I swallowed, wondering about Nick’s politics. If he was online, would he be one of those guys with an American flag in his profile and an insistence that there were only two genders underneath it? “You’re not entirely wrong. Yes, people pretend, and yes, they dogpile, and they edit the bad parts out of their lives. But that isn’t the only thing that happens. Young people—young women—get to tell their stories and find an audience.” Even as I spoke, I was thinking about the girl who’d asked, How can I be brave like you?, and how, so far, the best answer I’d come up with was telling her to fake it; how I’d told Ian Snitzer that social media was a place where everyone could pretend. I squeezed my hands together, thinking that if Nick and I somehow ended up together, I’d need to find a new line of work.
“I looked at your Instagram, on the bus ride down,” he said.
This did not fill my heart with joy. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. “You did?”
I braced myself for a discussion of my bar-fight video, or a critique of the posts that were basically ads—my spon-con—but Nick surprised me.
“I liked what you wrote about going out to eat with your dad. What’d you call it? Dinner on Sundays?”
“Sunday suppers!” I said, feeling marginally less miserable. For the past year, every Sunday, I’d posted about a place my father and I had visited together, either in the past or that very day. I’d write about what we’d eaten, or the route we’d taken, or some bit of history or current event from the region that had provided the meal.
“Did you and your dad really go out every Sunday?”
“We did, when I was a kid. Now it’s more like once or twice a month.” I thought about our meals: the fragrant exhalation of steam from a soft-bodied pork bun; the way my lips had tingled from the bird’s-eye chilis in the Thai dishes that had left my father and I both gasping. The sweet crunch of sugar on my favorite brioche, the subtle heat of Jamaican patties with their flaky bright-gold pastry crusts.
“Do you like to cook?”
“I do. Some people in New York don’t. They say it’s a waste, when you can just order any food you can ever dream of, and it’s probably better than what you could make at home, but I like cooking. My father loves to cook. He’s got a huge cookbook collection. You’ll see.”
Nick was easy to talk to. Easy to be with. The attraction that I’d felt on the Cape was still there. Of course, now it was tempered by the knowledge that he despised what I did online, mixed with a hint of terror that he might have killed my friend. I wondered why he was really here, in New York City, how much of it had to do with the father he couldn’t remember meeting and the half sister he’d never known at all, and how much had to do with me.
“What are your aunt and uncle like?” I asked him.
“They’re fine,” he said with his eyes on the ground.
“Fine?” I teased. “That’s all I get?”
He tugged at the knot of his tie. “Let’s see. My uncle owned an auto-body shop. My aunt was a claims adjustor at an insurance company. They’re both retired now. And they are fine. You know. Good people.” He was quiet again. Then he asked, “How well do you know him? Robert Cavanaugh,” he added, in case I was confused about the “him” in question.
“Hardly at all,” I said. “When I was in high school I spent a lot of time at Drue’s house. But he was never there. He traveled.”
Nick’s lips quirked upward in a thin, bitter smile. “I’ll bet.”
In that moment, I felt a great enfolding sympathy for him, a sorrow so piercing and complete it was hard to breathe. Had I really spent so many years feeling miserable because I was bigger than other girls, when there were people who’d grown up without their parents? Had I pitied myself because I’d failed at Weight Watchers, and because my high school BFF and I had fallen out, when there were people who’d found their own mother’s dead body on the floor? Had I fretted because I’d never been in love, and that I’d wasted two years on Wan Ron, when I had a mother and a father who loved me, who would have given me whatever help they could, who wanted nothing but my happiness?
I wanted to hug him; I wanted to cry; I wanted to tell him how terrible it was that his mother had been murdered and that his father was a stranger. Not just a stranger, but a preening, overbearing bully who’d cheated on his wife and slept with lots of other women. And, of course, I wanted to tell him how sorry I was that he was now a murder suspect. Except now I was one, too.
