TONIGHT MY NAME IS Denise. I’m a dental assistant, I’m divorced, and I love dogs. My dark hair is covered by a muted red wig that hangs past my shoulders and makes my neck itch. The designer clothes I once obsessed over have been replaced with basic, bland pieces meant to be forgotten once the night is over, the same way I’ll forget it.
Don’t judge me. Everybody who hooks up online lies and everybody expects it. It’s just something to break up this wretched monotony, to keep me breathing until the day my father’s appeal is heard or I find the courage to jump off a building and put an end to my misery. Whichever comes first.
Until then, there’s this.
And tonight, there’s Doug.
Doug’s not so bad. Over the past two years—as Angela the accountant or Beth the barista or Carmen the cartographer—I’ve met some good guys and some questionable ones, but no one dangerous, not that I care. The only real rule is that they buy into the evening’s persona. The slightest indication that they recognize me and the deal’s off.
Doug has no clue. Doug’s a decent guy who’s newly divorced and looking to get back in the game. He’s got all the requisite first-date stories lined up, as though he’s read the same hundred internet articles every other single person has read.
We’re eating at Verre Plein, a small restaurant with leather-bound menus and a wine cellar so extensive it has its own round-the-clock guard. Not even at the height of my fame—or infamy—did I have a bodyguard.
The white cloth-covered tables are arranged close together, but instead of feeling suffocated, the proximity enhances the sense of privacy. Like everyone is making an effort to show just how much they’re not listening to your conversation. How much they can’t see you. How much they don’t care.
Originally conceived as a Wall Street off-shoot, Holden City, just an hour’s train ride from Manhattan, has taken on a life of its own. In two decades it’s transformed from a smattering of buildings housing Wall Street rejects to a glittering city of towering offices, imported cars, people too rich to care about their money, and the people they pay to care about it.
Like ninety percent of the population here, Doug is an investment banker. He has a little office in a little building and manages money for people with bigger offices in bigger buildings. I know the world well. Daughter of the one-time richest man on the eastern seaboard, I was born into money. As was expected of me, I grew up and got my Masters in Economic Policy and, for a time, had a corner office at Carlisle Gale Investors with a pristine view of the city.
Of course, everyone hated me. I was born into that, too. They didn’t even whisper nepotism; they shouted it. I could hear them through the walls. Math came to me almost as easily as the job, though I’d never been nearly as interested in managing other people’s money as I’d been in spending my own. My hobbies were going to clubs and posing for pictures and monitoring my growing internet celebrity. It wasn’t until they called me a thief and a murderer and a whore that people credited me with much of anything at all. The first two names I get, but I’m not sure where the “whore” came from; maybe they just needed three to round it out. Or maybe that infamous crotch shot did it. Anyway.
Doug is in the middle of a story about a box he found in the attic of the house he’s renovating—because renovating is one of his hobbies, along with cycling and listening to jazz—when the maître d’ seats a man at the table beside us. I try to appear interested in the contents of Doug’s box, but I’m distracted by the man. My dad used to play a game with my brother and me: Who belongs? Who doesn’t?
The man doesn’t.
He orders a beer. In a bottle, not a glass. He’s wearing a brown sports jacket with patches on the elbows like a professor in a movie, and the Rolex that peeks out at his wrist is a knock-off. Until they were taken away, my father had a world-famous collection.
Unlike everybody else, who is actively ignoring everybody else, the stranger is watching me when I lift my gaze. I’m wearing brown contacts, but the extended eye contact makes me feel exposed. I used to be bold, but years of self-imposed solitude and fake