Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage — Part II

Part II

Male ospreys court their mates. They identify a breeding area, an ideal location for a nest, and then practice a series of aerial maneuvers. When a female appears, the male performs his routine: He flies above her, often as high as three hundred feet, pauses, fans his tail feathers, and dives down again, toward the water, toward her. He usually carries something in his talons, a fish or something to build a nest—sticks, bark, grass, seaweed. The male calls for the female as he flies, a sound like a whistle of a teakettle.

This courting is called a “sky-dance.”

Once they reproduce, the couple is usually monogamous. They mate for several years, often for the rest of their lives.

—

James and I met in 1998 at Davis Polk, a large corporate law firm in Midtown Manhattan. The firm occupied multiple floors of a skyscraper above what used to be the Grand Central Post Office. It was modern and luxurious, all blond wood and glass, with sweeping views of the city from every office.

It was a place I never should have been. In high school, I wanted to be a writer. I discovered writing in my first year and won several prizes for fiction before I graduated. When I arrived at college, I applied to a selective writing seminar. After submitting a sample of my work, I was admitted to the class, one of only two freshmen. I shared my first short story in October.

It was about a family spending the day on the beach. I can’t remember much more than that. What I do remember is a senior telling the class that it was terrible, that I couldn’t write. His name was Greg. He was tall, white, and very punk rock—short, spiky blond hair, a torn concert T-shirt, big

black combat boots, a leather jacket. His analysis included nothing specific about my story. It was a blanket judgment about quality and talent. The teacher, another man, said nothing. After a few minutes of tense silence, a female student rose to my defense. But it was too late. I had taken Greg’s assessment as the truth, storing it in every cell of my body.

I changed my focus to public service, and I was frenetic about it. I volunteered in a nursing home, as a Big Sister, and a GED tutor. I manned a legal services hotline at Boston City Hall. It was as if I were trying to beat the writing dream out of me, drown it in altruistic purposefulness. I graduated, did a fellowship in New York City government, and went to law school.

I spent the summer after my first year of law school at the Criminal Defense Division of Legal Aid in Brooklyn, a gritty place with lawyers sitting wherever they could find a free desk. Even as an intern, I was able to be “second seat” in a trial, assisting a lawyer in a grand larceny case—the robbery of a deli—which ended in an acquittal. I did more defense work during my third year in law school, representing a twelve-year-old boy in family court, defending him against a charge of climbing into his neighbor’s window to steal her shampoo (he was given probation). I loved being in a courtroom. I didn’t feel shy there; I could prepare almost every part of it— the direct, the cross, the closing statement—the map of it becoming clear in my mind: how to present a case, how to take a witness where I wanted them to go.

During the spring of my second year of law school, a swarm of elite law firms came to campus to hold interviews for summer associate positions.

We put on suits, met with partners, and compared our “callbacks”— invitations to visit the firms for more interviews. I was swept up in all of it, the sophistication and achievement of it, the courting. I collected a dozen offers and chose Davis Polk for its reputation and, if I’m honest, its sleek and glamorous interiors. My father was surprised I didn’t pick Cravath, the most prestigious of New York law firms at the time, but their offices weren’t nearly as nice.

Davis Polk continued to seduce us all summer long. Our workloads were light. We were invited to lunches at the grand restaurants of the era— Bouley, Vong, Montrachet. They threw us lavish parties at the Central Park Zoo and the Empire State Building. I worked in the litigation department and, in early July, was placed on the defense team for a well-known tobacco company. I spent two weeks in a windowless conference room at their headquarters in Kansas City, reviewing binder after binder of board minutes, a painfully boring task, which also felt morally compromising.

Still, there was glamour to it—defending a famous company, searching for incriminating evidence, working on a team with the best minds at the firm, including a future US senator.

At the end of the summer, Davis Polk offered me a permanent position, pending my graduation from law school and passing the bar exam. I wavered. I was still drawn to the prestige, to the idea of a few years at the firm serving as a legal finishing school, but I knew my true interest was in criminal defense. I like to think I would have chosen the public sector had my life remained stable, had everything not fallen apart.

—

On January 22, 1996, during my third year of law school, after a long group study session in my apartment in the West Village, I went to bed late. Eager for sleep, I shut off my phone’s ringer. I turned my answering machine’s volume down to zero.

At 8 a.m., I woke to the sound of the building intercom’s buzzing. I walked the few steps from my bed to my small galley kitchen, feeling cold and confused by the sound.

I picked up the handset. The doorman said, “Your aunt is trying to reach you. She says it’s an emergency.”

I turned to look at the answering machine in my living room. It was blinking frantically, the number fourteen flashing. I hung up the handset, walked to the machine, and pressed play, still half asleep. The first five messages were from Susan, using my childhood nickname: “Flo, call me,

it’s urgent. Flo, where are you, please call.” And then a series from my aunt, my father’s older sister. Then several hang-ups.

I called the number at my father and Susan’s apartment uptown. My aunt answered. I said, “What happened, what’s wrong?”

She said, “Just come right away.”

“Tell me now, what happened?”

My aunt was a loving person, but always blunt. She said, “He’s dead.

Your father is dead.”

I called my mother. She answered. I began to sob.

She tried to calm me down, trying to find out what had happened. She asked, her voice rising, “Is it your brother?”

I said, “No. It’s Pa. He died.”

She said, “I’m coming.”

She arrived in her station wagon thirty minutes later, still in her flowered bathrobe, and drove me up Madison Avenue, leaving me at the awning of my father and Susan’s building on East 83rd Street. The doorman took me up to their apartment in the service elevator; I can’t remember why.

I had thrown on jeans, sneakers, and a sweater, which now felt hot, itchy. I pulled at the neck. It was normal weather for January, in the thirties, but it felt much warmer. The air in the elevator was still, stifling.

In the apartment, there were at least a dozen people milling around— several of my cousins, an old college friend of my father’s, my brother and his wife, Charmaine. They had all picked up their phones, they had all answered when Susan and my aunt called, while I was still asleep. I stood in the entryway, waiting for someone to notice me.

My father and Susan’s housekeeper grabbed me. She said, “You should see him before they take him away.”

Before I could refuse, she pulled me down the hallway by my wrist, to the door of my father and Susan’s bedroom. He was lying in bed, on his back. His shoulders, above the sheets, were bare.

I learned later that his body had been on the ground, moved by the paramedics so they could work on him on a hard surface, and then, after they declared him dead, placed him back in bed, the covers pulled up, his

eyelids closed. I wished that someone had dressed him. He looked so vulnerable.

Standing in the doorway, I could not process what had happened. My father was fifty-four and looked even younger, like the California boy he was—tall, fit, tanned, a full head of blond hair. It did not seem possible that he could die, that I could never see him again.

—

My father was a magnetic, larger-than-life figure, the center around which Susan, my brother, and I orbited. He was born and raised in Beverly Hills, his father a photographer and movie producer, his mother a silent-film actress. He was a diligent student, an altar boy, and a devoted son who, as a teenager, wrote long letters to his parents every week from his Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island. He met my mother, Amanda, when they were both in college, he a senior at Harvard and she a freshman at Wellesley. They fell swiftly in love and married in Roslyn, New York, in 1964. It was a large and lavish wedding, with trumpets, twelve bridesmaids, and nineteen ushers. She was twenty and he was twenty-three.

Their marriage made headlines because both their families had bold names, signals of American wealth and privilege. My mother’s ancestors include John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, and Henry Morgan Tilford, a founder of Standard Oil; my father was descended from the Vanderbilts. My mother’s mother was Babe Paley, a fashion icon of that era and the wife of Bill Paley, the founder of CBS. As newlyweds, my parents lived a glamorous life. They had a grand apartment in the Dakota, hosted and attended notable parties, and made regular appearances in gossip columns, on best-dressed lists, and in Vogue magazine. My mother was famously beautiful with dark brown hair and almond-shaped hazel eyes.

She was photographed by Richard Avedon and Irving Penn; my father was drawn by Andy Warhol. They were called the “It Couple,” the “Fun Couple,” the “Young Locomotives,” and, in one fictionalized account, the “Moonflower Couple,” the moonflower symbolic of beauty and romance.

My father went to law school, worked for Robert F. Kennedy as a legislative assistant, and, after Kennedy’s assassination, ran for a position in the New York City Council, becoming, at that time, the youngest person ever elected to a seat. He was politically progressive, cofounding the New Democratic Coalition and drafting one of the country’s first gay rights bills.

The same year he was elected, at age twenty-eight, he bought a controlling interest in The Village Voice, beginning a lifelong interest in media, later merging the Voice with New York magazine and selling his stake to Rupert Murdoch (a decision he eventually regretted).

My brother was born in 1967, named Shirley Carter after my father and grandfather, and I was born in 1969, named Flobelle after my father’s mother, the stage name she had created from her given name (Florence Belle). Flobelle died four months before I was born. At her funeral, my father concluded his eulogy by announcing that if I was a girl, I would be named for her. He had not discussed it with my pregnant mother who sat, stunned, in the front pew. She decided I would go by Belle, her small rebellion.

My parents loved each other but they were too young, too immature, to make the marriage work. They fought a lot, both had affairs, and divorced in 1972, when I was still two. By the terms of their joint-custody agreement, typical at that time, my brother and I saw our father only every other weekend, on alternating holidays, and for a few weeks in the summer.

He was not a hands-on father, but he enjoyed us and wanted more time with us. He dreaded Sunday nights, the moment we left him, when we were taken back to our mother’s apartment.

My father met Susan shortly after he and my mother divorced. Susan was twenty-three and dazzling in a different way than my mother—six feet tall with long, thick blond hair and blue eyes, a social worker and former homecoming queen, born on Long Island and raised in Ohio. She turned my father down at first, disliking his reputation as a socialite, but finally agreed to an early dinner at the Ginger Man on the Upper West Side. Within an hour, they both knew they would spend the rest of their lives together, the attraction and chemistry between them instant. They discovered they had

the same favorite book, The Brothers Karamazov, and they walked through Central Park after dinner, to the Doubleday Book Shop on Fifth Avenue, so my father could buy her his favorite anthology of poetry. They were joined that night, threaded together in both intellect and heart, and they never again parted.

My brother and I loved Susan immediately. She was young and fun and gathered us up, spending hours making sandcastles with my brother on the beach in East Hampton, dining on soups of toilet paper at my pretend restaurants, reading to us at bedtime. The weekends my father had custody, she picked me up at school on Friday and took me to buy a bologna sandwich wrapped in white paper from a deli on Madison Avenue, or if my father was with us, to Melon’s for a bacon cheeseburger and cottage fries.

Susan and my father married in our living room in 1977 and brought me and my brother on their honeymoon to La Samanna, a new beachfront hotel in St. Martin, a place we returned to every spring for almost twenty years.

My father and Susan were, to me, the perfect couple, my example of a great marriage. When I think of them, I see them dancing together in our kitchen, the same height, their long legs in blue jeans, their arms around each other. My father was the flower, needy of attention, and Susan was the gardener, a natural caretaker, and that dynamic worked for them. They experienced the world with a similar lustful curiosity and sense of fun. They conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in bed together every New Year’s Eve. They drank red wine and played chess late into the night. They hosted friends for lively dinners and long weekends at their house in Water Mill on Long Island. They were adored for being genuine and relaxed, never pretentious. They loved dogs, especially pugs, a passion my father acquired from my mother. At one point, they had five of them, four fawn and one black, all named after members of the family, all allowed to sleep on their bed, a chorus of snoring.

