“You’ll be fine,” Kate said. “What am I going to do, out in California, with my crazy aunt and uncle and a bunch of weird old shit?”
“You love weird old shit. You’re going to get super tan. And you can find all kinds of secrets about Miranda Brand and write a book. You can get a million dollars and buy one of those pink Victorian mansions. Go on all the TV shows. You’ll never come back to New York.”
That didn’t sound so bad. New York was contaminated now. Whenever Kate stood on her usual subway platform or passed a familiar bar, she remembered what it had been like to see those places before her life had tipped upside down. And she couldn’t get a job here, anyway, not at the Times or the Post or any place where Leonard Webb had friends, which was everywhere on the East Coast. California was an empty sheet on a clothesline, a place bleached clean of knowledge.
“I’ll mention you in my Pulitzer speech,” Kate said.
“Hell no, bitch. You’re aiming for the Nobel fucking Prize.”
Kate laughed and shook her head. Out the window in front of them, a sea of flat roofs stained with bird shit swelled out into the black snake of the East River. Beyond lay the tiered glow of the Williamsburg Bridge, the starry needles of Manhattan. The liquor store sign fizzing neon on the opposite corner. The smell of plantains and jerk chicken rising from the late-night Jamaican place down below. Out in the night, half a mile off, a helicopter hovered in the sky. Thump-thump-thump. The spotlight hunting its prey.
The sight made Kate shiver, and she said what she had been thinking for the past hour. “Those guys over there have been watching me.”
“Which guys?”
Without looking, Kate tilted her head to the kitchen, where several men in identical thick-framed glasses were standing in a small group. “They know about Leonard.”
Natasha glanced over. “No, they don’t.”
“They’re journalists.”
“They’re lawyers,” Natasha said. “I’ve met them before.”
“Maybe they’re with the firm that I talked to about suing.”
“They don’t recognize you,” Natasha said, her tone final, and Kate felt herself recoil in surprise. Natasha must have realized how she had sounded, because she hugged Kate around the shoulders and added in a softer voice, “I’m going to miss you.”
“I’ll miss you, too,” Kate said.
It was true and not true. She felt like she had been wearing a mask for years, and suddenly the elastic had snapped, and now she couldn’t hold it in place. She would miss Natasha, infinitely. They had been friends for more than ten years, had turned twenty and then thirty together, had consoled each other through heartbreaks and deaths and many daily disappointments. But now when Kate saw Natasha, she only remembered that morning when Natasha had come into her room to tell Kate (unwashed, unmoving, watching the radiator eat a circle of frost on the window) that she had called Kate’s mother to come pick her up and take her home.
She wouldn’t miss that. The shame of having been seen at her worst.
And she wouldn’t miss the carefulness she now heard in Natasha’s voice. Or this feeling she got sometimes, that on some level Natasha would be relieved to see her go.
Two sweaty arms wrapped around Natasha from behind. Her boyfriend, Liam, reclaiming her.
“You have to dance with me,” he said. “You love this song. Kate, you come, too.”
“Right behind you,” Kate said.
Natasha believed her, or pretended to, because within a few seconds she and Liam had vanished into the crowd. Kate turned back to the window and leaned farther out, propping her elbows on the greasy rail. She gazed down eight stories to the sidewalk below. It was cracked and dirty. A Styrofoam takeout container had been discarded on the pavement and smashed underfoot. Two floors down, someone’s hand flashed in and out of view as they gestured over the rail. A minnow thumbing through the silt.
Coming tonight had been a mistake. She should have stayed on the raggedy Craigslist couch in their living room, shaking and sweating beneath her borrowed duvet, waiting for things to get better. Forest animals did it when they hibernated: they made nests for themselves out of leaves and dug tunnels through the roots of trees, they put themselves into a dark warm place and slept through winters that could kill them. Only humans thought self-protection was a sickness. When Kate had been waiting out her winter, everyone told