In those years, Leo and Carver went to day care, which bothered Freddy, but there was no money for a nanny. They moved to a two-bedroom apartment on East 82nd Street, but it was still a walk-up. Freddy used to leave the apartment before the boys were awake and get home after they were asleep. He lost weight. Meredith begged him to have a milkshake with his lunch, she begged him to see a doctor, but for Freddy there was only work and more work. Getting the company up and running. Attracting clients. How would he attract clients? He worked on the weekends. Meredith was left to handle everything at home. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t have two little kids and run a household and grade thirty essays and do lesson plans. Carver was already showing signs of anxiety disorder; he screamed and cried when Meredith dropped him off at day care, and he screamed and cried when she picked him up.

And then Meredith got pregnant again.

She was waiting for Freddy in the apartment when he got home from work, waving the pregnancy test in her hand like a wand: a wand that was going to reveal everything that was wrong with their life. She wanted things to be easier; she wanted things to be different. Her job was hard. That very day Meredith had come across two girls fighting in the bathroom, and one of the girls had a razor blade concealed inside her lower lip. The most disturbing thing was that Meredith had known how to restrain the girl and where to look for the blade. Why should she know such things? She wanted to leave Gompers at the end of the year. She hated the commute on the subway. She hated dropping the boys off at the dreaded day care. Carver clung to the front of Meredith’s shirt; he clawed for her glasses. The workers had to peel him off her. And now she was having a baby.

She stared Freddy down. She loved him, but this was not the life she’d expected.

“I’m taking the children,” she said. “And I’m going to my mother’s.” She was disappointed at how cliché this sounded, but what was not cliché was the thought of sleeping in her childhood home, the big white Colonial in Villanova with the expansive back yard where the boys could run through the sprinkler and play on the swings. Meredith would have an extra set of hands. She would enroll the boys at Tarleton.

Freddy, Meredith remembered, had seemed to shrink. Then, he smiled. “Another baby?” he said.

“Another baby,” Meredith said, and she smiled, too, in spite of herself. But then she hardened. “I mean it, Fred. I’m leaving. Until things change, I’m going home.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Fred said. “You’re going to stay right here, and I’ll make things better. I will take care of everything.”


The SEC and the Feds postulated that Freddy had been operating his Ponzi scheme for at least a decade, but when Meredith looked back, she knew with gut-rotting certainty that it had started the year after Meredith threatened to leave. Because Freddy was good to his word: everything got better. Instead of schlepping all the way to the Bronx every morning, Meredith stayed home with the boys. She delivered Leo to a summer preschool program at the Catholic church, she took Carver for a chocolate milk at E.A.T. Café, then home to play blocks, watch Sesame Street, take a nap. One sweltering day in the middle of the summer, Meredith was headed down the building’s stairs in her flip-flops, and she missed a step. She fell all the way to the landing. She was hurt, but not hurt hurt; however, she decided to call off their outing to the deliciously cool, air-conditioned halls of the Museum of Natural History. By the time she got upstairs to the apartment, she was bleeding.

She was only twelve weeks along, and she’d barely told anyone about the pregnancy (her mother, Connie, the principal at Gompers, who asked why she wasn’t coming back), but still, the miscarriage struck Meredith as a tremendous loss. She was positive the baby would have been a girl, whom she would have named Annabeth Carson after her grandmother and Ms. McCullers.

Freddy had taken the miscarriage in stride, and when Meredith accused him of being unfeeling, he said, “We can’t both be basket cases. We have the boys to think about. And we’ll get pregnant again, sweetheart. Don’t worry. We’ll have our little girl.” He held Meredith, and he said these encouraging things, but when his cell phone rang, he switched right into work mode.

It was that autumn, Meredith remembered, that the money started rolling in. They got full coverage with Blue Cross and Blue Shield. They pulled Leo out of the Catholic preschool and sent him to Saint Bernard’s. Freddy wasn’t home any more often, but when he was home, he was happier. He had solved the problem of attracting clients. It seemed the way to attract clients was to tell them they couldn’t invest in Delinn Enterprises. Delinn Enterprises was only looking for certain kinds of investors; many people got turned away. Freddy had investors banging down the door. He put back on the weight he’d lost, and twenty pounds besides. He ordered lunch in every day: reuben sandwiches, lobster bisque, omelets with goat cheese and smoked salmon. He had business dinners at Gallagher’s and Smith & Wollensky. He had no time for exercise. He got his first gray hair at age twenty-nine. Meredith had wanted to pluck it, but he wouldn’t let her. He wanted to look older, he said. He needed gravitas, he said.