My father was an intellectual, reading several books a week, mostly history and biographies, but he loved less erudite culture too—he had more than a dozen magazines delivered from a newsstand every Monday, a stack we could not touch until he had read them all. He was a great writer, always

composing on large yellow legal pads with black felt-tip pens, in a distinct, nearly illegible scrawl. He wrote an adventure tale on one of those pads for me and my brother, reading installments to us on Saturday nights in his study as we drank mugs of warm milk mixed with honey.

He had an extraordinary eye as a collector. In the 1960s and ’70s, he bought paintings by Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Mark Rothko, among others, a collection he sold in the 1980s to finance his real passion, first editions of twentieth-century American literature (an epically unwise trade; many of those paintings are worth millions of dollars today). My father and Susan’s apartments, at the River House on East 52nd Street, and later on Fifth Avenue, and their house in Water Mill, were filled with all his collections, including drawings, wooden staircases, bronze sculptures, and hundreds of pieces of treen—voting boxes, perfume bottles, miniature shoes. Almost every room had shelves filled with his books, the regular ones next to the collectible first editions, the latter in custom-made black, red, or brown boxes. My middle-school years were filled with the sounds of him opening boxes of books and cutting reams of clear plastic to cover them. I had to angle myself slightly to get to my bedroom because he had installed bookcases on both sides of the narrow hallway.

My father was handsome, always carrying the air of the California boy he had been, but perfectly dressed in an East Coast way, in Savile Row suits, Turnbull & Asser shirts, and John Lobb shoes when formal; jeans, long-sleeved polo shirts, and driving shoes from Hunting World on the weekends. He smoked a pipe at all hours of the day and carried leather pouches of Dunhill tobacco in his jacket pockets. He loved food, both fine dining and junk, equally passionate about the French restaurant Lutèce and Big Macs (he could eat two in one sitting). He loved to travel and packed meticulously for every trip, filling large black Hermès suitcases with his clothes and a portable stereo to play classical music. He wore a “man purse” (Hermès too), slung across his torso to hold his wallet and traveler’s checks. He loved shopping of all kinds. He was generous and spoiling. He never let anyone else pick up a check. He was charming and funny and often outrageous, swearing without hesitation, saying inappropriate things.

But he was also introverted. He always preferred to stay home over going out, and he hated the phone. We were most similar in this, in our shyness, our introversion.

My father was not always easy. He was moody and had a temper, occasionally a scary one, but usually more like a child who needed to be managed. He yelled and stomped his feet—literally—when he didn’t get his way. When he napped on weekend afternoons, we had to stay completely quiet, moving carefully around him, anticipating a period of intense grumpiness when he woke up. My brother also had a temper, and my father said his mother did too; it was accepted as a Burden family trait. Susan could manage him and my brother; she didn’t wilt or retreat, but also allowed it to go on. In this environment, I became even quieter, more cautious, watchful.

My father and I were close in many ways. We had inside jokes. Every time we were in a car, from childhood well into adulthood, I would ask him, “Where are we going?” and he would answer “Puerto Rico.” I can’t remember why. He wrote me letters in the voice of each pug when I was at sleepaway camp. And we bonded over collecting. I had my own, less expensive collections—stacks of Dannon yogurt tops foraged in my grade- school cafeteria, puffy stickers placed in photo albums, porcelain figurines, and, most passionately, Archie comic books. When I was little, he bought me all the latest issues—Archie, Jughead, Betty & Veronica—from a small comic store on Second Avenue and showed me how to create a catalog, which I typed onto thin onionskin pages. On my twenty-first birthday, he gave me Archie No. 1, from 1942, placed in a custom black box, the name and date in gold on the spine.

My father was proud of me, of my studiousness, of my decision to become a lawyer, following his example; he told me this often. But when he died, we were still parent and child, shy people who had not yet broken through. As I stood in his doorway, looking at his profile, his skin beginning to drain of color, I was not yet conscious of all that he would miss— weddings, grandchildren, growing old with Susan. All I could feel was the

horror of death, the shock of it, the sensation of being completely unprepared.

—

In my father and Susan’s bedroom, their housekeeper said, “You should kiss him goodbye.” She and I were both Catholic, as was my father. It was what one was supposed to do. But I couldn’t bring myself to move closer to him.

I shook my head and left the room.

I found Susan in the kitchen. We held each other, crying. My brother put his arms around us.

Susan told us she had taken their two dogs out at 6:30 that morning. She asked my father what time he wanted to get up. He said 7 a.m. She set the alarm clock for him and left. When she returned, the elevator door opening directly into the apartment, she heard the clock’s beeping, loud and steady, coming from their bedroom down the hall.

She said, her voice shaking, “As soon as I heard it, I knew he was dead.”

For several weeks after my father’s death, after his funeral at St.

Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue, after his burial next to his parents at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, in the middle of the night I would panic, believing he was not really dead, that we had buried him alive. I would wake Susan up and beg her to intervene, to dig him up, to save him.

—

The cause of my father’s death, the phrase listed on his death certificate, was “sudden arrhythmia death syndrome,” defined as a fatal heart attack in a victim who is young and seems to be in good health. He had known for decades that he had a heart defect; his aortic valve was damaged and leaked, the result, perhaps, of a bout with scarlet fever as a child. He knew he would need surgery at some point to replace the valve. He had checkups with a cardiologist every six months. The last appointment had been only

two months before his death, and the results were good. The doctor told him he could postpone surgery another year.

I had gone to that final appointment with my father and Susan. When he completed his tests, he walked down the hallway in his hospital gown, his fists raised in triumph, knowing he had avoided surgery again. He dreaded the idea of being cut open, his chest scarred, months of recovery. He wanted to delay it as long as he could.

After getting dressed, he sat with us in his doctor’s office. The doctor asked, “What medications do you take at home?”

My father pulled out a list he’d compiled on one of his yellow legal notepads, using his felt-tip black pen, in his unique scrawl. He read it out loud: “Advil, Anacin, Afrin, Prozac. Occasionally, when I can’t sleep, Ambien.”

The doctor nodded and said, “Okay, none of that concerns me.”

Two months after his death, we learned that he had omitted a prescription diet drug from his list. My father had a long history with diet drugs. His mother, the former actress, gave him and his sister diet pills in their teens. In college, he started taking thyroid medication to speed up his metabolism. He took it on and off through his twenties and thirties. During this time, in photographs lovingly taped in our leather family photo albums by Susan, he appears gaunt and bug-eyed.

When he died, my brother, Susan, and I believed he hadn’t taken diet drugs in a decade. He loved food but was equally obsessed with health, walking miles in Central Park every day, doing yoga, hiking in Arizona several times a year. He looked healthy and trim but not too thin, no bug eyes, not as many mood swings. And there he was in the cardiologist’s office reciting his list of medications. All prescribed or over-the-counter. All innocent.

Nothing showed up in his autopsy, performed two days after he died.

We spent a month thinking how tragically unlucky he was, in the mere two percent rate of sudden death associated with his condition, a much lower risk than dying during valve replacement surgery. But then the confession came, his assistant telling Susan that she had been making him

appointments with a diet doctor for the last year. He had opened a new account at Zitomer Pharmacy on Madison Avenue, picking up his prescribed pills in person, hiding the amber plastic bottles from Susan. We don’t think the diet drug killed him—he probably would have died anyway —but it could have had an impact. We buried the secret, omitting this detail from the story of his death. We felt ashamed of it somehow, and protective of him; we wanted his life story to be pristine.

For Susan, the secret felt like a deep betrayal, as shocking as an affair.

She started having dreams about him, dreams she still has today, where he appears as a stranger, cold and remote, alive but married to a different woman, with a different family. When she wakes up, she pushes this shadow away, reminding herself that their intimacy, their bond, was real, that his secret is revealing only of his frailty, his demons.

There was another revelation that came soon after my father died, another blow that forever altered my understanding of him. My father left an estate that was forty million dollars in debt, carrying both personal loans and loans to his media company, one from a bank and one from our extended-family investment partnership, a group that included my aunt and my Burden cousins. It is not unusual to take on this kind of debt when growing a business, but my father’s collateral was his and Susan’s apartment, their house, and their collections, so it was possible they could have lost everything if the lenders had called the loans. Susan knew this was the state of things, a life on the edge of potential ruin, and they didn’t hide it from me and my brother. They even made jokes about the loans, about the bank owning their apartment, but we didn’t understand the scope of it until he died. He had spent money like he had an endless supply, and we’d believed that it was exactly that—endless.

—

I returned to Davis Polk as an associate in September 1996, eight months after my father’s death. It felt like the adult choice—a job with a significant salary, one that would cover my rent, a career step that would have

impressed my father. I moved from the litigation department to the corporate department, a change that made no sense: Corporate work had no research, writing, or court time—the parts of the law I enjoyed—and I had no interest in finance. I could not even read a balance sheet. But I didn’t want to be placed back on the tobacco company defense team. I had chosen the private sector, but I felt like I had to draw a line somewhere. I could have asked the assigning partners to move me to a new case; they would have done it. But it felt easier, less confrontational, to just switch departments.

Corporate was divided into three groups—banking, mergers and acquisitions, and securities—and the firm’s clients were some of the biggest banks and companies in the world. I started in banking and was quickly claimed by a gruff male partner who terrified me. With almost no training, I drafted and negotiated debt provisions with banks and opposing counsels, pretending I understood what they meant, faking my way through it. In my second year, I rotated from banking to securities, spending nights at the printer, traveling around the country to do due diligence. I worked hard and I figured out how to do the job, but I hated it—the punishing hours, the demanding clients, the phone calls that came just as I was putting on my coat on a Friday evening, knowing, as I saw the partner’s name appear on the screen, that I would be there all night, all weekend. I cried in the bathroom almost every day.

I was managing more than the demands of the job. Susan, my brother, and I met with lawyers and financial advisers every week, sometimes every day, to sort out my father’s estate and sell his company. The sale allowed us to repay his loans and regain some wealth, in part because of Susan’s status as a widow, which exempted her from paying capital-gains taxes. But the stress continued. Two years after my father’s death, I was still fielding calls from lawyers and bankers, still having heated arguments with my brother and Susan about investments and expenses. I took these calls in a small telephone booth in the Davis Polk offices, trying to keep this part of my life hidden from other associates, ashamed of the mess we were in.

Every phone call filled me with dread. The conversations, the decisions, the arguments were intertwined with the shock and grief of my father’s death, a pervasive and unrelenting sense of doom. It matched my unhappiness at the firm. I felt pressure and fear wherever I turned.

—

Another associate, a friend, introduced me to James in March of 1998.

James was in his fifth year at the firm, recently returned from a six-month stint in the Hong Kong office. I’d seen him before, passing each other in the wide, carpeted hallways, nodding politely, but we’d never met.

When my friend brought me into James’s office, I was carrying an Academy Awards ballot. My family had an Oscar pool, a tradition since I was little, and I was considering my choices. James sat at his desk, my friend and I sat in two chairs facing him.

I said, “What do you guys think? Who for Best Actress?” I listed the names, including Judi Dench and Kate Winslet.

James looked confused. He said, “I’ve never heard of them.”

I said, “What about Best Picture? Did you see Good Will Hunting?”

He said, “No, I don’t know what that is. I saw Titanic. Is that on the

list?”

I thought, Who is this guy?

I found him handsome, but I was not interested. In addition to his lack of movie knowledge, I could tell he was a typical New York private-school kid, the boarding-school and Ivy League variety, just like me. And he looked like my father—blond, six-foot-one, lean, with proper shoes, his shirtsleeves rolled up. It was too familiar, the WASP-y preppiness, too appropriate.

