Wozniak looked at me and I felt my skin prickling as he continued. “Next thing I knew she was laughing. Hysterical, surreal. ‘I got you!’ she said, nearly spat it at me.” His face contorted in pain. I held my breath as I waited for him to go on. “My brain short-circuited,” he said finally. “The adrenaline, the shock. It was a knee-jerk reaction. I barely felt her weight against my hands before I realized what I’d done.”
His jaw began quivering and he stared at his feet. I couldn’t see his tears in the faint light, only his hand brushing them away. Soon, his entire body began to shake with convulsions, scary sounds coming out of his chest.
“I killed her,” he sobbed. “I pushed her to her death.”
I sat there in shock. My heart ached for Katya. Such a tragic, pointless way to go.
“I really cared for her,” he said in a coarse voice as if the words were being torn from somewhere deep inside him. “Any other patient, I would have dropped at the first red flag. But Katya . . . I got caught in her spell. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I wouldn’t admit it even to myself.”
With a whimper, he crumpled on the bed. A broken man.
I got up and made my way to the kitchen, where I flipped on the light and filled a glass with water and drank. When I returned, Josh had slumped to the floor and curled into a ball, pressing his palms against his ears. His sobs had subsided.
“You know I have to call the police, right?” I said.
He nodded. Closed his eyes. “I keep seeing her,” he said. “Standing there on the other side of the railing, her hair blowing in the wind. Her laughter rings in my ears. ‘I got you!’”
61.
LANA
NOW
“I’m so relieved you’re okay,” Tyler said, and stood up abruptly, rattling the silverware and glasses on the table. “I can’t believe you went to that guy’s apartment alone.”
I shrugged and sat down, ignoring Tyler’s outstretched arms. Was I making a mistake meeting with him? I’d been looking forward to my appointment with the lawyer this afternoon. I’d decided I should at least have a consultation, figure out what my options were. But my experience with Josh last night had muddied my mind and I’d awoken this morning thinking that I should sort things out with Tyler face-to-face before I spent money I didn’t have for legal advice. While still in bed, I’d called him, asking if we could talk in person. “There is nothing I’d like more,” he’d replied.
And so here we were, awkwardly sitting across from each other at Henry’s—our favorite weekend brunch place on Broadway, just a few blocks from the apartment. Thankfully, the sidewalk section was nearly empty at noon on a Wednesday even though it was a perfect day for outdoor dining: dry and breezy, the temperature only in the midseventies.
Tyler was wearing the faded blue T-shirt I liked so much on him because it made his eyes stand out. The idea that he’d put some thought into dressing for our lunch was touching. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. I had on a black wrap dress with a white jacket and sandals only because I was planning to go straight to the lawyer’s office from here and wanted to look professional. I should have skipped the lipstick, though. Hopefully, it wouldn’t give Tyler the wrong idea.
I’d told him briefly over the phone about my encounter with Josh last night, but that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. As soon as the waitress walked away with our orders, I leaned forward and fixed Tyler in my gaze. “I need to know the truth,” I said. “About Katya, about your teaching assistant—”
“I’ve been trying to explain, but you wouldn’t hear it.”
Here we go again, I thought, with that damn defensiveness. But I wasn’t here to fight him.
“Yes, that’s entirely my fault,” I said, forcing a lighter tone to my voice. “Please, can we accept that we both made mistakes and move on from there? This is not a competition. There are no medals awarded for the one who’s least guilty.”
“No?” He looked at me with a playful glint in his eye. “Damn.”
“No medals for making me laugh, either,” I said, chuckling despite myself.
He grinned back, relaxing his shoulders.
“And no penalties,” I continued, “so please just tell me everything. What the hell has been going on?”
He sighed. “It’s actually quite simple. I made one big mistake and then I made more mistakes trying to cover it up.”