After the New Year, they moved to a three-bedroom apartment with an eat-in kitchen in the East Sixties. It was a doorman building. They bought a car and kept it in the garage. They began renting a house in Southampton for two weeks a summer.

In September, Carver joined Leo at Saint Bernard’s. Meredith tried to get pregnant again but didn’t have any luck. She suspected that Freddy’s sperm were too stressed to swim. Freddy gave Meredith carte blanche to hire a nanny and a cook, even though they ate out almost every night. With both kids in school and a Filipino nanny, Meredith was free to go back to work. Gompers, or any other public school suddenly seemed out of the question, and before she knew it, working at all seemed out of the question. Freddy declared that business was gangbusters, and he whisked Meredith down to Palm Beach for the weekend, leaving the kids with Cecelia, and they loved Palm Beach so much that Freddy wanted to look at property. To buy.

Meredith’s life became consumed with managing all that she suddenly had: The boys, their needs, their sports, their school functions. There was yet another new apartment-the penthouse at 824 Park Avenue-that they had bought, as well as a house in Palm Beach, the Pulitzers’ former house. Freddy had snapped this up at auction “for a steal,” he said. (As a testament to her remove from Freddy’s financial dealings, Meredith never learned how much the Pulitzer house had cost them.) The Frick Collection asked Meredith to serve on its board of directors, and she was on the Parent Action Committee at the boys’ school, which allowed Meredith to meet other busy, important people who each seemed to want to get her involved in something else. She and Freddy had things to attend-events, benefits, dinner parties, nights at the symphony and the Metropolitan Opera. There wasn’t time for Meredith to work. She was too busy being Mrs. Freddy Delinn.


Meredith washed her dinner dishes. The house was dark now; she had to use the light over the sink or risk breaking a glass.

She saw that there was a single cupcake under plastic wrap resting on a saucer. It looked suspiciously like a vanilla-bean cupcake with strawberry icing from the bakery at the Sconset Market. Connie is an angel, Meredith thought. Or Connie felt worse about leaving Meredith alone than Meredith realized.

Meredith ate the cupcake standing up at the counter, wondering about the moment when she’d realized they were really… rich. It was probably a quiet moment-a nondescript afternoon walking home from lunch at Le Cirque with the likes of Astrid Cassel or Mary Rose Garth, when Meredith stopped in to Bergdorf’s and bought-who knows?-a $2,000 powder-pink Chanel cardigan and didn’t keep the receipt. Or it was something more momentous, such as her first trip to Paris with Freddy since their backpacking adventure. He had booked a suite at the Hôtel de Crillon. They had eaten at Taillevent, and in the Jules Verne restaurant at the top of the Eiffel Tower (Meredith could have skipped the Eiffel Tower, but not Freddy). The highlight of that trip wasn’t the hotel (though they laughed, remembering the hostel they had stayed at in the sleazy eighteenth arrondissement their first time through) or the dining (they remembered how they ate a baguette and Camembert while sitting on the floor of their room in said hostel), but a private tour that Freddy had arranged at the Musée d’Orsay. When he told Meredith they were going on a private tour, she thought that meant they would have their very own English-speaking guide. But what it meant was that at six thirty, half an hour after the museum closed, they stepped through a discreet door and were met by the museum’s curator, who was trailed by a waiter with a bottle of vintage Krug. The curator proceeded to give Meredith and Freddy a private tour of the museum, with special emphasis on Pissarro, who had been Meredith’s favorite painter ever since she attended a Pissarro exhibit with her father at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when she was fifteen years old.

Champagne, the whole museum hushed and waiting for them, the erudite curator with his elegantly accented English. Yes, on that day, Meredith understood that they had become rich.


Meredith checked the back door: locked. She checked the front door: locked. She checked the alarm: activated. The windows were shut and locked; the air-conditioning was on. Meredith toyed with the idea of turning on the TV. Other voices in the room might ease her anxiety. But Connie never turned on the TV and Meredith wouldn’t, either. She might inadvertently come across something in the news she didn’t want to see, or “Frederick Xavier Delinn: The Real Story” on E!