Instead of speaking, I reached for his hand. At first, Nick looked startled. Then, gratefully, he squeezed it back. Even in my sorrow and my anxiety, it felt reassuring to be with him, to feel his shoulder nudging my shoulder, his hand holding mine; the comforting warmth of another body beside mine. “Come on,” I said. This time, I was the one who pulled him to his feet. “Time to meet the parents.”
* * *
I felt my heart lift, the way it always did, when we turned the corner onto my tree-lined block, and I saw the building where I’d grown up, with its brownstone façade and double front doors, its large, rectangular glass windows, with four panes of glass on each side, and the Japanese maple trees. One of those trees had grown right outside my bedroom, tinting the light in my room green, making me feel like I lived in a tree house. On Sundays, I’d wake up to the pealing of the bells from West End Presbyterian Church on 105th and Amsterdam.
“Come on up,” I said, and brought Nick inside and upstairs to where my parents were both waiting.
My mother wrapped her arms around me, holding on tight. I hugged her back, extricated myself, and turned to see Nick, looking amused at the scene.
“Nick, these are my parents, Jerry and Judy. Mom, Dad, this is Nick…” I got stuck, trying to remember his actual last name.
“Nick Carvalho,” he said, and extended his hand.
“Nick was an old friend of Drue’s.” I’d fill my parents in on the half brother part later.
“We heard they let go of the girl they’d been questioning,” said my mother, sniffling as she pulled a bit of tissue from her favorite tunic’s front pocket. “Do you know if the police have other suspects?”
I shook my head. “That’s why we’re here. Nick and Darshi and I are going to try to figure it out.”
“Figure out what?” my mom asked.
“Who killed Drue,” I said.
Before my mom could ask more questions, we went to the kitchen, where the refrigerator was still covered with my artwork, from my preschool finger-painted smears to the watercolor portrait I’d done of my mom as part of my senior-year project at Lathrop. I was wondering if I’d be able to slip into the living room and move the life-size papier-mâché rendering of Bingo I’d made from its spot on the mantel to a closet or the trash.
My father, I saw, had been shopping. He’d already set out a dish of olives, a bowl of pretzels, a saucer of hummus with a slick of oil, pita chips, walnuts, a wooden board full of charcuterie, grainy mustard and crackers, and a small plate of crumbly almond cookies from his favorite Italian bakery in Brooklyn.
“Beer?” he offered Nick, rearranging the bowls and adding a small pile of linen cocktail napkins to the assembly. “Red wine? White wine? Coffee? Tea? I can make sangria, or I can mix up a pitcher of Manhattans…”
“Dad,” I said, “it’s one o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Well, it’s five o’clock somewhere,” he said, exactly the way I knew he would.
Nick held out my chair for me. I could see my parents notice, and the look of approval they exchanged.
My mother took her customary seat at the foot of the table. My father, in jeans and his oldest SUNY Purchase T-shirt, sat for a few seconds before popping up to his feet again to put out a wedge of Stilton, a dish of glazed apricots, another dish of wasabi peas, and a sleeve of water crackers.
“Coffee would be great,” said Nick. I mouthed the words “Thank you.” If my father was busy with the French press, he wouldn’t be able to keep emptying the contents of the refrigerator and pant
ry onto the kitchen table. My phone buzzed. “Oh, Darshi’s here!” I got up to let her in. She greeted my parents, and the five of us gathered around the table.
“Where should we start?” I asked.
My parents exchanged another look. “Daphne,” said my mother, “we aren’t sure that you should be involved in all of this.”
Darshi nodded emphatically. I ignored her.
“I understand. But here’s the thing. I brought Drue a drink the night she died. The police say that she was poisoned. So they’ll be looking at anyone who touched anything she had to eat or drink.”
My mother made a tiny, moaning sound and pressed her knuckles to her lips. My father put his elbows on the table, steepling his fingers and resting his chin on them as he frowned. “Okay,” he said. “Does Drue have enemies? Any vengeful ex-boyfriends? Does the groom have any unbalanced ex-girlfriends? That would be the obvious place to start.”