“Spoken like a true philosopher,” I said, and looked at him pointedly. “But I need the details. About your relationship with Katya, with your—”
“First of all, you have to know I’ve had no relationship with Katya,” he said, his neck turning red with anger. “None. I haven’t touched her. I haven’t so much as accidentally brushed her shoulder. Whatever she told the Ombuds officer was a lie.”
Josh had already told me as much, but it felt good to hear it from Tyler. I exhaled and leaned back in my chair, a warm wave of relief spreading through my body like the herbal tea with honey and lemon my mother made me drink as a kid.
“Katya was just another one of my students,” Tyler went on.
Only you neglected to mention that detail to me, I thought, and had to bite my tongue before I said it out loud. If I wanted him to open up and be honest with me, I had to play nice, pretend I didn’t care.
But as he launched into the story of how he’d bonded with his TA, Rachel, after our miscarriage last fall—last fall, for Chrissake!—I found it hard to keep my composure. To avoid tearing up, I trained my eyes on the white picket fence behind him that separated the café area from the sidewalk. Not the kind of thing you’d expect to see on a busy New York City street. We’d been coming here for years but I’d never paid it much attention.
Tyler’s voice trailed off and I turned to see the waitress coming with our orders—kale salad with grilled shrimp for me and a chicken club sandwich for Tyler. I’d lost all appetite, but Tyler dug in as if he hadn’t eaten for days. I’d always envied his ability to compartmentalize.
Between bites he proceeded to explain that his relationship with Rachel hadn’t been sexual. “I wasn’t looking for an affair. I promise you that was the last thing on my mind.” He paused to swallow. “But it was a mistake anyway, opening up to Rachel. I should have talked to you, made it clear how sick and tired I was of all the fertility treatments. I never should have introduced a third person into the equation.”
Damn right, I thought.
I pushed the kale around my plate as he continued. “We’d become confidants of sorts and when her mother died, Rachel broke down. She was so distraught and I was trying to comfort her and before I knew it, we were kissing. I won’t lie, it felt good—”
“Christ, Tyler! Spare me the details.”
“Sorry, I thought you said you wanted details.” He brushed his hand through his hair, seemingly more confused than accusatory. He could be so smart about abstract ideas and so dense when it came to feelings and emotions.
I had to smile. “Not how-it-felt details.”
“Sorry,” he repeated. “What I mean is—nothing more happened. That was it. We’d crossed a line and we both knew it. We agreed she’d switch to a different adviser. It was to be the end. But . . .”
I leaned forward, my stomach clenched in anticipation. “But?”
“It turned out, Katya had followed us and snapped a photo. She threatened to show it to you if I didn’t cancel the cycle.”
I stared at him. “That was it? Katya had you for a kiss?”
“I know.” Tyler shook his head as if he, too, couldn’t believe it. “I should have just told you. But it wasn’t the kiss I worried about as much as Katya. I would have had to come clean about the whole damn thing.”
“You mean that she was your student?”
“I mean about the flyer,” he said, his hands crumpling the white paper over the tablecloth like the folds of an accordion. “
I knew you’d go ballistic if I told you about it. And rightfully so. The way Katya was acting . . . It confirmed your fears. You had been right and I didn’t want to hear you say it.” He let go of the paper and looked at me, his eyes red and moist. “I’m sorry,” he said yet again, and pursed his lips.
I was looking at him, my brain incapable of computing his words.
“What flyer?” I asked finally. “You didn’t put—?”
“I did,” he said, and looked down.
I rubbed my temples, trying to make sense of it all. “So it wasn’t just a coincidence that she happened to be a student at Columbia?”
He reached for my hand on the table and squeezed it. “I’m afraid not.”
The static in my ears grew louder than the Broadway traffic.