My boyfriend at the time was unemployed. He’d lost his job at a news program within days of moving in with me, a decision he pressured me into right after my father’s death, when I left the West Village for an apartment on East 85th Street. I was too shell-shocked to refuse him. As I discussed the ballot with James, my boyfriend was probably sitting on my couch,

watching CNBC, his feet on my antique coffee table, still sweaty from the gym. He couldn’t pay any of our rent.

A month after the Oscar discussion in James’s office, I was rotated into his group, Investment Management. My new office was three doors down from his and I was soon assigned to a deal he was running, the IPO of an internet holding company. As we worked together, I was impressed. He was very smart. He could parse and fix a memo or prospectus flawlessly within an hour; his markup looked like a work of art. He was quietly confident and always polite. He was adored by his clients and his assistant, an older woman from Long Island, the wife of a firefighter. We often sat side by side, working on a document. Once, our hands, holding pencils, brushed against each other (he was left-handed; I was right-handed). To my surprise, I felt a jolt, a spark.

While James looked like my father, there were important differences.

Unlike my father’s unusual path through politics and media, James, as a senior associate at the firm, had a traditional job, going to work each morning in his suit, taking business trips, like a dependable father in a television show. He was ambitious about a career and making a living in a way my father, as someone with inherited money, never was. And James was calm and even-tempered, never moody. His voice was always gentle. If you had asked me to describe him then, I would have used the word steady.

He had a girlfriend and broke up with her sometime that spring, I can’t remember when, but I noted it. On my birthday in May, he offered to write a complicated memo assigned to me by a partner. He stayed late into the night to do it so that I could go out to dinner with my family and friends.

A few weeks later, he came into my office and showed me a card he’d received in the mail from the Morgan Library. It was an announcement of a talk I was giving to a group of young members about my father’s book collection, which we’d just donated to the library. James, holding the card

aloft, looked shocked.

He said, “This is you?”

I felt embarrassed, like I’d been found out, but I was also happy, relieved, that he had discovered the other side of my life.

He came to the lecture, sitting in the back of the audience with his roommate, Mark. He brought me a Coke at the reception, weaving around my boyfriend. My brother asked, “Who’s the blond?”

In June, he sent me an email with the subject line “Going off the record here.” It was the dawn of email; any message was exciting, but this one seemed to glow in my inbox. It read, “Would you be interested in ditching your boyfriend and coming to Greece with me this August?”

I waited until the next morning to answer, something rambling about liking to spend time with him, but no, I could not go. I had received a notice from my landlord that she was selling our apartment and that we needed to move out by the end of the month. I told my boyfriend I did not want to move into a new apartment together, but I was not yet brave enough to break off the relationship completely.

I’d only had three serious boyfriends in my life, and each relationship lasted for years. I didn’t have casual encounters and never flirted—I was too shy, too lacking in confidence. I needed men to pursue me, to be serious and certain. And when the relationship had run its course, I was always too afraid to break it off. The prospect of hurting someone’s feelings paralyzed me. I had been in love with my college boyfriends but never with this one.

He had somehow ended up there, in my life, on my couch, and I didn’t know how to get myself out of it.

—

On June 26, I worked late into the night preparing to leave for a vacation— a hiking trip with Susan, her mother, and my cousin. James walked into my office and shut the door behind him. Without thinking, I stood and stepped from behind my desk.

He said, “I just wanted to say goodbye.”

He paused, several feet away from me. After a few beats of silence, we moved toward each other quickly, embracing, kissing—an equal, impassioned wanting of each other. The chemistry people talk about—pure physical chemistry—was coursing through me. Something had happened.

He put his hand on my cheek. His hand was shaking.

He said, “Have a great trip,” kissed me again, and left my office. I was stunned. And electrified.

I left the next day and, according to Susan, spent the week of hiking in a daze, barely speaking. At the end of June, I moved out of my apartment on East 85th Street and into the third floor of a brownstone two blocks away, on the same block where Susan lived, where my father had died. I had the conversation with my boyfriend that I’d avoided for a year, ending the relationship. It took ten minutes.

On my first day back in the office, the first day James and I were both single, July 6, he took me to an AT&T cell phone store and bought me my first cell phone, a Nokia. It was navy blue, my favorite color. For a long time, he was the only person who had my number, the number I still have today. When it rang, my pulse raced.

With my new phone in hand, we left the office together in the late evening, when the hot July sun was cooling, and took the subway from Grand Central to Brooklyn Bridge. Before we got on, he took my hand and guided me to the downtown end of the platform, where the last car would open, so that our exit at City Hall Park would be easy. I loved this feeling, his gentle authority. As we walked north on Broadway, he pointed out the Woolworth Building, the Tweed Courthouse, the Sun Building. He talked about each building’s history, the city’s history, things I hadn’t known.

He lived on the corner of White and Church streets, next to the Baby Doll Lounge, in a loft he shared with Mark, a friend from boarding school.

Mark owned the building and James was the superintendent, his barter for rent. Tenants often called James at work, when the elevator broke down, when the heat wasn’t working, when they needed an exterminator. He solved each problem—calling handymen, dispatching elevator companies, calming tempers—while he ran securities deals.

James and Mark’s loft was on the fourth floor, divided in two by a heavy metal door they usually kept open. An elevator arrived at James’s side; a staircase led to Mark’s. James’s side was monastic, only his bed, a desk, a chair. Mark’s side was warm, filled with books and art and

comfortable furniture, a pool table, and an open kitchen. When they met in boarding school, Mark was a star—respected as an athlete and a scholar.

James was not a star; he had poor grades and often got in trouble. He’d also had several brushes with the law, first at sixteen, when he used a BB gun to shoot out the back window of an empty Mercedes in East Hampton. The owner of the Mercedes pressed charges, and James and his co-conspirator, his best friend, spent the night in a pink cell in East Hampton’s jail. James told me that he was arrested again a year or so later, the first person to be charged under Massachusetts’s new DUI law for mopeds.

James went to Kenyon College thinking it was Denison (he mixed them up in his mind). When he arrived in the cornfields of Ohio, he said a switch went off. He started studying, planning his escape. He transferred to Cornell and graduated summa cum laude. He went to work at the Manhattan DA’s office, then to Yale Law School, then to Davis Polk.

Evidence of the bad boy remained. He had a tattoo (a Greek pottery shard) on one of his inner biceps, smoked Marlboro Reds, and kept his first mug shot on his bulletin board, a teenager in profile. He told me stories of the many women in his wake, some of them stalking him, unable to accept his rejection. This narrative was sexy to me, the former rebel dressed in a suit, the problem child landing at an elite law firm, the heartbreaker. He was the perfect combination of exciting and safe.

In adulthood, James and Mark switched roles. While James cleaned up, Mark’s life became more complicated. After inheriting a fortune at twenty- one and winning acclaim as a writer of short stories, he started partying heavily. When James left the loft in the morning to go to work, Mark and his friends were often still awake, playing music and pool, drinking. Mark was delighted by James’s transformation into a responsible adult. He looked to him for guidance; he depended on him for stability.

That first night in the apartment, James showed me around the empty loft, Mark’s side and his, the roof, and then, finally, his bedroom.

He said, “Every single night, for the last two months, I’ve woken up at three a.m., thinking of you.”

When I’d anticipated a physical relationship with him, I had imagined something sweet, but this was both tender and thrilling. It was a revelation.

James was so confident, so in charge, but also vulnerable, shaking again, with the emotion of our coming together.

When we left the apartment to get dinner, as I saw him confidently descend the wide, steep stairs at the back of the apartment, tucking in his striped oxford shirt as he held the heavy door for me, I thought, I am going to marry him.

—

The rest of the summer was a blur of weekends in his bed and mine, clandestine encounters behind locked doors at the office, backgammon and gimlets in the loft with Mark, late dinners at Barocco, a restaurant a block from his apartment. He brought me to Chinatown and gave me my first soup dumpling, and to the Oyster Bar for my first oyster. He had perfect table manners and was always a gentleman, running me a bath, making me a latte, once gently ironing the skirt of my suit while I was wearing it.

After three weeks, he said, “Tell me you love me.” I did.

When we had dinner with my brother and Charmaine at The Odeon, introducing them for the first time, I felt so proud, watching them talk as I held James’s hand under the table. I’d always envied my brother and Charmaine’s relationship, their passionate love for each other, and now I had it too. After dinner, my brother said, “My sister has grown up.”

I brought James to Balthazar to meet my mother, to Water Mill to meet Susan. We were all over each other, kissing at meals, unrestrained in our desire for each other. My family was stunned—by the speed of it, to see me so enamored—but they were happy too, glad that I had found someone I loved so much.

I went to Greece, accepting the invitation James had extended in that first glowing email. I loved traveling with him. He took care of everything, making hotel reservations, both expensive and dirt cheap, finding great restaurants, bringing me an ice-cold cocktail while I showered. We started

in Athens, then Ios, and finally Palaikastro, a small town on the Eastern end of Crete, for his stepfather’s seventieth birthday party. His stepfather was an archaeologist for half the year, running a dig in Palaikastro, and a boarding- school teacher the other half. For decades, he’d brought students to work on the site in the summer. James spoke with reverence about being one of those students, spending high-school and college summers on the dig, working long hours, unearthing relics, recording his findings, his hair turning nearly white in the sun. The tattoo on his inner biceps, the pottery shard, was an homage to their work, to the precious things they had found.

We stayed at a hotel on a cliff that cost ten dollars a night, where the August winds woke us up early. We ate Greek yogurt with thick local honey and rich black coffee for breakfast and went to topless beaches where James covered me with the island’s famous mud. His stepfather’s birthday party was at a taverna in the small village. James knew all the locals and spoke to them in nearly fluent Greek. We drank raki, ate platters of freshly caught fish and perfectly grilled lamb chops, and sang “Happy Birthday” in Greek.

We could not keep our hands off each other.

On a ferry from Crete back to Athens, we lay on the floor, our heads on our duffel bags. James asked me if I wanted to have children. I said I did.

He said, “We’re going to get married. We’re going to have a family together.”

In September, we went to City Hall and got a marriage license, a requirement in New York before getting married. We didn’t tell anyone about it. It wasn’t an engagement, but it was a private declaration of our love, of our intent. We made photocopies of the thin paper and kept them in our desks.

In October, James went to Asia on a long-planned trip with Mark. Since email was still dial-up and neither of us had laptops, we sent each other faxes, using the Davis Polk fax form. I still have all of them, the faxes and our emails, clipped together, protected like heirlooms in a cabinet in my apartment. The exchanges are charming and clever, filled with love and lust, of longing for each other. We also kept a diary together, a small red one with thin blue pages. We took turns filling in the days with a mechanical

pencil, recording everything we did together, handing it back and forth, delighting each other with the words we chose, the way we crafted short sentences, making the most of the narrow space allotted for each date.

Every day, every interaction, felt romantic and passionate. Even when I saw his name appear on the display of my work phone, the neat five letters of his first and last names flashing, I was flooded with something—a sense of destiny, security, love. But it was more than that. It was intimate. I felt known. He understood my heartbreak and confusion over my father’s death, the ups and downs of my friendships, the details of my calls in the phone booth, the hundreds of Archie comic books in my closet. I knew the details of his life too, the things he loved, the arc of his journey from fuckup to star lawyer, his romances and his adventures, his love and worry for Mark. We told each other things late at night and early in the morning, on the subway to work, whispering in each other’s ears, confiding again and again, in person and on the page.