I hadn’t yet told my parents about Drue’s real marriage and sham engagement. “At the hospital, Stuart told me he thought that she might have had another boyfriend at some point. But I don’t know who.”
“And there was that guy,” Nick said. “The one waiting outside her room at the party. The one at the funeral. Do you think maybe…”
“No,” I said, remembering the guy’s unruly hair, his cheap, badly fitting clothes, his absolute lack of any resemblance to the kind of men I knew that Drue preferred. “He might have been a stalker, but he absolutely wasn’t a boyfriend.”
“So who would know?”
I sighed, shaking my head. “Even if we find this guy, he might just be another dead end.”
“What about Drue’s friends?” asked my mom.
The three of us looked at her. My mother fidgeted, but didn’t drop her gaze. “I’ll bet Drue hurt other people.” The phrase “the way she hurt you” was unspoken, but it still hung, audibly, in the air. “And, I don’t know, but if she was poisoned… well, to me that feels like a woman. Men use guns and knives. Poison feels like a woman’s weapon.”
Nick looked at me. I shrugged. “I don’t know much about Drue’s friends, or her life after Lathrop. Just that she did a gap year at a private school in California. Then Harvard. Then back here. And when she came to find me, she made it sound like there weren’t a lot of people she was close to.” I remembered what she’d said, in the Snitzers’ kitchen: I don’t have anyone else, and You were the only one who ever just liked me for me.
I reached for my phone; googling “Drue Lathrop Cavanaugh Harvard roommates” spat out a handful of names. Changing “Harvard” to “Croft” yielded a few more. I read them over, wondering if I could cold-call Madison Silver or Deepti Patel or Lily Crain and start asking questions about their dead roomie. If they were smart, they’d have turned off their phones and recruited friends to screen their social media to avoid the reporters, the same way I had. Out loud, I said, “We need someone who knew her back then. At Croft, or at Harvard. Preferably both.”
“Did anyone from Lathrop go to Harvard with her?” asked Nick.
“Tim Agrawal,” said Darshi. “They weren’t friends.”
“Does Tim know anyone she was friends with?” I asked.
Darshi shrugged. “I can ask him, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. I think they were in different circles.” Which I knew meant that Drue had probably ignored Tim if their paths had ever crossed up in Cambridge.
“Who else knew her?” asked my mother. “Her mom? Her brother? Who else would have known her friends?”
I drummed my fingers on the table. “Let’s start with the roommates. And then, maybe we can go back to Drue’s social media accounts,” I said. “We can divide them up and start calling her friends.”
“She had a lot of friends,” said Darshi.
“Well, obviously, we don’t try to call the five hundred thousand people who followed her. Maybe we just reach out to the people she followed. How many is that?”
Darshi checked. “Twelve hundred and ninety-six.” She brought the phone up closer to her glasses. “But some of them are celebrities. Unless she actually knows Chrissy Teigen?”
I shrugged as my heart sank. “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s possible.”
“What about Abigay?” asked my mom.
When the three of us looked at her, my mom appeared startled, but she didn’t drop her gaze. “Daphne, you told me that Drue wasn’t very considerate to the people who worked for the family. If she got used to treating them like furniture, maybe Abigay saw something, or heard something, or knows something…” Her voice trailed off. My father deposited a kiss on her forehead, and hugged her, murmuring something too quietly for me to hear. Then he turned to me.
“Her number’s in the Lathrop directory.” Abigay, it turned out, was one of Drue’s emergency contacts and was listed in the school phone book.
She picked up after two rings. “Daphne, what a pleasure! I’m sorry I didn’t get to say hello to you this morning.” Her sunny, musical voice became somber. “Such a terrible thing.”
I told her what we needed.
“I don’t know that I can help, but I’ll surely try.” Abigay had to be at work in an hour, but she had a little time to spare. We agreed to meet at Ladurée on Madison, near her current employers on the Upper East Side.
“You two go,” Darshi said. “I’ll hang here and we can start calling Drue’s friends.”