“I knew it had been a mistake,” he continued, “as soon as Katya showed up in my intro class. But even then I convinced myself that it wasn’t a big deal. That meeting me had simply stirred her curiosity about philosophy. I couldn’t have imagined how much worse it would get. When I found out that she’d been following me, I panicked. I mean she was talking about her baby. I realized—no matter what she wanted—we couldn’t continue with the cycle and have a baby with her eggs. Because she wasn’t just going to go away.” He swallowed before continuing. “I thought taking a break might actually be a good thing for you and me, an opportunity for us to start our life together from scratch in a month or two. And”—he looked down at his empty plate—“it stopped us from going ahead with the cycle without me having to fess up to my sins.”
I nodded, incapable of speaking. What was there to say? His intentions had been good. He’d meant to spare me pain, and that touched me. I stared at my salad, wilting in the sun. I had pushed all the shrimp to the side. “As hard as this is,” I said, “I wish we’d had this conversation back when she’d threatened you.”
“I know. I fucked up.” He took my hand in both of his and, looking into my eyes, said, “Will you ever forgive me?”
I held his gaze. Would I? It was hard to even think of it right now. Finally, I shrugged. His face seemed to fold; his hands relaxed their grip on mine.
“But if you still want to come to the doctor’s appointment with me,” I said, “I’ll be okay with it.”
He smiled and I realized then that I would forgive him. Of course I would. But would I ever be able to trust him again?
62.
LANA
LATER
The sky hung low and gray over the buildings. Gusts of wind swept through the streets and whipped the tree branches outside the window. It was starting to sleet. But the apartment was warm and cozy even if I had to turn on the lights at three in the afternoon.
Angie and I were on the couch, holding our babies and staring at my laptop on the coffee table in front of us. Her son was asleep but my daughter was getting fussy and I started rocking her. Penka had joined us on Skype from her kitchen in Sofia, where it was ten in the evening. I’d called to invite her to the christening in a month, hoping she would be able to spend a few days with us in New York.
“Angie will be her godmother,” I said, tilting my chin toward Angie. “Her son is only two months older than our girl.” My Bulgarian had gotten better as a result of my Skype calls with Penka. But I was finding it harder today, having to go back and forth, translating for Angie.
Penka had aged over the past nine months, the grief etched permanently on her face. And while she brightened up when she saw the baby during our video conversations, there was always a moment or two when a cloud of sadness would cross her face and she’d go quiet. I imagined it reminded her of Katya. Or of her son who had drowned so many years ago. How hard, how tortured Katya’s life must have been having carried the guilt of her brother’s death from such an early age with no one to support and comfort her. No wonder she’d unraveled in the end, overstepping all boundaries by stalking us and meddling in our lives. How could I blame her? It takes a mother to understand her desire to protect the life she’d helped conceive, her flesh and blood, at any cost.
Two weeks after the birth of my daughter, I’d gone to the George Washington Bridge with a long-stemmed rose to pay my respects and thank Katya for her gift. To my shock, a tall chain-link fence had been erected in front of the old barrier and connected to a netting that hung like a canopy over the pathway. A quick search on my phone confirmed what my eyes refused to believe. The Port Authority had installed a temporary fence last September, four months after Katya’s death, in an attempt to prevent suicides. There was no mention of murder in the article. A permanent fence was to follow.
I stood there, a cold lump swelling in my throat, as bicyclists rode by me in both directions. Only four short months earlier and Katya could still be alive, I thought as I pushed the rose through one of the links in the fence. I hadn’t told Penka about it and didn’t plan to.
The baby made a gurgling sound and Penka smiled and cooed to her from the screen. Her smile was big and warm, even if tinged with sorrow. But it was her eyes I kept staring at, the green almond-shaped eyes with which my daughter looked at me. Katya’s eyes.
They were of course very much my mother’s eyes, too, if not in color, then definitely in shape. I was quite apprehensive about my mother meeting Penka at the christening. The two women were so different. It was hard to picture them side by side. My imposing mother all made up—hair, makeup, silk scarf neatly wrapped around her neck—her chin jutting forward, shoulders pulled back, standing tall next to Penka, always casual in dress and demeanor, slumped over and weighted with grief. My mother could be so judgmental, so forward with her opinions whereas Penka was shy and demure. But they were born and raised on the same soil and spoke the same language and now shared a grandchild.