—

James’s most tender topic was his family. Each word, as it came from his mouth, seemed to hurt him. He told me his parents had both grown up with money, in nice apartments in Manhattan, attending private schools and impressive colleges. But at some point in the 1970s, his father had a breakdown, was laid off, and stopped working. As the years went by, his parents had to spend their savings to cover basic living expenses and school tuition. They lived in a classic seven-room prewar apartment on East 74th Street, next to the all-boys’ private school James and his brother attended, but signs of the unrelenting financial pressure were everywhere—holes in carpets and jeans, sneakers that were always too small, overdue bills. They never went out to dinner, never went on vacation. It was a stark contrast to James’s friends, who were not just solvent, but very wealthy. James learned to get invited on trips with his classmates—spring break in the Caribbean, Christmas in Brazil, August in East Hampton—to make his life bigger, but there was a pervasive sense that it was all going to fall apart. And it did.

When James was in law school, his parents divorced, sold their apartment for a fraction of its value, and revealed their empty coffers. His father moved to Norwalk, Connecticut, renting a one-room apartment in another family’s house, becoming a hermit, refusing all luxuries, even a television.

There was another thread of the story, one that James wouldn’t talk about, a whisper I heard over the years but could never hold on to—his father leaving the family abruptly, abandoning his life as a husband and father, maybe after an affair, but coming back, returning to East 74th Street for a period of years before James’s mother filed for divorce. When I asked about it, even after many years of marriage, James would shut down, unwilling to discuss it. It was the third rail, a piece of him I could not go near.

James seemed to carry the story of his father and his family’s financial ruin like a hard nut in his chest, painful and motivating at the same time. I never learned the full story, but I could feel its edges. I could see its effect: James’s drive to make money, to support his parents, to protect himself from a similar fate. And to create his own family, one he could make secure.

He told me how much he wanted to be a husband and father. He told me how much he wanted an honorable life.

—

When James landed at JFK after his trip with Mark, he asked me to meet him at the clock in Grand Central at noon, a short walk from our offices. I got there early, circling the information booth, running into a partner who was picking up her train schedule. I saw him descend the stairs. He was wearing a tweed jacket and had grown a beard. My breath caught. He was so handsome.

He walked over to me, grabbed me in an embrace, and whispered in my

ear, “Will you marry me?”

I whispered in his, “Yes.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a sapphire ring, loose with no box, the blue stone encircled with small diamonds. He put it on my

finger.

He said, “Nothing bad will ever come of this.”

It was three months after our first kiss.

I felt it all: love, lust, joy, and a letting go of the anxiety, the gripping I’d felt since my father was found dead in his bed. James was here. He had arrived exactly when I needed him. It was the romance my favorite books, my favorite movies, and my family had told me to want and expect—he had swept me off my feet, quickly and completely. And, as he told me often, he was going to take care of me. The fatherless girl had found her knight.

—

The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending, of his exit, felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. They both left me reeling. In both instances, he was definitive, certain. There was no gray area. The switch went on, and then it went off. He wanted it, he wanted me.

And then he didn’t.

Were there red flags? The subtle or not subtle warnings I should have seen before we married, the ones people ask me about now, wanting something—anything—to prove that our fate could have been predicted, that the same thing couldn’t happen to them? Maybe the shift in personality at Kenyon. Maybe the arrests and the breaking of girls’ hearts. Maybe his tendency to direct, and mine to follow. Maybe the untold tale of his father.

But these felt like stories of a rebellious boy becoming a responsible man; the normal mysteries of a three-dimensional human being. There is nothing I look back on now and say, How could I have missed that? Other couples I knew then, and know now, had many more flags, redder flags, and they stayed married.

And doesn’t it all look different, wouldn’t your own story look different, if you knew how it was going to end?

—

After we left Grand Central, we told everyone we were engaged, calling our parents, our siblings, our friends. We met a large group for dinner at a restaurant in Tribeca to celebrate. We were both elated. James wanted to be married as soon as possible, but I wanted some time to plan our wedding.

We settled on the first Saturday in June.

The news of our engagement spread quickly through Davis Polk.

Within days, I was moved out of James’s group and back to the general securities pool. Partners didn’t like couples working together, even though, by some accounts, thirty percent of Davis Polk’s lawyers had met their spouse at the firm. I quit four months later, in March 1999, becoming the stereotype of a woman who leaves a job as soon as she finds a husband, but I was relieved to get out of there. I went to work as general counsel of my brother’s company, an internet-hosting venture he started in 1993. He needed someone to draft contracts for clients and vendors. I thought it was temporary, a way to escape Davis Polk, a brief stop on my way back to the public sector.

I had always worshipped my brother. Only nineteen months apart, we were allies in childhood, shuttled side by side between our mother and father, sharing an understanding of the strange particularities of our parents, our homes, our nannies. We fought in all the normal ways siblings do; I can still summon the terror I felt when he chased me down hallways, the rush to lock my door before he reached me, and there were also years when he ignored me. But once I became a teenager, he adopted me again, introducing me to his friends, keenly interested in making me cool, an uphill battle with a painfully shy little sister. He took me to my first concert, The Clash, when I was thirteen. He introduced me to Tower Records, vintage Levi’s, Brooks Brothers tweed overcoats. He insisted I accompany him to nightclubs—Danceteria in the Hamptons, Limelight and Area in the city—all of which I found scary, counting the minutes until I could go home. He gave me my first cocktail, a vodka tonic in St. Martin (I liked it) and my first drag of pot (I hated it). When I went to boarding school, he gave me a Frankie Goes to Hollywood poster and dozens of records—the Cure, Talking Heads, UB40—which I played loudly on my stereo in my

dorm room. He explained the internet to me long before anyone had heard of it and bought me my first computer.

My brother failed to make me cool—I would never be that—but he made me a little less nerdy. When I went to work for him, it felt like where I should be in that moment: siblings joining forces in the wake of our father’s death, me supporting his growing company. Our skills complemented each other—the visionary entrepreneur and the rules-oriented lawyer.

—

As soon as we were engaged, James and I moved into a rental apartment on Worth Street. It was a loft with two bedrooms and a roof deck. He created a checklist of things we needed to do to combine our lives—setting up cable TV, booking movers, ordering blackout shades. We loved crossing things off the list. It felt so grown-up. We split the rent, utilities, and other costs down the middle, starting our commitment to dividing things evenly. I picked up the check at dinner as often as he did. I felt proud of this, my ability to pay my equal share.

I filled the apartment with my things: a mahogany bed, my grandfather’s desk, my father’s Sally Mann photographs to hang over the white couch. James arrived with almost nothing, just his clothes and a few framed posters from the White Street loft. But we shared a similar aesthetic —minimalist, masculine, no bright colors or patterns—so it soon felt like it belonged to both of us.

A few months before our wedding, my mother reminded me that James and I had to sign a prenuptial agreement. When my brother and I were in our early twenties, we signed a contract with her, agreeing that we would have prenups when we got married. All of my assets were in trust, entirely protected in case of divorce, whether we had a prenup or not. I didn’t think I needed it. But I had committed to having one.

My brother and Charmaine signed a prenup before their wedding in 1996, and our family lawyer, Tom, sent the same template to me, James, and James’s lawyer two months before our wedding. The draft said that any

asset we brought individually to the marriage would remain ours, not subject to division, but anything earned during the marriage, and anything in joint name, would be split if we divorced.

James was upset when I told him about the prenup. He said it made him feel like an outsider, a threat. I felt guilty asking him to sign it. The draft sat on my desk for a month, unaddressed.

A few weeks before our wedding, as I felt increasing pressure from my lawyer to get the document signed, James asked me to make one amendment to the agreement: instead of sharing anything earned during the marriage, only assets that had been put in joint name would be split.

Anything that was in my name alone, or his name alone, would not be split.

James explained that it was fair to do it this way, that we should each keep what we made during the marriage unless we affirmatively chose to share it.

His reasoning made sense to me.

With James sitting beside me, I called Tom to request the change. I put the call on speaker phone. I did not tell Tom that James was listening. Tom told me it was a bad idea; it was standard to share in what was earned during a marriage, both by James and by me. It was what my brother and Charmaine had done, what most couples do. It was fair. I made the counterargument, repeating the words James had given to me to explain why we should make the change. Finally, Tom said, “Okay, Belle, if this is what you want.”

After we hung up, I felt a wave of anxiety. I was going against legal advice. But James was my family now, my soon-to-be husband, the future father of my children, the love of my life. He was the man I trusted most.

And our wedding was only three weeks away; any conflict over the prenup could derail the whole thing. I didn’t tell my mother, Susan, or my brother about the change. I worried they would intervene, that they would stop me.

Tom revised the document and sent us new drafts. We signed it on May 30 and married on June 5.

—

Our wedding was at my family’s house in Water Mill, a farmhouse with eight acres of land, an apple orchard, a rose garden, a tennis court, and a pool. We knew the wedding had to be small or it would balloon to hundreds of people; my mother and Susan would both have long lists. I was never someone who imagined a big wedding—the thought of all that attention made me anxious—so we decided to limit it to eighty guests, forty for each of us.

It was beautiful, more like a big dinner party than a wedding. I wore a slinky satin dress designed by Calvin Klein at my mother’s request since she was friendly with him. My brother walked me down the aisle. A judge married us under an open tent facing Mecox Bay. Dinner was set up at one long table between an allée of sycamore trees. Mark circled the length of it as he gave his toast. A dozen other friends took the microphone to talk about James, about me, about us together. A small group watched a Knicks playoff game in my father’s study after dinner; I threw my bouquet from the adjoining balcony after they won. James did not want dancing, and I conceded (my one regret about that day), so we set up what looked like a nightclub under lanterns by the pool, playing a mix my brother had made, hanging out, James’s friends and mine, late into the night. At 3 a.m., a driver in a rented Rolls-Royce drove us back to the city and we checked into the St. Regis, the same hotel where my grandparents had an apartment in the 1960s.

We flew to Asia the next day, starting a honeymoon James had planned meticulously: a grand hotel in Bangkok, a luxury tent on a remote Indonesian island, a week on the beach in Bali, eating our way through Hong Kong. Susan warned me that a honeymoon could turn out to be disappointing, a victim of too-high expectations (she had seen this often in her practice as a family therapist). But ours was anything but. We were so in love, so attracted to each other, so excited about being married. James knew every location well, having lived in Hong Kong. His expertise made all of it feel exciting and romantic.

We had one fight, during an outdoor dinner in Bali, over my tendency to pay restaurant checks without looking at the bill, something James had

witnessed in New York and made note of. He told me this would not be the way we did things in our marriage. I was surprised by his upset, by his scolding. My family never opened the padded black folder at restaurants before handing over our card; we trusted the calculation and tipped heavily.

But the habit made James anxious. We were now tied to each other financially, and he worried I would be a profligate spender, like my father. I was defensive and argued the point, but his admonition also made me feel safe. He was going to make sure I never ended up in trouble.

We came home and started our married life together. He left Davis Polk the following year and became general counsel at an investment firm founded by my uncle. He soon moved to a senior management role at the firm, abandoning his law degree. I continued to work for my brother, his legal needs increasing as his business grew. I liked the work, the combination of contract law, human resources, and the dynamics of a start- up. I had stock options and believed in the promise of the company.

I also felt stuck, not wanting to disappoint my brother by leaving. I tried to keep my own interests alive—starting a website about volunteering, taking on pro bono domestic violence cases—but it wasn’t enough. I had marooned myself again, following a dream that was not my own, moving further away from the person I’d planned to be.

