I feel like I’m on the verge of a panic attack, and writing in this journal is my only release. I’m back in New Haven for the weekend, cooped up in the office while everyone is downstairs hanging out—Heather and Maggie are making that chili I love for dinner. I told them I needed to answer some work emails. The kids are so happy to see me and have so many questions about Dubai that it makes me physically ill, and I don’t know how I can continue on this way. Even Todd has been reaching out, asking how Dubai is. I hate lying to everybody. I hate it so much.

What I do know is that I have to propose to Skye, and I have to get our joint bank account opened so that I can start transferring some money to Heather. All of this has to happen soon because we are in serious, serious debt. Not to mention if I don’t come up with the money, Hope will have to drop out of college. But I will get the money—I asked Peter for Skye’s hand a couple of weeks ago, and he said yes. So now I just need to get the ring from Heather, and then I can propose. I know I’m not actually going to go through with marrying Skye—that’s not part of the plan—but it doesn’t make this any easier, or any less evil. I just wish there was a way to—

That’s where the journal ends, the sentence of the last entry unfinished. That was the moment Heather and Maggie walked into the office and I slid the Moleskine behind the desk, so they wouldn’t see.

Sleep isn’t possible, that much I know. I go downstairs and wait for Heather in the kitchen, anger building inside me like a wave. I’ll wait all night if I have to. An open bottle of Malbec sits on the counter, and it takes every fiber of self-control in my body to keep from chugging the entire thing.

Instead, I find a pad of paper and a pen and I start writing a letter to Skye. I must crumple up a dozen different versions.

I’m in the middle of a new draft when the wheels of Heather’s car finally crunch over the driveway. I imagine her turning off the ignition, slumping over the steering wheel for a moment to prepare for our interaction before she comes inside.

It’s two A.M., but she knows that I’m wide awake, waiting for her.

Chapter Forty

Heather

Dear Dr. K,

It hit me in waves, as I nursed Hope and waited for Burke to get out of prison, that our life would never again be the same.

He was released in March, a few months early, one year after his sentence. Our lease was up at the end of the month, and no way could we afford to renew. I’d gotten by on our savings while Burke was away, but with our pricey Gramercy rent and two babies to care for, the balance had notably dwindled. I watched tears glaze my husband’s eyes when he checked our bank account for the first time since being home.

We moved to a cheap two-bedroom in Astoria. I lied to my friends in our Gramercy building as we packed up the apartment, explaining that we were moving to a house in the suburbs with a backyard and a pool. I couldn’t bring myself to admit that we were downsizing to a small walk-up in Queens without a dishwasher.

I felt gutted during our first few days in Astoria, as though someone had died. I missed the shiny marble floors of our old lobby, the cheerful greeting from the doorman, and the sleek, speedy elevator. Garrett’s new room doubled as Burke’s office, which Burke used to hit the ground running on his job search. He was angry, and devastated, and motivated like I’d never seen him before.

The harsh winter melted into a forgiving spring, but Burke was still jobless. By the time summer rolled around he was becoming more and more discouraged. He’d sought out every position in finance under the sun—he applied to big banks, small banks, hedge funds, insurance agencies, accounting firms, you name it. Search agencies wouldn’t work with him once they learned of his background. A felon who’d done time for insider training was the last person welcome on Wall Street—or anywhere else.

Despite our increasingly thrifty lifestyle, by the end of the summer we were running out of money. Burke took a job busing tables at a Thai restaurant in our neighborhood. They paid minimum wage and ignored that Burke had checked the felony box on his application.

Burke did hustle, I’ll give him that. Whenever he wasn’t working at the restaurant, he was home at his desk applying for jobs, or out networking. He met with a couple of his old professors from NYU for guidance, and even one ex-colleague from Credit Suisse agreed to give him advice. Burke would come back from these meetings buoyed, a bright splash of hope on his face.

I, on the other hand, was sinking deeper into a pit of misery. I found myself wishing Burke had never gotten into the Credit Suisse analyst program in the first place. I wished he hadn’t transferred from CUNY to NYU. I wished he’d never found the drive to keep his transcript perfect. Because now, having had a sweet taste of the life we could’ve had, I knew I would never be satisfied by anything less.

I didn’t consider leaving him, not actually. I could have left, and I might have if it hadn’t been for Garrett and Hope. I was still young, and the way men’s eyes lingered on me in coffee shops and elevators told me that, even after two babies, I was still desirable. I’d accumulated a lavish enough wardrobe over my years in Manhattan to make myself appear as though I’d belonged. These were clothes I refused to sell, and Burke didn’t know enough about fashion to suspect that they were valuable. My point is, I could’ve found another man to love me, a man with the money and upward mobility that Burke had proven to lack.

But I’d meant the promise I’d made to myself, and to Burke, when I first found out I was pregnant with Garrett. We swore that we’d give our children everything our parents had never given us, all of the advantages we’d never had. And first on that list was a mother and a father who loved each other, who stayed together for better or for worse, whose marriage was the rock that weathered all storms. I refused to put my babies through the agony of growing up in a broken family.

Besides, I still loved Burke. Even though part of me hated him for his selfish stupidity, even though sometimes I wanted to wring his neck for the position he’d put us in, I knew I would always be in love with Burke Michaels. I found strength in that. I found power in knowing that our marriage was stronger than Libby and Peter Starling’s had been, and that because of this our children were going to be better off than Nate and Skye. To me, that counted for a whole lot.

That winter, nearly a year after Burke had been out of prison, he got a call from his old colleague Eric from Credit Suisse. Eric told Burke that Eric had a cousin who owned a small wealth management firm in New Haven called PK Adamson that was looking for someone to do data entry. Eric had vouched for Burke—unlike most people at the bank, he recognized Doug Kemp for the scheming scum that he was—and PK Adamson agreed to bring Burke in for an interview.

A week later Burke took the train out to New Haven for the interview, and Eric’s cousin offered him the job on the spot. The cousin said he was impressed with his background at Credit Suisse, and that he was willing to overlook his criminal history because he owed Eric a solid. The starting salary was $25,000 a year.

I couldn’t understand why Burke was so thrilled to accept a position that would be paying him a tiny fraction of what he’d been making before. He reasoned that it was an opportunity to get his foot in the door at a decent wealth management firm, that it could be a stepping-stone on the path toward becoming a financial adviser. He’d likely never make what he would’ve in investment banking, but he squeezed my hand and told me that perhaps a lucrative career in finance was still in the cards for him after all.

What neither of us admitted was the undeniable truth that this was our only option. Clearly no one else was going to hire Burke, and his gig busing tables at Bangkok Garden wasn’t sustainable—we had two young children, and we needed health insurance.

I wasn’t sad to pack up and leave Astoria; with two very mobile kids we were quickly outgrowing our nine-hundred-square-foot dump of an apartment. Besides, our downgraded life in New York nagged at me like a chronic ache, our proximity to Manhattan a constant, searing reminder of what we no longer were, of the promising future we’d lost.

When I used to imagine moving to the suburbs of Connecticut one day, I certainly hadn’t pictured New Haven. Libby used to say that Fairfield County was the only decent place to live in the state.