I made a mental note to speak to my mother and ask her for once to let go of her competitive streak and show Penka a little grace.
After the call, Angie and I sipped coffee while our babies slept. Outside, the wind seemed to have intensified, the sleet giving way to snow. A car alarm screeched somewhere down the street.
“So I see Tyler’s back on the piano,” Angie said, nodding toward the framed photo of the two of us on top of Kilimanjaro, our young faces flushed with the high of new love. “Are you guys getting back together?”
“We’re talking about it. It won’t be easy to move beyond the betrayals and the ghosts of the past. I do miss him, though, so we’ll see.” I kissed my little angel on her forehead before continuing. “But if we do, we’ll get married this time.”
She shot me a look, eyebrows up. “I thought you didn’t believe in that patriarchal shit.”
I shrugged. “I might have confused my fear of abandonment for feminism.”
When Angie left, I finished breastfeeding the baby, and as I headed for the bedroom to put her in her crib, I paused at the piano.
I’d arranged my photos in two sections—present and past. Front row center was a portrait of my daughter, one month old, flanked, on one side, by a shot of Angie and me pushing our strollers in Central Park and on the other, by a photo of me in the hospital, my newborn on my chest. Behind them, I had my mother on the beam at the Montreal Olympics, Tyler and me atop Kilimanjaro, and Katya and me on the swing at Mehanata. I could trace the beginnings of my baby from Montreal through Kilimanjaro and, finally, to a Bulgarian nightclub in New York. But those threads would not have come together without the flyer Tyler had posted on campus—even if behind my back and against my wishes.
So much in our lives hinges on random and not-so-random, big and small, happy and tragic events. Had Tyler not made the flyer, the two of us might have still been together. Katya might still have been alive. But how could I wish the past away if it meant the little girl I was cradling in my arms wouldn’t have existed?
I picked up the last frame on the piano and stared at the pink sheet of paper, the large black letters spelling the beginni
ngs of my daughter: Loving couple seeking egg donor from Bulgaria. I pictured Katya reading it, full of hope and excitement for a future she would never see.
But her gift lives on—our miracle baby. Alex.
Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to my grandparents, who weren’t able to go to high school, let alone college, but worked two jobs and saved every penny so that I could. I owe everything to you.
I would like to thank my agent, Lisa Grubka, who believed in this story when it was nothing more than an interesting premise. I’m deeply grateful for your guidance and continued support. My editor at Putnam, Margo Lipschultz, whose insightful comments and questions helped me make this book as good as it could possibly be. Thank you, Margo, and everyone at Putnam who assisted with this project, including Monica Cordova, who is responsible for this beautiful cover.
I’m indebted to my friend and critique partner, Kyra Robinov, who has read every iteration of this story. Many thanks to all my early readers, many of whom are dear friends: Phil Roosevelt, Svetlana Tsoneva, Fe Kagahastian, Gigi Griffis, Jessica Lewis, Amanda Skelton, Lynda Montgomery, Kristin Vukovic, Melissa Witcher de Jesus, and Andrew Skelton. This book wouldn’t have been possible without your feedback and encouragement.
Huge thanks to Detective Daniel Churla (NYPD) for his extraordinary patience with my questions and hypothetical situations. Also Jeff Guerrier, who helped me with the art citations and the daily tasks and duties of an art curator.
Thank you to all my writing teachers over the years: Leslie Sharp, Curtis Sittenfeld, Anthony Doerr, Susan Shapiro, and Taylor Larsen.
I’ve been blessed with a great support network of family and friends. Special thanks to my mother, who has always been my biggest cheerleader. I’m especially lucky and grateful to have my partner, Willy Burkhardt, who has read numerous versions of the novel, has endured endless dinner conversations about Katya, Lana, and Tyler, and has had to put up with me working at all hours of the day and night, during holidays and vacations. You’re my inspiration, my partner in crime.
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