If Meredith were very honest with herself, she would admit that, in some way, the beginning of her love affair with Freddy had been entangled with the end of her love affair with Toby. Meredith had spent her first semester at Princeton seeking out the “amazing opportunities” Toby had promised she would have when he broke up with her. She had wanted Toby to be right. She had wanted Princeton to be so scintillating that she forgot she ever knew a boy named Toby O’Brien. And the person she fixed her attentions on was Freddy. Then her father died, and Toby missed the funeral, and Meredith had allowed herself to be used by Dustin Leavitt. And when Meredith returned to school feeling as lonely as she ever had in her life, there was Freddy. Her answer. He was a pool, and she dove in.

Freddy became the president of Dial his senior year while Meredith moved into a suite with Gwen Marbury and born-again-Christian twins Hope and Faith Gleeburgen, who had been matched with Meredith and Gwen because there had been no other choices for either pair. The Gleeburgens seemed perfectly nice. Although what did Meredith know; she was never in the suite. She spent every night with Freddy.

Meredith didn’t have friends other than Gwen Marbury, though Gwen, too, fell away. Gwen had dated Richard Cassel for a while in an attempt to remain close with Meredith and Freddy; she had entertained notions, perhaps, of becoming Meredith and Freddy, but Gwen and Richard weren’t a good match and they broke up. Richard later told Freddy, “You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the girl,” which was a hideous thing to say-but that was Richard Cassel for you: an unapologetic snob.

After Freddy graduated, he received a job offer from Prudential Securities in Manhattan. Meredith couldn’t stand the thought of being without Freddy; she couldn’t stand the thought of Freddy in Manhattan with all the professional women in their snug power suits, meeting for drinks at the South Street Seaport after work. He would turn his blue gaze on someone else; this new girl would light up, fall at his feet, do his bidding. It made Meredith physically ill to think about. She started vomiting after nearly every meal in the spring of her sophomore year. Freddy thought she was bulimic-but no, she insisted, she was just sick with worry about losing him. They went to Mental Health Services together and saw a counselor, like a married couple. The counselor thought some separation would be good for both of them, but for Meredith in particular.

“It seems like you’re in danger of losing yourself,” the counselor said. “Freddy has basically subsumed you.”

“That’s bullshit,” Freddy said. “We don’t need separation.” If he had been thinking the same thing when he walked in there, hearing the words come out of the therapist’s mouth propelled him in the opposite direction.

“Then why are you leaving?” Meredith asked.

Well, Freddy pointed out, he had loans to pay back, lots of loans, which was something that Meredith, coming from her privileged background, would know nothing about. The Prudential job paid good money; he couldn’t just walk away from it.

“Fine,” Meredith said. “Then I’ll drop out of school and come to Manhattan with you.”

“Now, do you see how self-destructive that is?” the therapist asked.

The solution arrived in the form of a well-paying internship, offered to Freddy by the head of the economics department, who was writing a new textbook and needed a research assistant. Freddy, in his years at Princeton, had been known as an econ whiz. He understood the way money worked, what drove the markets, what slowed them down. He had been watching the stock market, he said, since he was twelve years old. At Dial, he was voted “Most Likely to Become a Wall Street Legend.”


Now, Meredith blinked. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, watching the sun sink into the ocean. Most Likely to Become a Wall Street Legend. Well, that prediction had come true, hadn’t it?


The summer between Meredith’s sophomore and junior year, Meredith convinced Freddy to go backpacking through Europe. They rode the Eurail; they slept in cheap hotels and pensiones. Meredith had planned their itinerary of cities-Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Venice, Florence, Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, Amsterdam, London-as well as the itinerary within each city. She wanted to see the churches and the art museums and every place that had literary significance-Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Meredith explained to Freddy the importance of Giotto’s frescoes and the difference between the Gothic and the Romanesque. Freddy took notes in a tiny reporter’s pad. At first, Meredith thought he was making fun of her, but as they squeezed into a twin bed at night, he insisted his interest was sincere. She was the one who had read the Yeats and taken the art-history courses; she was the one who could speak French. He was just an uncultured kid from a house with pasteboard walls in upstate New York, trying to keep up with her.

