People always ask what it’s like being married into the Cook family, a political dynasty second only to the Kennedys. I deflect with information about our foundation, trained to keep my focus on the work instead of the rumors. On our third-world literacy and water initiatives, the inner-city mentoring programs, the cancer research.
What I can’t tell them is that it’s a constant battle to find any privacy. Even inside our home, people are there at all hours. Assistants. Household staff who cook and clean for us. I have to fight for every spare minute and every square inch to call my own. There is nowhere that’s safe from the eyes of Rory’s staff, all of them devoted Cook employees. Even after ten years of marriage, I’m still the interloper. The outsider who needs to be watched.
I’ve learned how to make sure there’s nothing to see.
The gym is one of the few places Danielle doesn’t follow, trailing after me with her lists and schedules. It’s where I meet Petra, the only friend I have left from my life before Rory, and the only one Rory hasn’t forced me to abandon.
Because as far as Rory knows, Petra doesn’t exist.
* * *
When I arrive at the gym, Petra is already there. I change in the locker room, and when I climb the stairs to the rows of treadmills, she’s on the landing, taking a clean towel from the stack. Our eyes meet for a moment, and then she looks away as I help myself to a towel.
“Are you nervous?” she whispers.
“Terrified,” I say, turning and walking away.
I run for an hour, my eyes on the clock, and when I step into the sauna at exactly two thirty with a towel wrapped around my body, my muscles ache with exhaustion. The air is thick with steam, and I smile at Petra, who sits alone on the top row, her face red with heat.
“Do you remember Mrs. Morris?” she asks when I sit down next to her.
I smile, grateful to think of something from a simpler time. Mrs. Morris was our government teacher in the twelfth grade, and Petra almost failed the class.
“You studied with me every afternoon for a month,” she continues. “When none of the other kids would come near me or Nico because of who our father was, you stepped up and made sure I graduated.”
I turn on the wooden bench to face her. “You make it sound like you and Nico were pariahs. You had friends.”
Petra shakes her head. “People being nice to you because your father is the Russian version of Al Capone doesn’t make them friends.” We’d attended an elite school in Pennsylvania, where the children and grandchildren of old money viewed Petra and her brother, Nico, as a novelty, sliding up to them, as if on a dare, to see how close they could get, but never letting either of them all the way in.
And so we’d formed a trio of outcasts. Petra and Nico made sure no one made fun of my secondhand uniform or the beat-up Honda my mother used to pick me up in, rattling its way to the curb, belching exhaust in its wake. They made sure I didn’t eat alone and dragged me to school events I’d have skipped otherwise. They put themselves between me and the other kids, the ones who made cruel, cutting remarks about how I was merely a day student on scholarship, too poor, too common to truly be one of them. Petra and Nico were friends to me at a time when I had none.
* * *
It felt like fate, the day I walked into the gym two years ago and saw Petra, an apparition from my past. But I wasn’t the same person Petra would remember from high school. Too much had changed. Too much I’d have to explain about my life and what I’d lost along the way. And so I’d kept my gaze averted, while Petra’s stare drilled into me, willing me to look up. To acknowledge her.
When my workout was over, I made my way to the locker room, hoping to hide out in the sauna until after Petra had left. But when I’d entered, she was there. As if that had been our plan all along.
“Claire Taylor,” she said.
Hearing her say my old name made me smile despite myself. Memories came rushing back, found in the tone and cadence of Petra’s voice that still carried a trace