—

In November 1999, five months after our wedding (and six months after his own), Mark was found dead of a heroin overdose in his bathroom in the White Street loft. He had been doing well, happy to be married, preparing for the publication of his first novel, so his death was a terrible, horrifying shock. James was devastated. They were so close, so tied to each other.

James felt like he had failed in his most important job: making sure Mark was okay. He had moved out of the loft less than a year earlier, consumed with our romance. They had both married. James had stopped paying attention.

Mark was also the source of all that was exciting and unpredictable in James’s life. They traveled together often, to Asia and Europe, unruly adventures James loved. James also seemed to live vicariously through Mark, thrilled by his freedom and his bad behavior. Mark said what he wanted and did what he wanted, not caring who he upset or offended. He was known to be a disrupter, hurling insults, causing damage, while James walked the straight path, reporting to clients and partners, burying the wild teenager he had been.

After Mark’s funeral, James said to me, “I don’t have anything to look forward to anymore.” I wasn’t hurt; I understood what he meant. I understood what he had lost.

—

The next year, we started looking for an apartment to buy. We wanted to stay in Tribeca, far from our childhoods on the Upper East Side. In early 2001, James read about a building on the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street being converted to condominiums. It was an old state office building and sat across from the Tweed Courthouse, catty-corner from the Sun Building, and two blocks north of the Woolworth Building— the landmarks of our first date. It was also the original site of the Manhattan Project and still had Ellen’s, a famous coffee shop, in its lobby, a meeting place for mayors and councilmen, a place my father had frequented. James tracked down the number of the company developing the building, called the owner, and said we wanted to see it. We toured a four-bedroom apartment on the twenty-fifth floor that faced west to the Hudson River.

There were still long wooden pews in what would be the kitchen and living room, ghosts of the administrative hearings that had taken place there in the years before we arrived.

The apartment was much bigger than I thought we needed, and Chambers Street felt too gritty to me, unlike the more residential part of Tribeca, farther west, where my brother and Charmaine lived. But James loved everything about it—the history, the views, the proximity to subways,

the authentic urban feel of the neighborhood. We decided to buy it. We would have to wait more than a year for the apartment to be ready for us— the norm in large building conversions.

My primary assets were held in two trusts that could be accessed, with the trustees’ consent, for a legitimate purpose. I asked the trustees of the smaller trust, given to me by my mother’s stepfather, for permission to use the trust’s assets, in their entirety, to buy the apartment. They agreed. When we closed, I listed my name and James’s name as joint owners, even though he had not contributed to the purchase. I was happy to be able to do it. It felt like an offering to him, to our marriage, to the family we were going to create. And I thought that was what you did when you were married—share everything.

—

I started trying to get pregnant the same year. I was serious about it, testing for ovulation, taking my temperature daily, creating charts. James was equally excited to have a baby. It took eight months, the wait increasing our excitement when I finally got a positive test on August 25, my father’s birthday. My appointment to check for a heartbeat was scheduled for September 12, 2001.

I witnessed the terror attacks of September 11 from the south-facing picture window in my office on Beach Street, twenty blocks from the World Trade Center. After the second plane hit the South Tower, I called James at his office in Midtown. I was still on the phone with him when the towers fell. I screamed.

James left his office and started running south, in his shirtsleeves and nice shoes, against a tide of people walking north, away from the wreckage.

He ran four miles to get to me, earning hot, bleeding blisters that stayed on his feet for weeks. When he arrived at my office, we held each other amid the sounds of sirens—police, fire, EMS—racing down Varick Street.

Within an hour, we knew we had to leave the area, to join the tide moving north. My brother drove us and Charmaine uptown, retracing

James’s steps back up Park Avenue, to Susan’s apartment. When James and I looked at each other in the bright sunlight of the Upper East Side, we saw that we were covered in ash. It had settled on us during the short walk to my brother’s garage.

My obstetrician kept my appointment the next day. James and I waited outside her office on East 67th Street, sitting together on the curb, watching a line of people form at a blood bank across the street. Only a day after the attack, New Yorkers still believed there were survivors, that there would be people they could help.

My doctor let us into the building, into her empty office, and did the ultrasound. We heard the steady thump of Finn’s heartbeat. As we exited her office, we felt strange, our happy secret in my belly, shocked again by the reality of what had happened, our fear about what was to come. I felt James’s protection in the face of the unknown, his care for me, and I clung to it, I clung to him, the same way I would nineteen years later, during the first days of the pandemic.

We stayed at Susan’s apartment for three weeks while Tribeca remained evacuated. When we returned to our rental on Worth Street in October, the air was thick with a terrible smell—organic, metallic, human. James bought air purifiers, believing they were enough to protect me and the baby, but I was too anxious. We moved back uptown for another month, returning for good in November.

I loved being pregnant and had a voracious appetite. Once we were back in our apartment, we went to Chinatown twice every weekend for barbecued pork buns, my most intense craving. I took the subway uptown for the Melon’s bacon cheeseburgers of my youth, and to Häagen-Dazs for hot-fudge sundaes.

As my due date approached, I started to feel uncomfortable. I was gaining weight rapidly (a rate faster than I could blame on my eating), and I had a sharp pain under my right ribs. My obstetrician dismissed my complaints, and I progressed to almost forty weeks, with an increasing sense that something was wrong. When I went into labor, a resident diagnosed me with HELLP syndrome, a variant of preeclampsia that results

in the death of the mother or baby in twenty-five percent of cases. The pain under my ribs was my liver, swollen with toxins. I was induced and the labor was frightening, my blood pressure skyrocketing with every contraction. My mother, Susan, and James were all there, all scared. For reasons I still don’t understand, the obstetrician on duty (not my doctor) decided against a C-section.

Finn was born at 3:43 p.m on May 4, two days before my thirty-third birthday. I was shocked when they announced his sex; I was certain he would be a girl. As James held our new baby, he wiped away a tear and said, “I recognize him.” They were identical, father and son: the same nose, eyes, chin. Finn was healthy, but I was not yet in the clear, experiencing HELLP episodes for several days, a phenomenon my obstetrician told us was impossible. She didn’t come to see me until James demanded it on the third day. It was one of the only times I had ever heard him yell.

James was fully engaged with newborn Finn. He changed his diapers, sang to him with his guitar, and carried him proudly around our neighborhood in our BabyBjörn. We spent hours trying to get Finn to sleep, taking turns rocking him, pacing the length of our apartment. James started filming Finn with a small video camera and, with the help of a friend, created a movie for his first birthday—footage of him in the bath, crawling in the hallway of a hotel in Miami, on James’s shoulders at the beach in Water Mill. James added a soundtrack specific to Finn—“Moon River” (the song he sang to my pregnant belly), Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” and Faith No More’s “We Care a Lot.”

Finn was seven months old when we moved into our new apartment on Broadway, just before Christmas in 2002. Susan helped us pay for a decorator who designed it in the minimalist style James and I liked, adding things from my family—my father’s brass mirror above the fireplace, his treen objects placed among our combined books, photographs from both my father and grandfather in the hallways—Diane Arbus and Paul Strand joining Sally Mann. We had a playroom, a laundry room with two stacked washers and dryers, a den. James had a proper office with a sitting area.

We were both eager for another baby. We started tracking my ovulation cycle in careful charts for the second time, again waiting almost a year for a positive test. I had Evie in December 2004, a tiny, happy girl who sprouted white-blond hair and, eventually, huge front teeth. She was strong-willed as a toddler, certain of what she liked and didn’t like, refusing most solid foods until we gave her bacon. We debated having a third child, unsure if we could handle it, but after Evie turned two, James called me from work and said, “Let’s go for it. I’m a family man. I want another.” I was thrilled; three kids felt like a commitment to a busy and happy life, different from my quiet childhood. Carrie was born in 2007. She was a sweet and easy baby.

Unlike her brother and sister, she fell asleep immediately at night, her thumb in her mouth. She was in love with Evie from the moment she laid eyes on her. And Evie took her on, acting as a second mother, teaching her how to tie her shoes, how to wash her hands.

James was excited about each pregnancy. He gave me heparin shots, prescribed after a hematologist tied my HELLP syndrome to a blood- clotting disorder. He brainstormed girls’ names with me. He brought me lattes and Krispy Kreme doughnuts on Sunday mornings and took Finn to play soccer in City Hall Park when I needed a nap. He was with me in the delivery rooms both times and sang “Moon River” to each girl as they were being cleaned up, before they were placed in my arms.

—

After Evie was born, James was promoted to president at the investment firm where he worked. As his professional obligations became more intense, he slowly, almost imperceptibly, moved away from doing things with the kids. He often came home late, exhausted, wanting only to eat dinner and go to bed. I could hear his footsteps from my perch in one of the kids’ rooms where I was nursing a baby or trying to get a toddler to sleep. I could hear him opening the freezer, the ice clinking as he made himself a cocktail, always Svedka vodka on the rocks.

He didn’t like the mundane tasks of taking care of kids and often said, with some humor, “I don’t do bath, bed, or homework.” And he didn’t.

Work came first, always. I knew other husbands like this, working seven days a week, but James seemed to be one extra degree of hardworking, one more turn on the dial of work obsessed. And I never forced him to engage or help. I let him skip curriculum nights, parent-visiting days, and most parent-teacher conferences. He went into the office every weekend, no matter what was going on with the kids.

We had made an unspoken bargain: he would work all the time and I would take care of the kids all the time. I resented this sometimes, usually when I was stressed, when one of the kids was sick, or when they were melting down over something. But most of the time, I liked his fervent commitment to his work. It was impressive, and it seemed honorable to me, to put so much time in, to be such a dutiful employee, to be working so hard for our family’s long-term financial security. It felt like he was taking care of us, each time he put on his suit, each time he labored at his desk on a Saturday.

And I had help. I hired Tenzin as a babysitter when Finn was two months old. She was a few years younger than I was and had a daughter the same age as Finn. She didn’t have much experience in childcare, but I liked her immediately. She was smart and warm and had a calm manner.

Absolutely nothing fazed her; she was the opposite of me as a mother. I was very nervous, anxious about safety and schedules, always unsure if I was doing it right. When Finn was a baby, Tenzin didn’t have much to do; I took him to all his Music Together classes, to his doctor’s appointments and playdates. I could barely take my eyes off him. But after the girls were born, Tenzin and I were both busy, going in various directions for activities, splitting bedtime duties, alternating making dinner. It was the easy version, the privileged version, of stay-at-home motherhood. Still, my days felt full, often frantic, managing the kids and our life as a family.

Even as he receded from daily parenting, James was a kind and sweet father, taking on the role of a visiting celebrity, delighting the kids with his presence. He was always happy to see them, breaking into a smile when

they ran into a room, embracing them, giving them nicknames—“Finshwin” for Finn, “Babyface” for Evie, “Chichikakutani” for Carrie, I can’t remember why. He was never critical of them, never angry. He took Finn to hockey practice at 5 a.m. on Saturday mornings for several years, and to Rangers games, where they wore matching jerseys. He brought the girls to musicals—they saw Mamma Mia! five times—and for soup dumplings in Chinatown, rating each restaurant in a black-and-white composition book.

He started sourcing Halloween candy in September, looking for hard-to- find brands of sour candy to fill our bowl. He took each kid on trips alone— Carrie to LA, Finn to Iceland, Evie to Rome. James and Evie walked so many miles together on their trip, he framed a map for her, a red line tracking the ground they had covered. He continued to make movies of our life as a family, using the footage we both collected, first on video cameras and later on iPhones, including scores of his favorite music—Luna, Pavement, Dinosaur Jr. He made one for every year, from 2003 to 2018.