Before they left, Freddy had told Meredith that he had no money for such a trip. He had put all of his graduation money-which consisted of a check for a hundred dollars from his mother, a thousand-dollar cash award from the economics department, and a thousand-dollar leadership award from the alumni of Dial-toward his student loans. Meredith had assured him that she had enough money for both of them. And, true to his word, Freddy ran out of money right away. He spent the bulk of what he’d brought at a nightclub in Barcelona. Neither Freddy nor Meredith had wanted to go to a nightclub, but they’d met some chic Catalan university students on the Rambles who had talked them into it. Once they were in the club and were charged an exorbitant sixteen dollars for two beers, Meredith suggested they leave, but Freddy decided he wanted to stay. The university students secured a table near the dance floor and ordered several bottles of Cava. Meredith and Freddy danced awkwardly to the house music, and then sat back down at the table, talking to the university students in English. Freddy reverted to his tutoring days, correcting everyone’s tenses. Meredith grew drunk and combative-she wanted to leave-but Freddy kept putting her off. One of the students was a dark-haired girl who looked like Trina. This girl asked Freddy to dance. Freddy glanced at Meredith and quickly said no, but Meredith felt compelled to say, “Don’t be stupid, Fred. Go dance with her.” So Freddy and the girl danced, and Meredith excused herself for the ladies’ room-where everyone was snorting cocaine or shooting it into their ankles-and threw up. She rested her face against the grimy tiles of the floor by the evil-smelling toilet and decided that this was the lowest point of her life, short of her hour in Dustin Leavitt’s apartment. She hadn’t thought such a base feeling was possible when she was with Freddy, but there it was, and furthermore, she was pretty sure she was going to lose Freddy to the Spanish girl. He would marry her and enjoy a life in the Catalan countryside helping the girl’s father with his olive farm. Meredith was only roused from the floor by someone aggressively kicking the door to her stall and bellowing something in German. When Meredith got back to the table, Freddy was standing. They were leaving, he said. Meredith had never been so relieved.

When they got outside, however, Freddy told Meredith that he’d paid the bill and that the bill had been three hundred dollars, and that he was, at that point, effectively broke.

Meredith wasn’t used to being angry with Freddy. Upset, frustrated, jealous, yes, but not angry. She didn’t know how to express what she was feeling.

She said, “Why did you pay the bill? Did they ask you to?”

He shrugged. “No. I wanted to.”

“But now you have no money.”

He gave her a hangdog expression. “I know.”

And she thought, I can’t believe you, Freddy. How irresponsible!

And she thought, He did it to impress the girl who looked like Trina.

Then she thought, softening, because there was something about Freddy that always made her excuse him, He did it because he’s naturally generous and he wanted to make those strangers happy.

She did not think at the time (though she certainly thought it now), He wanted their admiration, he wanted control. He wanted to walk out of there a big man.


When Meredith became a senior in college, Freddy left Princeton. He had taken one year off to stay with Meredith, but he couldn’t take two. Prudential had come back to him with another job offer at a bigger salary. It seemed that saying no to them and working with a famous economist had boosted his value, and Freddy couldn’t turn them down again. His loans beckoned.

Meredith wasn’t happy, but she agreed that he should go. It was only one year. She could make it.

She scheduled all of her classes on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, so that by Wednesday night, she could be on a train headed for the city. Freddy, as a perk in the package Prudential had offered him, was living in a condo on East 71st Street. The condo was well beyond his means; it was, essentially, a free sublet from another Prudential trader who was spending a year with a Swiss bank in Zurich.

Meredith gasped. That trader had remained in Zurich; he had become a higher-up with a Swiss bank. A Swiss bank, where, possibly, Freddy had hidden money. Which bank was it? She’d asked, but had Freddy ever told her? She needed to remember so she could tell Dev. And what had that trader’s name been? Thorlo was the name that popped into Meredith’s mind, but that wasn’t quite right. Ortho? No. Meredith had spent a large chunk of her senior year living among this man’s possessions. She remembered that he had a Danish mother who had filled his apartment with sleek, modern furniture. She remembered a tall Norfolk pine that it had become her responsibility to keep watered; she remembered a rocking chair made from smooth, blond wood. She remembered a folk statue of a little man with a funny Alpine hat, his hair fashioned from gray cotton. The statue’s name had been Otto-was that the name Meredith was remembering? But what, then, had the trader’s name been? She racked her brain. This might be the name that could save her. Thorlo, Ortho. She had lived in this man’s apartment. She had chopped celery with his special, sharp knives and had stuck the celery in the Bloody Marys she made for herself and Freddy every Sunday morning. Back in those days, she and Freddy had gone out on the weekends. They went to bars, they danced. Freddy had once gotten so drunk that he climbed up on the bar, gyrating his hips to “I Love the Nightlife.” That had been a fun year, Meredith’s senior year of college, though college had nothing to do with it; it was her life in the city with Freddy that mattered. Half the time, they enjoyed doing adult things: every Sunday, Meredith would make Bloody Marys and they would get bagels and lox from H &H and they would read the Times. And the other half of the time, they were drunk at the Mill on 85th Street. Meredith threw “cocktail parties” for the guys from Dial who had graduated with Freddy and were now living in the city with their various girlfriends. Meredith served shrimp cocktail and Armenian string cheese and pigs in a blanket with spicy brown mustard, just like her own mother had.