I gave her a hug and summoned a car, which took Nick and me to Ladurée, which had celery-green walls accented with gold and a black-and-white-tiled floor, glass cases full of macarons in pink and lavender and raspberry, and cake stands piled with croissants and kouign-amann pastries. This place hadn’t been opened when Drue and I had been in high school, but it had the familiar feeling of every coffee shop where we would hang out, drinking lattes, crunching rock-hard biscotti between our teeth while we talked about tests and boys and colleges and what Drue would wear to her debut.
Nick looked at me. “You okay?” he asked.
“I feel like I’m moving backward in time,” I said. “First school. Now this place. I feel like, maybe by the end of the night, I’ll be back in preschool or something.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, and smiled. “I promise that I’ll share my juice box with you.”
* * *
The café had a handful of tables in the back, with white-lacquered chairs with green cushions. It smelled like sugar and butter and coffee, and was quiet, except for the hiss of the cappuccino machine. We found a table and, without thinking, I pulled out my phone. “Sorry,” I said when I realized what I’d done.
Nick held up his hands. “It’s fine.”
“It’s just that I haven’t posted anything since—well, since—and I have contracts with these companies, and—”
“Daphne,” said Nick, “don’t apologize. It’s your job. I get it. It’s fine.” I nodded and bent over my phone, steeling myself before I opened my email. Already, a few of my clients had reached out, mixing condolences with ever-so-gentle reminders that I needed to start posting again. I began scheduling content for the coming day, then the coming week: posts for Alpine Yum-Yums, for Leef, for the Yoga for All yoga mat. I’d grabbed just one sad picture of the mat on Cape Cod, unrolled on my deck, before the deck had turned into a crime scene. And what was I supposed to say? Great mat; bad weekend? I finally arrived at, I hope this beautiful shot of a fabulous yoga mat above a beautiful beach inspires you to get your beautiful self moving today. I added the appropriate links and tags—#plussizefitness, #plussizeyoga, #everybodyisayogabody—and scheduled the post to go up in four hours, when the company’s research indicated that the largest slice of mat-buying browsers was online.
I’d moved on to the pet treats when Abigay sailed through the door, dressed in a gray pleated skirt and a black silk blouse. Her broad face was a little more lined and creased, but her smile, when she saw me, was just as welcoming as I remembered, from that first day I’d gone to Drue’s house and asked for peanut butt
er and apples for a snack.
“A terrible t’ing.” Abigay hugged me, pulling me tight against her, then holding me out at arm’s length. “It’s good to see you again,” she said. “You holding up?”
I said that I was and introduced Nick. His mouth quirked up when I said, “Nick is a friend of the family.” Abigay sat down after checking the time on the slim gold watch with a rectangular face that was clasped around her wrist. “A going-away present from the Cavanaughs,” she said. “See?” She removed it and passed it across the table. The metal still felt warm as I read the engraving on the back. To our Abigay, who has been part of the family, with love and thanks.
“It’s very pretty.” I wondered how Abigay felt about our Abigay, and the part of the family bit; how many hours she’d spent away from her own family, her own children, in service to the Cavanaugh kids.
“Yes indeed,” she said, her expression still neutral.
“What can we get you?” Nick asked. After some coaxing, she asked for a latte, and I asked for Earl Grey tea. Nick went up to the counter. Abigay settled into her chair with a sigh.
“It’s nice to see you, but I don’t know how much I can help. I left the Cavanaughs three years ago. With both kids mostly out of the house, and with the missus on those juice diets, they barely needed me at all.”
Nick came back with our drinks and a plate of pastries. “It all looked so good,” he said. When Nick set Abigay’s latte in front of her, she took a sip and set her cup back in its sauce with an expression suggesting that she could have done better.
“Did you and Drue keep in touch after you left?” I asked her.
Abigay made a face that was almost a smirk. “What do you think?”
I sighed. “Not to speak ill of the dead.”
“Oh, go on,” Abigay said. Her voice still had that familiar musical quality, every sentence rising and falling like a song. “Tell the truth and shame the devil; that’s what my mama used to say.”
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