The kids went to nursery school on Duane Street and then to a coed Episcopal school on Fourth Avenue, a place with uniforms and a traditional curriculum, similar to the schools James and I had attended uptown. The kids each started in junior kindergarten, tiny four-year-olds in navy pants and jumpers, white shirts with school crests. They made friends, as did I, and the school became a home for us. I volunteered as a class parent, sold doughnuts at the fall festival, ran the book fair.

I tried to keep some kind of professional life going, making sure I did the hours of continuing education to keep my law license active, volunteering one day a week at a domestic violence nonprofit. I served on school boards, including the kids’ school and the boarding school I had attended, the latter a consuming role, requiring several days in New Hampshire every quarter. I co-chaired the board of a local education nonprofit. I developed an expertise in board governance. Once Finn reached high school and the girls were both in middle school, I started doing pro bono juvenile immigration cases with the mother of Evie’s best friend, also a former big-firm lawyer.

But I never went back to paid work. James’s job, combined with my anxiety about being available for my kids, made a return to the workforce feel impossible, like the road was blocked. I felt increasingly unskilled as a lawyer, and I had a glaring gap in my résumé. I sometimes felt like the worst kind of fraud; I was neither working nor a proper stay-at-home mother, since I had help with childcare and housework.

In 2012, a former colleague offered me a job at a large foundation he’d been hired to run. He believed in my competence, even while I didn’t, and my skills seemed to be a fit. I was torn, but James was clear. He said, “You can’t do that. You need to be here for the kids.” The speed of his response, the lack of discussion, was startling. I had hoped he would encourage me to accept the job, that he would say, “Don’t worry. We will figure it out. I will help.” I felt a flash of resentment, but it shifted quickly. He was right. I needed to be home. We had to prioritize James’s career. It was the way our family functioned. I turned down the job.

Most of the time, I was proud of my decision to stay home. I felt a rush of happiness every time I picked the kids up from school, seeing them in line to shake their teachers’ hands, watching them grin as they spotted me waiting. I liked making them dinner, reading them books, baking Valentine’s treats for their class. I hated parenting sometimes too—the frustrations, the meltdowns, the small failures. And I don’t think I was always good at it. I lost my patience often. I hated the endless hours at the playground. I often worked on my laptop while my kids played on the floor next to my desk, reluctantly joining them when they begged me to sit down.

But I felt like I was doing something important just by being there. I was giving them what I had longed for when I was a child.

—

After she divorced my father in 1972, my mother moved us to an apartment at 10 Gracie Square on the East River. It was a beautiful building, prewar and grand, but there was something foreboding about it. A car tunnel ran through its belly, from the entrance on East 84th Street to the exit on 83rd

Street, and there was a deep, wide gulch between the building and the East River Esplanade, like a moat, filled with garbage no one would ever be able to reach. The building later became known for two suicides, one a young man, the other an older female writer. When I heard about the deaths, I thought about the darkness of that gulch, the private place to land.

Our apartment was in the middle of the building, in the second of three lobbies. It was called a “maisonette” because it occupied the first and second floors, with the front door off the lobby. It felt huge, with five bedrooms and a wide, curved staircase leading to the second floor. My mother loved rattan and bamboo furniture and there was a lot of it, along with sisal rugs and furniture upholstered in green, brown, and orange, her favorite colors. The dining room, almost as vast as the living room, was lined with kumquat trees. My mother’s bedroom faced the river; my brother’s and mine were on the other side, facing a maze of air condensers.

There was a long hallway dividing us. My mother had a wide arrow painted in that hallway, stripes of primary colors, directing us from our side to hers.

As a young divorcée, my mother was scared and overwhelmed, trying to build a life alone with two toddlers. She enrolled at Sarah Lawrence and finished her BA, doing homework as we clamored around her, climbing onto her lap. After getting her college degree, she became an urban planner, first working for William Whyte, a pioneer in creating public spaces, and then on the team charged with developing Battery Park City. It was her deepest calling. She loved deciding how wide a brick in the esplanade should be, how narrow the arm of a bench, how to make spaces useful and enjoyable. In 1990, after getting her master’s degree from Columbia, she was appointed to the City Planning Commission, and in 2002, Mayor Bloomberg made her the chair of the commission and head of the city’s planning department, positions she held for twelve years. She was known for walking the streets of every neighborhood—she was familiar with every storefront, every streetlight—and for being tough with developers, demanding they add public spaces adjacent to their skyscrapers. She helped create the High Line elevated park and promenade and the Greenpoint- Williamsburg Waterfront, among other projects that transformed the city,

but she is most proud of leading the most extensive rezoning of the five boroughs since 1961. Even now, she continues to work full-time, traveling the world, from Tampa to Turin, advising city governments on planning.

My mother fought hard against the tide of expectation of who she would be, and she succeeded, creating a life that is true to her essential nature. She has (almost) extinguished the moniker of “socialite,” attached to her since her glamorous days in the Dakota, an identity she hated.

My mother is very smart and hardworking. Her career success is not surprising. But I think part of her intensity, part of her ambition, was wanting to leave her mark on the world after a childhood of feeling invisible. She grew up at Kiluna Farm, the Paleys’ estate in Manhasset, Long Island, with her older brother, two half-siblings, and, sometimes, her stepbrother and stepsister. The six children lived with nannies in a house they called “the cottage,” not with their parents. My mother saw her own mother only once a month, when she would appear in the cottage to put the kids to bed. Her mother never hugged or kissed her. She never touched her at all. Her distance was consistent with the era, with that world; parents did not consider children central to their lives. And the demands of my grandmother’s marriage were significant. But, still, the neglect, the coldness, is difficult to explain, difficult to excuse.

Despite her childhood wound, my mother was warm, loving, and affectionate with me and my brother. She wanted to do it right, to be interested in us, to hug us, to create memories with us. She put us to bed often, singing to us, checking on me late at night when I developed childhood insomnia. She made us crepes with apple jelly on Christmas morning and brought us toast with raspberry jam, cut into strips, when we were sick. She filled our pantry with the junk cereals I loved and stocked the fridge with Sunkist, my brother’s favorite soda. She cared about our report cards and visited us in boarding school. She could be short-tempered when she was anxious, and she was always slightly guarded—her childhood made intimacy hard for her—but her mothering was a 180-degree shift from what she had been given herself.

When she was in her twenties and thirties, my mother was pursued by many men. She dated a succession of them until she met Stan, a tall, white- haired mogul who had founded a famous media company. Stan moved in with us in 1975, when I was six, appearing at breakfast in his bathrobe, my mother making him fried eggs. My brother and I loved him. He gave us a big and exciting life, introducing us to Pelé at the Meadowlands, taking us to the premiere of Superman, traveling by helicopter to his house in East Hampton and by private jet to his company’s villa in Acapulco. But what we really loved was his presence, his way of being. He was all warmth and fun, and he wanted to be with us. He insisted we have family dinners. He waded into my brother’s tantrums and my meltdowns with a fatherly gentleness. He spent hours with us on the floor, playing Battleship, Mastermind, the French card game Mille Bornes. He had two older kids who made short appearances, adding to the feeling that we had a complete family.

My mother and Stan married in 1979, after four years of living together, and divorced in 1981, separating the month we moved into a new apartment on Park Avenue (we spent only one night there). My mother left him, for reasons I now understand, including infidelity. But my brother and I felt the loss deeply. It proved too hard for Stan to keep seeing us, especially after he remarried, and he gradually faded from our lives. After he died of prostate cancer in 1992, his wife sent us two of his ties, mementos we suspected went to hundreds of people (he had a lot of ties). We weren’t invited to his private funeral. It made sense; we hadn’t seen him for several years and we were ex-stepchildren, a label without importance. But it hurt.

After her divorce from Stan, my mother had a series of boyfriends, each one joining us for a time, competing with us for her attention. I didn’t like this, the appearance of new men in the apartment, on our vacations, at her rental houses in Connecticut. She met her long-term boyfriend, the one who would stay for thirty years, when I was in college.

As a shy and awkward kid, I didn’t have many friends and I had trouble convincing the friends I did have to walk the many long blocks east to our apartment. In his preteen years, my brother disappeared into the world of

Atari video games and then elected to go live with my father and Susan full-time until he went to boarding school. This left me on my own with our mother and our nanny.

At my mother’s apartment, we always had a live-in nanny. The first was Cece, an older woman who was partially blind, and then Rose, a woman from Northern Ireland who moved in when I was in third grade. Rose spoke with an Irish lilt, wore very tight jeans, even tighter sweaters, and dyed her hair platinum blond, using a box of Clairol every month in our shared sink.

She said she was thirty, but I suspected, based on the lines in her face, that she was much older. She was very strict and very mean.

Rose made me go to Saint Stephens, our local Catholic church, at least three times a week, insisting I put my allowance—two folded dollar bills— in the wicker basket they brought around during Mass, forcing me into the confession booth long before I had sins to confess. She brushed my hair after my required nightly showers, pulling far too hard, yelling if I had a single knot (I had many), ignoring my tears, sometimes hitting the side of my head with the hard part of the brush. She told me I was stupid when I didn’t know that the stain in my underwear was my first period.

I was terribly embarrassed to have a nanny at all, especially one who was waiting for me outside my school, side by side with the stay-at-home mothers. When I was in second grade, in a scheme to stop my nanny from picking me up, I told my mother that all my classmates were taking the public bus alone, and she agreed to let me do it. At eight years old, I boarded the 86th Street crosstown bus, early in the morning and after school, knowing where to get off only because of certain landmarks, like the orange curtains in the window of the Madison Avenue deli.

For years, I didn’t say anything to anyone about Rose’s meanness, or about my embarrassment in having a nanny. I endured it silently, knowing that Rose would make things harder for me if I complained. Finally, when I turned fourteen, I told my mother everything, confessing my torment all at once as she stood in her bathroom applying mascara. I described the punishing hours at church, the hairbrush, the small comments Rose made to me about my appearance, about my lack of friends.

My mother had no idea. She fired Rose that day.

After that, my mother stopped going out. She cooked dinner for me every night, using long-dormant skills she’d acquired as a young woman studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. She made perfectly grilled lamb chops and buttery mashed potatoes, veal scallopini with rice in a champagne cream sauce, always comforting food that she prepared quickly and easily.

I’d set the table, pour her a glass of wine, and we’d watch Family Feud as we ate, competing to hit the buzzer first, slapping our hands on the table.

Growing up, I had three parents who loved me. They called me every night when we were apart. There was fun, there was happiness. But there was also a lot of quiet. My mother’s apartment always felt dark, shut down, like it was abandoned or waiting for a real family to arrive. I remember many solitary afternoons and evenings, doing my homework at my little desk with a rolltop cover, reading Deenie and Harriet the Spy on my bedroom floor, spending hours watching sitcoms, The Love Boat, and MTV, alone on my mother’s bed. I had a running commentary with myself, creating stories, imaginary friends, trying to keep myself company.

I yearned, deeply, for a normal family, a stay-at-home mother, a lively household with many kids, a life with no divorces, no mean nannies, no split time, no loneliness. So, I became what I’d always wanted for myself: a mother who stood in the schoolyard, day after day, waiting for her kids, with chocolate chip cookies in her hand.

