When I look up, my four best friends in the world are staring at me.

“What on your phone could possibly make you smile that big?” Isabel teases. “Can’t go one dinner without texting your husband?”

“Fiancé,” Andie corrects, and I make the mistake of meeting her gaze. She doesn’t finish the thought out loud, but I can hear the rest inside her head, behind the hardness in her eyes:

He’s not your husband yet.

Chapter Fourteen

Burke Michaels’s Diary

DECEMBER 20, 2018

Dear Dr. K,

Merry Christmas, doc. I know it’s been a minute since my last entry—sorry about that. But I’ve been busy. I’m jolly as an elf this year, and I’ll tell you why. That plan of mine? It’s working.

Skye Starling is sweet and beautiful and not a hard girl to pretend to love. She’s more or less perfect, actually, aside from her peculiar OCD compulsions.

As planned, two months ago I told Heather that with Oliver’s help I’d gotten a tempting job offer in Dubai. I explained it was an eighteen-month contract for a position that, after a two-month training period, would pay six times what I could ever expect to make in the United States, given my unfortunate record.

I’d known Heather would be floored by the prospect of us living on different continents, but I wasn’t surprised when her eyes filled with tears and she told me to take the job. She agreed it was the right financial decision for our family, and that some space might not be the worst thing for our marriage. I promised to come back every few months to see her and the kids.

So off I went to Dubai—aka Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I found a decent sublet near Prospect Park for just $750 a month. It was the cheapest place I could find that was not an actual dump; I figured if Skye ever decided she wanted to see my place in Brooklyn, I couldn’t be found living in squalor. My roommate is a guy named Ethan in his mid-thirties who does Big Law in midtown and is almost never home.

But I only have ten more days in Crown Heights, Dr. K, because the plan is right on schedule. On January 3, the day after Skye and I get back from spending New Year’s with her family in Palm Beach, I move into Skye’s spacious one-bedroom in the West Village. It wasn’t hard to convince her; in fact, no convincing was needed. Earlier this month, I simply suggested we move in together. I told her that even though we’d only known each other three months, I’d never been so sure of anything in my life. I told her I was in love with her.

Skye’s cinnamon-brown eyes had grown shiny and round, and color flushed her cheeks as she nodded fervently and buried her face in my neck. I love you, too, she’d whispered against my chest. I knew she’d fallen as fast as I pretended to.

Skye owns her apartment—it belonged to her grandparents before they gifted it to her—so I won’t have to put a penny toward rent. It’ll be ours, Skye said to me the other day. Ours for the life we’re building together.

It’s not that there’s no part of me that feels guilty, Dr. K. I’m not a psychopath. I just know that, in the long run, Skye will be fine. She’ll get past this unfortunate chapter. It might take a little while, but she’ll eventually meet someone else who’ll make her deliriously happy, and they’ll have lots of little towheaded babies and all the money they could ever want. In the long run, my payout won’t make a dent in Skye’s family fortune. Would it be easier if we bypassed all the emotional destruction and I told Skye exactly what I needed and she cut me a check, no strings attached? Of course. But that’s not the way the world works, Dr. K.

My point is, Skye will still live happily ever after. But Heather and me? Without this plan, we don’t stand a chance. We won’t be able to afford Maggie’s college tuition when the time comes, and Hopie will spend the rest of her life wearing dental flippers. I’ll have to get a job at Target, and we’ll be forced to sell the house, and I’ll wake up every morning next to a wife who feels nothing but disappointment and lost hope when she looks at me, until one day we’re both dead. People always say money doesn’t buy happiness, but that’s bullshit and you know it, Dr. K. If it didn’t, you’d take insurance.

What money can’t buy is love—that’s indisputable. I didn’t choose to love Heather, and she’ll be the first to tell you that she didn’t choose to love me. After we got back together the summer before senior year, I asked her all the time why she gave me a second chance. Our love seemed like a miracle, especially after the agony of being apart. But Heather would never answer. She’d always say that she couldn’t explain why she loved me, that it wasn’t something she could spell out, that it just was.

All I know is that it still just is, Dr. K. That I would do anything to give my wife what she needs to be happy. That my own happiness depends upon hers.

There was a time when Heather and I were building a life together, too. We’d finally clawed our way out of Langs Valley, out from under the crushing weight of the lives into which we’d been born, which promised us nothing. We moved to New York, just as Heather had always dreamed. I knew that if I stuck with her, I’d be all right. I would’ve followed her anywhere.

We worked hard in New York, earning our future. But then I fucked it all up, Dr. K. I made a mistake. After everything we’d done to beat the odds stacked against us from the start, I made one mistake. People like Skye Starling—people who are born with the odds in their favor—they can make as many mistakes as they want and never pay for a single one.

Still, I take responsibility for what happened to my marriage, that’s what I’m trying to say. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that if you can find a way to make things right, you do it. And if screwing over a desperate, privileged girl is the price, so be it.

Chapter Fifteen

Heather

APRIL 1990

A week after Easter, Libby made me a serious offer.

It was a mild April evening, and Libby and I had put the kids to bed and were sitting on her back patio drinking wine. The groundhog hadn’t seen its shadow that year, and sure enough, spring had come early after a particularly tumultuous winter.

“I’ve been thinking about something, Heath.” Libby placed her glass down and pulled her knees into her chest. She tucked her chin into the crook between them, which made her look so much younger. “I want to take Gus when you leave for school next year.”

“I can’t ask you to do that,” I replied automatically.

“I don’t mean take him, like, permanently take him. But I want to give him a home while you’re away so you can fully immerse yourself in school. He can come live with us in Connecticut. We’re in one of the top school districts in the state, and he’ll just be starting first grade. And in full transparency, we have more than the means to support him. There’s a good deal of money on my father’s side of the family—the Fontaine side—which I’ve inherited. I don’t mean to sound tacky, I just want to assure you it wouldn’t be a burden on us financially, or in any way, for that matter. And you’d still see him all the time, we’d make sure of it. I’ve thought this through, Heather. And you didn’t ask. I offered.”

“Oh, Libby.” I watched the smile blooming on her pearly, moonlit face. Finally, the mystery of the family’s seemingly limitless wealth had been revealed to me. I momentarily let myself imagine how incredible, how liberating, it would be if some huge amount of money out there had my name on it, that I could claim by simply being born who I was. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Just say yes, Heather. You know Gus is like a son to me. And we can’t let him stay here with your fath—” Libby paused. “You know what I mean.”

“No way am I leaving him here with my dad.” I nodded. “I figured … I guess I figured I would take him with me. But if you’re—”

“I’m sure, Heather.”

“Peter, too?”

“Peter, too.” She grinned. “And I know it’s not for over another year, but I figured—with college on your mind in a real way these days—it was probably something you’d been worrying about. Or something you’d start worrying about soon. So I wanted to put it out there.”

“I mean, on one hand I can’t imagine living day to day without Gus.” I sipped my wine. “For the last five years, he’s basically been my child.”

“I know.” Libby nodded. “And he always will be, in a way. You raised him.”

“But I also know that I could never turn down your offer to give him the life he deserves.”

“And the life you deserve, Heather.”

“And then, after I graduate—”

“You’ll get a great job, Gus will be … let me think … ten. And he can go back to living with you, if that’s what you want. We can figure it out when the time comes. I guess we’ll have to see what’s on the horizon with your career.”