“You should see your brother now,” Nan bragged to Ivy on the phone. “He was born to work. He goes to bed right after he gets home and sets his own alarm. He bought an ironing board to iron his suits every night. And he’s finally making friends. They want to take a trip together to Mexico. He’s never been invited on a trip before. Baba’s worried that Mexico’s too dangerous. What do you think?”

Ivy wondered how her parents could afford all these additional expenses. Over Christmas, Nan had mailed her the money for the wedding, made out in four separate checks, with specific instructions for Ivy to cash them a month apart so “the banks won’t be suspicious.” Suspicious of what, Ivy did not care to ask. Long gone were the days when she had access to her mother’s checkbook—the Lins were probably cutting back in other ways—and so she repressed her conscience and said, “Austin will be fine in Mexico… I’m glad he’s adjusting.” Indeed, her brother returned her calls now and seemed to be in a state of giddiness every time they talked about his new job. He said he fetched coffee, conducted market research, wrote up long, twenty-page reports; everyone praised him for his great attitude. “My manager, Allen, says if I keep doing well, maybe after I graduate, they’ll offer me a full-time position.” Ivy told him not to expect anything. She was afraid for him, afraid of his fragile hope.

Perhaps she was unfit in giving this advice as she’d just taken the LSAT and bombed it so badly she’d deleted the email announcing her score from her inbox, then deleted it again from her trash folder. When Gideon asked about her results, she told him she wasn’t happy with her score—he had the delicacy not to ask the precise number—and that she was going to retake it in September. He pulled her into his arms. “I’m proud of you for not giving up,” he said.

That evening, they went for drinks at Dresdan’s. Ivy didn’t want the evening to become a pity party, so she wore her favorite dark brown taffeta dress with ball-gown sleeves and a black velvet choker that had a little bell attached to it, like a cat’s collar, and whenever she turned her head, the bell went da-ding da-ding and it was the sound of merry church bells. Ivy downed one cocktail after another while Gideon nursed a beer, laughing, telling her to slow down. His voice seemed deeper than usual, this abstract beautiful man in a white button-down, rolled up at the cuffs, the gleaming face of his watch emitting a rainbow onto the wall of liquor bottles behind the bar. All evening, he kept saying, “Are you happy? Are you happy?” and she’d say, “Of course. I have you.”

She told Roux about bombing the LSAT as well. His reaction was, expectedly, entirely different from Gideon’s.

“Of course you flunked. You’d make a terrible lawyer.”

“Why?”

“You have no deductive reasoning skills. You act on your whims and passions. You’re easily intimidated by others, and you’re swayed completely by outward appearances. I never understood why you even wanted to go to law school. I mean, you were probably a mediocre teacher but you’d be an even worse lawyer. Trust me, I’ve met a whole bunch of them in my life and they all see the world as one big booby trap. You couldn’t see a freight train coming until it ran into your face.”

Normally, Ivy would have been seething at Roux’s poor assessment of her character, but it was such a relief to finally talk to someone about Dave and Liana Finley and Gideon’s other ambitious friends who looked down on her lack of achievements, and how was she ever going to score high enough to get into a good school?

“Dave Finley?” said Roux, pulling her legs onto his lap and massaging her calves. “The VC guy?”

“You know him?”

“I’ve seen him at some art auctions.”

Ivy rolled her eyes and smeared some caviar onto a bagel chip. Roux loved to hint once in a while of his comings and goings amongst the one percent, to remind her of his new social status. Gideon never name-dropped. Gideon was allergic to all forms of self-promotion. The private clubs, the yacht, the shabby-chic beach house, the Celtics season tickets—all this was a result of Gideon’s natural tastes, tastes that had been refined and handed down through generations of education, unlike Roux, who liked to know how much everything cost, how many copies had been printed, how many people were on the waitlist before he made a purchase.

“Look,” said Roux, handing her a napkin. “What did you want to be when you were little?”

What had she wanted to be? “I don’t know.” The only thing she could remember wanting to be was popular. And to get away from her parents.

“How’d you get into teaching?”

“Oh, same as anything else. It came my way and I thought it would be an easy job until I figured things out.”

Roux looked at her shrewdly. “Why don’t you just do what all women used to do for a living—cook, clean, look after the kids. No woman I’ve ever met has complained about having a husband as breadwinner.”

“The women you know,” said Ivy coldly, “are probably too dumb to do anything else. Thankfully, I have more enlightened friends.”

“And here I thought you were a resourceful woman. If it’s money you need…”

“Are you offering to be my patron?”

“It’s one solution.”

“Not the kind I want.” She reached for an olive, popped it in her mouth, then spit it into her napkin. Too briny.

Roux pushed her legs off his lap. “You know what your problem is? You’ve never really worked hard at anything. You’ve gotten by on lies and cleverness. You think you’ve had a hard childhood, but you’ve always been privileged…”

Ivy turned on the television.

For weeks now, he’d been like this, hot, cold, tender one moment, angry the next. He’d always been moody, but the swings felt even more extreme than usual. It tried Ivy’s patience. More and more, he expressed his unhappiness when she refused to spend the night; he insisted on taking her for drives in one of his fancy cars, which he kept covered in Astor Towers’s private garage, and though Ivy always turned him down, afraid she might run into someone she knew, now Roux’s face would sour after her refusals and he’d remain cranky until she soothed him in other ways, most of the time through sex. He also had a new habit of proposing exotic getaways. He complained about being overworked—running errands for Baldy (the nickname Ivy had given Baldassare Moretti) had him frequently flying out of town—and he wanted to take Ivy to Cuba, to Tuscany, to Marrakesh, where his friend Andre Pascal lived and had invited him to spend a week at his family’s villa. Roux pulled up photos of Marrakesh right then and there on his laptop. Ivy obligingly cooed over the photos of blue umbrellas under a hazy sand-blown sky, crumbling orange-red villas the color of a ripe mango, mosques with stained-glass windows inside which olive-skinned men knelt, praying over braided rugs. She was practically there, she said, she could smell the fig and date trees bending over the garden walls.

“I’ll book tickets right now,” said Roux.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I have to study, Roux. I just bombed my LSAT, remember?”

“It’s just a week.”

“I said no.”

His grasp tightened on her wrist. “How long are you going to make me wait?”

She slapped his hand. “I’ll make you wait as long as I want.”

All of this theatrical martyrdom, Ivy only took for the flashing of feathers of a man exuding his dominance on any woman, something she could safely laugh off, instead of seeing it for what it was: a desperate man running out of patience, waiting for a prize he believed he’d duly paid for and belonged to him.

* * *

IN THE BEGINNING of March, one of the startups in Dave Finley’s portfolio announced their impending IPO at a market value of a billion dollars. To celebrate, Dave rented the penthouse suite at the Gonford and invited everyone in Boston, it seemed, to the extravaganza. The email he’d sent Gideon was literally to “bring your Ivy-girl and all your friends. Send names to Nancy to add to guest list.” Everyone at Gideon’s company was going and he’d also invited Tom and Marybeth as well as Sylvia and her new boyfriend, Jeremy Lier, who also happened to work “in tech,” though his work, when he’d described it to Ivy, seemed to consist of filming himself playing video games and launching things off the roof of his apartment building. He said he was a documentary maker.