—

Susan, my brother, and I sold our house in Water Mill in 2005. After my father’s death, we’d tried to share the house, but it brought out a host of tensions between us, primarily over the high cost of maintaining it. When a Wall Street titan made an incredible offer, we agreed it was time to sell. It was hard to let go of the house; it felt like letting go of my father. But it was also liberating to leave it behind. James and I didn’t feel at ease in the Hamptons, at least not the modern version of it, which involved a lot of competing, dressing up, and traffic.

There was an expectation that we would have a country house, a place to go in the summer, a replacement for Water Mill. Most of our peers in New York, nearing forty, were buying summer homes. It wasn’t just expectation; we wanted it—a respite from the city, a place to define ourselves, an investment in our life as a family. But we weren’t sure where to go.

One night in our new apartment, my friend Lynn and her husband came over for dinner. Lynn and I had been close since boarding school, part of a tight group of six friends that also included Anna.

Lynn asked, “How about the Cape? Or the Vineyard?” She and her husband had just bought a house on Cape Cod. They spoke about the magic of New England summers, the clamming and the crabbing, the beaches and the sunsets.

James and I looked at each other. Somehow, we hadn’t thought of the Vineyard, even though we both had history on the island. James had spent his childhood summers at his grandparents’ house in Edgartown. They’d sold it in the late 1980s, putting the proceeds into a small apartment in Manhattan, a trade that haunted James because he associated it with his family’s financial decline. I’d spent the summer after my freshman year in college living in a ramshackle house in Vineyard Haven with six other girls, all of us working for a landscaping company. We spent our days weeding and mulching the yards of expensive houses and the late afternoons drinking peach wine coolers with the guys who mowed the lawns. We hitchhiked between towns and beaches, covering ourselves in the clay from the cliffs of Aquinnah, then named Gay Head. People called us “the seven island sisters.” I loved it.

That night, after Lynn and her husband left, James and I looked for houses online. We found one that was listed by four different agents, on a lake five minutes outside of Vineyard Haven, a location that appealed to James—he could have a mooring for a boat, and the lake had a cut to the open water of Vineyard Sound. He loved boating. He kept a small Boston Whaler in Battery Park, taking it out every weekend to explore different canals and waterways around Manhattan and Brooklyn.

James flew up to see the house during a snowstorm in February. I couldn’t go because Evie was only six weeks old. The broker picked James up at the airport and drove him down a long, snow-covered dirt road to the house.

He called me an hour later, as I sat nursing Evie. He said, “The house is a little weird, but the rest of it is magic.”

We learned the house had been on the market for five years (thus the multiple listings), and the price, though still significant, had just been reduced. A local contractor had built the house on spec, designing it to mirror the double-doored, vaulted-ceilinged living room of Chip Chop, an estate owned by Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer directly across the lake.

The contractor built it as his dream house, and it had a distinctly wintry feel, with black countertops and an enormous brick pizza oven in the kitchen, and big splintery beams cutting the height of the ceiling in the living room, like a large ski chalet. And it was all upside down: the kitchen, living room, and primary bedroom were upstairs; the other bedrooms were downstairs.

As James walked across the lawn and out onto the dock, talking to me on his cell phone, he sounded elated. He spoke about raising our kids there, spending summers on the lake, adopting the island as our own. And doing our own thing, different from the Hamptons, different from my childhood. I was swept up with him, with his joy and certainty. We decided to make an offer, even though I had not seen the property. Within a few hours, our offer was accepted. I wired the money for the down payment.

My family thought I had lost my mind, leaving them, leaving the Hamptons, for an island they kept confusing with Nantucket, for a house I had never seen. I liked surprising them, making it clear that my priorities were James and our young family, making it clear I trusted James’s opinion, his gut instinct about what was right for us.

My last trust, from my father’s father, one that would have gone to my father if he were alive, matched the purchase price exactly, minus a small mortgage. The trustees agreed to release the funds. When we closed, I did exactly what I had done with the apartment: I listed James and myself as

joint owners. I was happy to contribute something so meaningful to our family, to cure, in some way, James’s heartache over having once lost a house on the very same island. And after five years of marriage, I believed even more strongly in our partnership, in our commitment to each other.

I finally saw the house in April. I carried baby Evie in my arms as James showed us each room, going up and down the stairs, his excitement palpable, nearly euphoric. As we stood in the living room, looking out at the lake, I put Evie on the floor in her car seat. Only a few minutes later, I looked down and saw that her pale skin was covered, head to toe, with hundreds of mosquitos. They were the result of an untended pond on the property, a mosquito breeding ground. I thought, Oh my God, what have we done?

We hired a contractor to remove the pizza oven, the black countertops, the beams. We added bead boarding, painted the walls and ceilings white, and stained the floors dark. We combined “his” and “hers” bathrooms into one large one. We filled in the mosquito-infested pond and thinned trees to see more of the lake. We enlisted the interior designer who worked on our apartment to decorate the house in blue and white, with some red, all comfortable and welcoming of small kids and wet bathing suits.

On the Vineyard, it is common to give a house a name, something related to the area, the road, a nearby body of water. James suggested we use the Indigenous name for our land, “Meadowpath,” a word he discovered in the closing process. He designed a Meadowpath sign—navy and white, a wide V in the right corner to symbolize an osprey—and used an electric drill to secure it to our gate. The name became our most prized word. We used it for email addresses, streaming passwords, stationery. It symbolized everything we had built together—home, family, security, love.

—

We moved into the house with Finn, then four, and Evie, then eighteen months, in June of 2006. A colleague of James’s told him about a private tennis club, located only five minutes away from our new house. It was a

generational place—populated by families who had been coming for decades, from Boston, Washington, DC, New York. It looked like the Adirondacks with lots of trees and simple wood buildings with dark green trim. There was an inn, a playground, a clubhouse, three piers, a small shop with penny candy. Members wore all white on the tennis courts and gathered for cocktail parties in linen blazers and colorful dresses. I resisted it at first; it felt intimidating in its clubbiness, its insularity. My family had never joined country clubs on principle, and I didn’t play tennis. But James was wild about it—the tennis culture, the people, the feel of the place, the life it would provide for our family. Since I wasn’t working and the kids were little, we decided that I would stay on the island for the summer and James would commute on weekends. The kids needed a camp and friends, so I agreed that we should apply for membership at the club. We became guest members, on trial for three years until we could apply for full membership.

I dropped Finn off at the club’s camp every morning in his green Celtics jersey and shorts, the only outfit he would wear that summer. I felt shy, not sure how to meet other parents, how to create friendships for the kids and myself. There was something about the club—even the playground—that felt impenetrable; everyone seemed to know one another, to have plans, to engage in traditions we knew nothing about. That first summer, James and I had no social life, neither invited anywhere nor extending invitations. We stayed home, eating dinner with the kids, inviting family and friends from New York to visit us every weekend, running what felt, at times, like a hotel.

Eventually, slowly, we got to know the parents of our kids’ friends, then their friends, and we started to be accepted. We became permanent members. And then we embraced all of it. Finn and Evie rode their bikes a mile up the dirt road to meet up with gangs of kids their age. I held Carrie on my hip as I dropped them off at camp and tennis clinics. We jumped off the pier into Vineyard Sound in the late afternoons. The kids did the bunny hop and the limbo at club dances. We went to bonfires and sang folk songs.

We combed one of the club’s small beaches for sea glass and multicolored

marbles, the latter an offering from a family who launched hundreds of them from their deck into the water. I hosted an art class, hiring a local teacher, and invited kids of all ages to paint large canvases on our lawn. Our sixteen-year-old babysitter went to pick up a dozen pizzas while I poured white wine for the mothers, who were now my friends.

James and I socialized throughout the summer, attending cocktail and dinner parties every weekend. The couples were kind and a lot of fun. We kept an eye out for one another’s kids, bandaging scraped knees, giving gentle scoldings when we saw them biking without helmets. Later, when the kids became teenagers, we helped one another track them down at midnight and shared harrowing stories of their first encounters with alcohol.

The women were universally well-educated, but most, like me, had left the workforce. This felt good; in New York, I felt conflicted, and embarrassed, about having paused my legal career. I didn’t feel this way on the Vineyard, surrounded by smart women who had made the same choice. There was a sense of being exactly where we should be, giving our kids a magical experience, where they could roam freely, safe and protected, summer after summer. At the time, I didn’t pay attention to the fact that almost everyone at the club was married. Out of more than a hundred people, I knew of only three who were single or divorced.

James flew up to the island every weekend and stayed for a week in early August. Many of the other husbands at the club kept the same schedule. On Friday evenings, he appeared as the sun softened, walking toward the house carrying his briefcase, his jacket on his arm, his shirtsleeves rolled up, grinning. The kids and I ran down our brick path to hug him, our dog jumping up on our huddle. He grilled hamburgers for the kids while I made pasta, their favorite meal and our Friday-night ritual, the burgers always without buns at the kids’ request, the juices mixing into the pasta. James made himself his cocktail of vodka on the rocks, poured me a glass of wine, and we sat on our porch watching the sun set, on the left side of the lake’s cut in June, on the right by early September. The kids ran around the lawn with Popsicles and soccer balls until it was dark.

James discovered that the shallow area of the lake was rich with clams.

We bought a shellfish license from town hall and spent many weekend afternoons feeling out the hard shells with our toes, the kids diving below the surface to collect each one. James made linguine alle vongole, spending hours on the broth, chopping the clams and piles of parsley, saving the smallest, prettiest clams to adorn the top of the bowl. He found grape leaves on our property and stuffed them with a mixture of ground beef and herbs, folding them with an obsessive meticulousness, and grilling them on our deck. He took us on boating adventures every weekend on his new Chris- Craft: tubing in Lambert’s Cove, up to Menemsha for lobster rolls from Larsen’s and fried shrimp from the Bite, over to Silver Beach on Naushon Island to see my boarding-school roommate, a member of the family that owned the island. James played a lot of tennis, often twice a day, becoming friends with other husbands who were equally passionate about the sport.

In 2008, Susan bought us an eight-acre plot of land adjacent to our house. We wanted to secure our privacy and have space for the kids to build houses as adults. The new plot was all forest—oak trees, pine trees, brush.

James was entranced with it. He created winding paths, pruned trees with a long pole saw, and sprayed every weekend for poison ivy, wearing a Roundup backpack with a nozzle. He said it would take him many years to make the paths perfect for the girls’ weddings. He imagined walking them through the woods to a small beach on the lake, steps from the osprey pole.

He named the beach for Finn, and carved Evie’s initials in a fallen tree trunk beside the boardwalk. He found boulders in the woods and named them for each kid, the biggest for Carrie. He taught them how to find their rocks using his carefully tended paths.

He kept investing in our Vineyard imprint, year after year. In 2018, he designed a large addition to the garage to house his extensive collection of motorcycles and forestry equipment. He included a garden on top of the addition for me, raised beds we filled with herbs and tomatoes and flowers.

In 2019, he planted blueberry and raspberry bushes on the edge of the property, plants that take several years to bear fruit.

—

As we raised the kids in New York, James and I were firmly in the present tense, with days, weeks, years going by, both slowly and quickly. We played Whack-a-Mole with kid issues—a failed Spanish test, lice, science projects, stomach flus. I was covered in breast milk, then baby food, then spaghetti sauce; cribs gave way to toddler beds and then real beds; strollers were replaced by scooters, which were then given away. We planned our family vacations, first to easy destinations like Florida and then as far away as Hawaii. We decided which dinner invitations we would accept, which we would decline. We went out most Friday nights, just the two of us, always in our neighborhood. I loved these dinners. We always talked easily. It always felt fun.

