.”

I nodded, tears pressing behind my eyes at Burke’s precise articulation of my experience, a mirror image of his own pain. A degree of empathy I’d never known.

I squeezed his hand. “I’m so sorry. Thank you for telling me. And I’m so sorry about your parents. Do you … want to talk about it?”

“Let’s save it for another night.” Burke smiled sadly. “I’ll tell you about it soon.”

I nodded. “If you’re at all uncomfortable when I drink around you, I’d like you to tell me. I should’ve said that earlier.”

“I would have told you if I was.”

I could feel the thing between us getting bigger, growing more real, filling up like a hot-air balloon.

“And I don’t want you to be ashamed of any part of yourself, Skye. I think you’re the most incredible woman I’ve ever met. I know it’s only been a few weeks, and this is going to sound crazy, but…” He exhaled. “I think I’m falling for you, Skye Starling.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but my heart clogged my throat. Tears burned behind my eyes.

That was the day—not even six months ago—that my life changed.

Chapter Eleven

Burke Michaels’s Diary

OCTOBER 7, 2018

Dear Dr. K,

Now I know. I couldn’t wrap my head around it before, how a gorgeous, smart, rich girl like Skye Starling could be so availably single. I know enough from observing Heather’s lifelong fixation on women like Skye to know that women like Skye aren’t single at twenty-nine-going-on-thirty if they can help it.

Anyway, I finally found out what was up on Friday night. Skye told me everything.

At first, I was a bit surprised at the revelation, after the way she sat me down, looked at me with huge doe eyes, and told me she had something serious to confess. I thought she was going to say she had a boyfriend, or that she’d found out I wasn’t actually an independent financial consultant who lived in Brooklyn. Or worse, that she’d discovered I was married.

But instead she told me about her OCD, which to me, at first, didn’t seem like that big of a deal. I’d always assumed a lot of people had OCD, including my mother. She left when I was young, but I still remember the methodical way she used to arrange all the food in the fridge and cabinets, with the labels facing forward, and the way the one bathroom in our tiny house always smelled like bleach.

But Skye isn’t a neat freak. She’s clean, but she’s not a stickler about it the way my mother was. Skye’s pantry isn’t organized, and there’s always at least a dirty spoon in the sink.

The kind of OCD Skye’s got is different. As she explained to me, there are obsessions and then there are compulsions, and she suffers from the latter. Her compulsions are—as she’s worked out with her psychiatrist in recent years—a result of the obsessive thoughts that began when her mother died eighteen years ago.

You’re a therapist, and I’d be curious to know if you had a case like this before. The way her voice got all strangled when she told me. It sounds like she’s had a rough time with this, Dr. K. It sounds like it’s been quite the hurdle in her love life. It sounds as though Skye Starling has routinely fallen for a certain breed of male—the college laxer turned I-banker from a “good” family whose surname (God forbid) doesn’t end in a vowel, whose douche factor is simply too high to allow him to view a medical disorder like Skye’s as anything other than an unnecessary complication and secondhand embarrassment.

I know this because I know these guys, Dr. K. They’re the pricks I worked with at Credit Suisse—the Doug Kemps of the world. They’re one-dimensional, selfish fools with pretty-boy faces and a lack of depth that somehow magnetizes girls like Skye who don’t know any better. And why don’t girls like Skye know any better? Is it a fragile, deep-seated insecurity? Is it daddy issues? I don’t know, but today it’s finally working to my advantage.

Here is what I also know in this moment: my last name ends in a consonant and I am a good-looking Anglo-Saxon, and that’s a great fucking start. The rest will be easy enough to improvise. I’ve already admitted to her that I was once a drug addict, but I’m confident that Skye, of all people, understands addiction as a disease. My family situation is less than ideal, and it’s probably better not to share that I grew up below the poverty line in Langs Valley, New York, raised by my grandmother while her Alzheimer’s steadily advanced. Better to say I’m an only child from—Phoenix?—whose parents both died in a plane crash when I was a teenager. Dramatic, yes, but again, at least my last name ends in a consonant.

I know that I’m starting to sound like a con artist, Dr. K; I know if you could, you would tell me to press pause on all this. But Skye’s pharmaceutical fortune, that’s not something I can just unlearn. When you’re a middle-aged man without a job and you have five thousand dollars in your savings account and you owe half of that to Eastern Connecticut State University for your daughter’s first semester of senior year and two of your three credit cards are maxed out and your hot-water heater is broken and said daughter has no top teeth and you meet someone who spends a fifth of the amount in your savings on a single dinner, you just can’t ignore that kind of information. And if you come up with a legal way to obtain a slice of said person’s fortune—kind of like that couple from Michigan who hacked the lottery—then I think you go for it, Dr. K. You realize that you’ve got nothing much to lose and everything to gain, and you just fucking go for it.

Yesterday morning, Saturday, Skye and I slept in till half past ten; it was the first morning I didn’t set my alarm for the crack of dawn in order to rush back home. I knew Heather planned to do an Uber shift anyway, and I told her Oliver had invited me to play golf at his club on Long Island.

After Skye and I had some lazy sex and lounged in bed, both of our stomachs were making grumbling noises, and Skye suggested we go out for brunch. Leaving the apartment that morning was the first time I saw her OCD for myself. I watched her knock on the door sixteen times in her systematic order—two counts of eight—before pushing it open. It was a tad bizarre, sure, but I didn’t think it was a big deal, not really, especially not with what I stood to gain from this girl. Her face was pinched in discomfort as she turned to watch me follow, and I felt sorry for her, for having to endure all that shame. Skye probably isn’t crazier than anyone else in this madhouse of a world, and she’s too crippled by her own insecurity to realize that. But that’s my opportunity, Dr. K, not my fault. If I can pull off the plan that’s been hatching in my head since Le Bernardin, Heather and I will never have to worry about money again. More than that, we’ll finally be able to live the life that should’ve been ours all along.

So here it is, Dr. K. I’m going to lay it out bare for you, because frankly I need to get it off my chest. And I need to make sure there aren’t any holes.

I am going to marry Skye Starling. There’s no doubt in my mind that she wants a husband, that she yearns to be loved in a way she never has been before. I can give her that—I can work with these vulnerabilities and be who she needs me to be. I can give her a whirlwind romance and a diamond ring and the promise of a future. We’ll date for a few months, and then I’ll propose. We’ll be married in less than a year. Technically it’s bigamy, but Skye will never find out about Heather, and vice versa.

I’m not on any form of social media—not even LinkedIn—so I’m safe in that domain. Nonetheless, I’ll be sure to do a thorough sweep of my online presence and make sure Skye or her friends can never find anything about the real Burke Michaels.