“Fine, you psycho,” I croaked, unable to look at Max. “If this is what you want, you’re sick.”

I lifted my fist in front of the door and began to knock. I felt three pairs of eyes glued to me. I heard the snickering, but I forced myself to keep going. I thought of my mother. Lucky eight. The breath. One two three four five six seven eight; eight seven six five four—

An arm grabbed my middle so forcefully I cried out.

“Shhhh,” Chase whispered, throwing me down on the bed. When I continued to scream, Wiley clamped his hand over my mouth.

“LaPointe says that if your knocking thing gets interrupted, you have to start all over again,” Chase continued. “Is that right?” He smiled vindictively, tracing his fingertips up the length of my thigh toward my bathing suit. My scream muffled into Wiley’s hand as Chase pressed his fingers inside me, just as Max had done moments before.

“Okay, okay, all done.” Chase stood. “Now you can go.”

Wiley removed his hand from my mouth. I was trembling, too afraid to make a sound.

“You can go now,” Chase repeated, nodding toward the door.

“What do you want from me?” I whispered, my eyes brimming with fresh tears.

Max took a long pull of whiskey, then handed the bottle to Wiley. “We just want you to go, Starling. It’s time for you to leave.” Max’s eyes looked plastic.

When I first got diagnosed with OCD, my father used to worry that if I ever got stuck in a fire, my compulsion would prevent me from escaping. I’d told him not to be concerned, that self-preservation would most certainly override my OCD in a life-or-death scenario. But in that moment, in that shitty share-house bedroom with Max and his cohorts, I knew my father had been right to worry. Here I was getting sexually assaulted, powerless against my own deluded mind. Max and his friends could rape me—even kill me—and I’d remain helpless.

The boys watched me do my knocks again; this time Wiley grabbed me before I could finish counting down from eight. They pinned me against the bed, Chase covering my mouth with one hand as Wiley stuck his fingers inside me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Max take another swig of whiskey, watching us.

Finally they were off me, and Max handed Chase the bottle, which was nearly empty.

“We’re sorry, Starling, we really are,” Max slurred. “I told them what a special girl you were, and they didn’t believe me. I told them you had the tightest pussy in the world, and they didn’t believe that, either. I had to let them see for themselves.” Max shrugged and stumbled out of the room, Chase and Wiley cackling in his wake.

I can count on one hand the number of people who know what happened that evening. I’d told Andie, sobbing uncontrollably in an Uber on the way back to the city later that night. I told Dr. Salam when I started seeing her several months later. Lexy, Isabel, and Kendall know abbreviated versions of what happened, but I never told them the full story. I was simply too humiliated.

Afterward, Andie couldn’t let it go. I don’t blame her, I suppose, as she’d seen my pain firsthand, the way the trauma consumed me in the weeks and months that followed. Andie was the one who called NYU and reported the incident that fall. The administration investigated, and two other girls from Stern came forward with official complaints of Max’s sexual aggression. He was expelled from Stern in January, four months before he was slated to graduate. The details were never made public, but Max knew what Andie and I had done. I knew he despised me, possibly as much as I despised him.

Five years later, when I hadn’t spoken about the incident to anyone in longer than I could remember, I told Burke. The thing that I shared with no one else, I shared with him. Something soft and safe was in his eyes, something that told me he’d take my darkest secret and bear some of its weight. And he did. And after that, my load was a little lighter.

And my load is still lighter, I think to myself as the taxi pulls to a stop on West Eleventh. I pay the cabbie and head up to my apartment.

I have two missed calls from Andie and one from Lexy, so I text our group chat and apologize for Irish-exiting. I tell them I just needed to go home.

I nestle underneath my covers still thinking about Burke, about the words I love you on the Post-it note I can’t shake from my mind. I think about how even though Burke and I are no more, even though what we had was nothing, my load is still lighter because of him. And that is something.

My phone vibrates on the bedside table. A new email from [email protected] A cold shiver runs through me.

A word to the wise, Starling—don’t forget what I said about consequences.

For the first time since he contacted me last spring, I let myself think long and hard about what Max LaPointe might actually want from me.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Burke

OCTOBER 2019—TWO DAYS WITHOUT SKYE

I am on the floor of our home office, the scratchy fibers of the wall-to-wall carpet digging into my ankles. A dull pain numbs my knees, but I can’t get up. I can’t stop reading the old entries of my Moleskine, barely able to wrap my mind around how much has changed in just a little over a year.

June 2, 2018

I have to say, there’s something about writing in a journal that helps. When our couples therapist recommended it a few months ago, I privately cast it off as something I would never do. But since getting fired (well, “let go”) from PKA, and with all this internal debate about moving forward with the Big Plan, my head feels like it’s on the verge of detonating, and letting my thoughts bleed on a blank page seems to provide at least some relief. At least it did last time. So here we go again.

To be clear, we’re no longer seeing said therapist. He charged three hundred dollars per hour-long session, none of which was covered by insurance, so after losing my job I quickly called and canceled our upcoming appointment. We are not going to reschedule.

Heather is pissy about this—she loved couples therapy and claims it was saving our marriage. Which is weird, because she has always been patently against therapy; thinks it’s woo-woo shit for weak people. Besides, I know Heather, and I know she thinks that MONEY is the thing that will save our marriage. She isn’t wrong.

I wish that weren’t true. I wish I were the kind of man who believes that love trumps all, that the power of love will hold us together even in the darkest days. But I’m not, at least not anymore. I’ve witnessed enough in my forty-five years on this planet to know that unfortunately love isn’t enough, not even close.

What I do still believe in these days is family—it’s something Heather and I both believed in from the start, and I’m proud of us for that. Neither of us grew up with real families of our own—it’s part of the reason we became each other’s.

I hardly knew my father; my parents were high school sweethearts who divorced when I was still in diapers, and my dad ended up in prison a couple years after that. My mom ran off to California with some guy when I was eight and never came back, so my grandma—my dad’s mom—raised me. Grams was the closest thing I ever had to a parent, even as her Alzheimer’s grew worse and worse. She died the year I started college in New York. She didn’t have much memory left by that point, but I like to think she knew I’d left Langs Valley. It would’ve made her happy to know I’d gotten out of there.

So Heather and I chose our own family—we chose each other. And after Garrett was born, we promised to keep choosing each other, and our son, and any future children we brought into the world. We knew all too well what a broken home looked like, and Heather said she’d die before she raised her kids in one. She was committed to giving Garrett, Hope, and Maggie everything her own childhood had lacked—stable, loving parents in a solid marriage was at the top of the list. Education was a close second.

Even when it felt impossible, I’d always admired Heather’s approach to raising our children. Our marriage became my religion. It’s where I’ve laid myself bare—whole and splintered. My unconditional love for the kids has never been a choice, but my union with Heather is—it has always been. The key is to keep choosing it, to stick with it like a kind of blind faith. And when you have a deep enough faith in something, it becomes a miracle. That’s what Heather taught me. That’s what she’s given me.