We had normal stresses and two great heartbreaks. In 2011, Lynn, my best friend from boarding school, was diagnosed with a rare and terminal cancer when she was pregnant with her fourth child. She had a mastectomy, delivered her baby, and started chemotherapy to try to extend the time she had left—a maximum of two years. Another member of our group from boarding school had died thirteen years earlier from brain cancer. She and Lynn were very similar—athletic, outgoing, famously funny; it seemed unfathomable that we could lose them both. I vowed to be present for Lynn in a way I hadn’t been for our other friend, too immature in my twenties to really support her. Treatment tore Lynn down in all the big ways but also in very small ones—I can still hear her voice, having to say her name and birth date over and over again to doctors, nurses, and technicians at the hospital, waiting hours for a chemo bag or a scan, then driving in maddening traffic back to her house in the suburbs, trying to reserve some energy to be present for her kids, all younger than eight years old. She would call me often in the middle of the night, wanting to talk about her impending death, about the unbearable prospect of leaving her children. If I made any attempt to be positive, saying there would be a miracle, that she would live, she would say, “Flo, stop, I am going to die.”

I said goodbye to her on July 30, 2013, at her house on Cape Cod. I knew her death was imminent, but I was still undone by it, by the tidal wave of grief I felt when I was told the next day that she was gone, by the overwhelming sadness that remained for years afterward. James was loving and supportive, patient with my feelings, understanding what it felt like to lose such a close friend. He had carried the grief of Mark’s death for fourteen years at that point; it had become a part of him, dimming him in many ways—his joy, his hope for adventure, his pleasure in the unpredictable.

James’s father died in 2016 from an undiagnosed illness, most likely cancer (he had refused to go to a doctor). James sat at his bedside for two weeks, arranging round-the-clock nursing care, changing his father’s clothing and sheets himself, holding his father’s hand. James was heartbroken by the loss, crying in my arms. It was only the third time I’d ever seen him cry—the first when Mark died, the second when Finn was born. I felt like he was grieving both his father’s death and what had happened to his father in life—his breakdown, his financial failure, his retreat from the world.

During the ups and downs of our life together—as a couple, as parents —I felt like James and I were entirely united, a team riding the waves together, a deep current of love and commitment binding us, accompanying each other through life. When I felt mad at him, or frustrated with him, it never lasted for long. Within a couple of hours, I felt the sensation of love washing away any anger, any annoyance. It was a feeling I’d never had with anyone else.

—

As James moved deeper into the investment world, I handed more of our financial life over to him. He understood the stock market, balance sheets, taxes. He could have the conversations with bankers and lawyers that I hated. Bankers and lawyers had always been tied up, in my mind, with the turmoil of my father’s death. He told me how much money to wire into our

checking account every month, the amount to pay in taxes. He dealt with the gas company, the landscaper, the accountants, the bookkeeper— anything and everything to do with money.

James was protective of me financially, always speaking up for my interests with my family. He also kept a sharp eye on our spending. Our transfers into our checking account, always equal, were small numbers; we were often in overdraft after I paid our regular bills, requiring another transfer. James preferred this scenario because he thought it made us more aware of our spending, what he called our “burn rate.” He became agitated if our joint Visa bill was too high, a vacation too expensive. At hotels, he made me smuggle food to him from the breakfast buffet—hard-boiled eggs in paper coffee cups, a muffin in my pocket—so that we didn’t have to pay one more cover. He asked me to annotate our joint credit card bills, explaining each charge in tiny print. Because of his anxiety, his watchfulness, I hid some things—the kids’ clothes, their birthday and Christmas presents, my clothes—paying for them on my own credit card, the Amex I paid myself, the one we didn’t split, the one I didn’t have to show him. My family paid other expenses for us, including school tuition and college savings plans for each child. It felt like another offering to James, taking these weighty costs off his shoulders.

He had excessive moments too, usually when it related to his passions.

With his salary, he could finally afford to buy the things he loved and he didn’t hold back: a dozen rare Rolex watches, several motorcycles, rare coins, custom suits from Zegna, a small vintage boat that had been used in Live and Let Die, and expensive red wine, hundreds of bottles that we added to the ones I had inherited from my father, storing all of them in a climate-controlled facility in New Jersey. We acquired other things together —Berenice Abbott photographs of downtown I gave James on his birthday, pets (a gecko, multiple fish, a Goldendoodle), piles of our children’s artwork, books, Amex points—the stuff you accumulate when you are married, have kids, and have money. Our apartment, though still modern and minimalist, was filled with all of it. Layer upon layer of life, of comfort and security.

I paid our bills online and signed our tax returns, but slowly, I lost touch with both the big picture and the details of our financial life, depending on James to tell me what to do. I felt some shame about it, about not being involved, about not asking questions. But I was afraid I wouldn’t understand it, that it was too complicated for me, even though I was a former corporate lawyer. I settled into the vagueness, the luxury and privilege of not knowing.

And part of me liked it, the handing over. James’s care for our money felt like his contribution to our family, the way he showed his love and commitment to me and the kids. There was something romantic about it too —the smart and honorable man, the devoted husband and father, shouldering this part of our life. I had my own bucket of responsibility—the kids, their school, the meals, the homework, the bedtimes—so it made sense that he would take on our finances. We were dividing and conquering.

—

In 2015, when the kids were thirteen, eleven, and eight, James led the sale of the company where he was president, the one founded by my uncle, to another fund. James said the deal was a success, but not a big one. He had several offers for a new job but decided to go work for a hedge fund founded by a childhood friend, a famously successful enterprise housed in a handsome building in the Nolita neighborhood of downtown Manhattan.

James joined the firm in the spring of 2016. He did well there, rising quickly through the upper ranks, becoming the fund’s chief client officer and chair of the executive committee by 2018. He told me the fund elected partners every two years, in even numbered years. Partnership at a New York City hedge fund is a life-changing accomplishment; if the fund is successful, the partner’s take-home pay can be many millions of dollars a year. Given the firm’s geographic proximity to our kids’ school, several partners at the fund sent their children there. Their names always appeared at the top of the page of donors in the school’s annual report—a very small, elite group. They owned some of the most beautiful town houses in New

York. Partnership was something James and I talked about often, the goal of his career, the finish line, the reward, the reason for his absence from so many family responsibilities.

Two years after James started at the fund, in December 2018, I sat in a pew at the church attached to our children’s school, waiting for Evie’s eighth-grade Christmas pageant to begin. James called me on my cell phone.

“I didn’t make partner,” he said, his voice a low whisper. “They said I haven’t been here long enough. They said I would make it next time.” He sounded crestfallen. I sat between other parents and grandparents, the phone pressed to my ear, frozen.

I spoke as softly as I could, “When will that be?”

He answered, “Two years. December 2020.”

I was devastated for him, knowing how disappointed he was, knowing how long two years would feel.

—

Seven months after the pageant, in July 2019, we met with our lawyer at her office in Hudson Yards. She had shared an agenda for the meeting with us, a list of routine estate planning matters. The last entry on the list was “Extinguish Prenuptial Agreement.” Over the years, we had discussed getting rid of the prenup, agreeing that it was no longer fair to me, given James’s career success, given the fact that I had emptied my trusts to purchase our homes.

The morning of the meeting, as James brushed his teeth in our bathroom, he turned to me.

He said, “Let’s table the prenup for now. We have too many other things to do. Let’s focus on the wills. I want to leave everything to you. Not in trust for the kids.”

I was touched that he wanted to leave me his assets outright, a change from our prior plan. It didn’t seem like a problem to delay getting rid of the prenup, to wait for a better time.

I said, “Okay.”

At the meeting, our lawyer told us that Susan could no longer pay the kids’ school tuition; her assets were too depleted. We nodded, not surprised.

We’d had a long run, lucky to have this expense covered for us, along with their college savings plans. It was time for us to take it on.

After we discussed our wills, James stood up to leave. He said, “I have to get back to my office.”

Our lawyer never had a chance to say, “We can’t find the prenup.”

—

As James entered his fifties, he seemed to be in the prime of his life. He knew who he was and how he wanted to move through the world. He had become increasingly eccentric as the years went by, almost like he had shifted onto the spectrum, or into the mindset of a sixty- or seventy-year-old man, but he showed no embarrassment about it. He went to bed at 9 p.m. and tracked his sleep cycles obsessively on his Oura Ring, reporting the results to me every morning. He didn’t like small talk, and he was always the first to leave a dinner or cocktail party, entirely confident in his right to do so. He was more and more obsessed with forestry, with the ospreys, and with tennis. He played at a court in Grand Central on Tuesdays and Sundays and watched tennis on the Tennis Channel almost every night as he ate pretzels dipped in mustard. I felt protective of this side of him, wanting to shield and smooth over his awkwardness in social situations, with the kids, with my family. I thought this was my lot—a husband who was older than his years, maybe not so much fun, but someone I loved deeply. We would grow old together, welcoming grandchildren, spending more and more time on the Vineyard. He would follow the ospreys, clean the paths, trim the trees, sit with me as the sun set, content in the life we had built together.

He was even-tempered and steady throughout our marriage, rarely raising his voice. I never had to worry about moods or outbursts, as I had in my childhood. I felt intimate with him, emotionally and physically, from the first day to the last. Still, I was conscious that there was a piece of him that I

couldn’t quite reach, a chunk of mystery. I liked this, the unknown piece, the feeling that there was something I had not yet discovered about my partner of two decades. It was sexy. It kept me interested.

The image of the eccentric old man, the unreachable man, is not the complete picture, though. There was another side of James, one that emerged when he started working for the hedge fund in Nolita. He was friends with a group of wealthy men who were fellow tennis fanatics, men we both liked. He played with them at the Grand Central court and had drinks with them afterward at Cipriani, a restaurant overlooking the concourse and the clock, the site of our engagement, often missing our family dinners for another round. They went on trips together, tennis and hunting weekends, transported to every location on a private plane. James seemed more confident when he was with these men, even cocky. There was a sheen of entitlement when he returned home.

Our physical relationship, once so hot, cooled considerably over twenty years, but not in a way that felt cold. It always felt romantic between us, and tender. He was not always affectionate, but I felt his love like a vibration around us. Sometimes, even in the months right before he left, he would look at me across a table, stand slightly, and put his hand gently on my cheek, his mouth slightly open, the way he had looked at me, and touched me, the night of our first kiss. Even after two decades of marriage, I loved how he smelled, how soft his skin was, the way he walked. Whenever I saw him from afar, approaching on the street, or stepping into the school gym just in time for a play or concert, my heart leapt. He would sit down next to me on the bleachers and our hands would immediately intertwine, his cold from outside, mine warm. I’d put my head on his shoulder.

When we heard about infidelities and divorces, he assured me it would never happen to us. He said that we were different from other couples because we were so compatible, so similar—quiet, cerebral, happiest at home. He told me, every day, that he loved me. He asked me often, “I make you so happy, right?”

He never told me, not once, that he was discontent in our marriage, unhappy with me, or struggling in our life together.

I wonder now, Did I make up the love story, the tale of our commitment to each other, carrying it around under my arm like a prized book? I’d believed in that narrative, referring to it daily in my mind, telling others the story of how we met, how long we’d been married, confident that I was someone who had experienced true love, who had a marriage that was strong and happy. There was nothing tangible to refute it, no sign that the cord between us was broken, or even fraying, no indication that he was unhappy.

But what if the story I told myself wasn’t true? What if he always had a different story?