Toby knocked at the door. He poked his head in. “How are you doing? Are you okay?”

She wanted to be left alone. But she was terrified of being left alone. She said, “They’re still out there?”

“Yes, but the police are coming any minute. I’m going down to wait for them. Will you be okay?”

Okay? she thought.


Meredith tried to be calm and rational. Unlike the eighth of December, when she was forced to deal with a situation of such enormous proportions her mind could scarcely comprehend it, today was simple. Today was a man cheating on his wife. She, Meredith, was the wife.

She didn’t feel any pain yet; she was suspended in a kind of breathless shock. Why shock? She had seen Samantha and Freddy together in Freddy’s den. She had caught Freddy with his hand on Samantha’s back. Meredith had witnessed them together, but she had dismissed it. It was a piece of dandelion fuzz that she’d blown off her palm into the wind. And why? If she ignored it, then it wasn’t real? What she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her? Was that true, also, of Freddy’s heinous crimes? Hadn’t she been staring them right in the face but been refusing to see?


Toby was still downstairs. Meredith crept along the hall, to Connie’s master suite. She opened the door to Connie’s bathroom.

The pills were there. Six amber bottles in a line. Meredith checked the label of each one, as though she’d forgotten the exact names of the drugs or the exact order she would find them in or the exact heft of each bottle in her hand. Connie hadn’t been taking the pills.

Meredith wanted the Ativan. And, yes, it occurred to her to take the whole bottle and end her life right there in Connie’s room. If what Samantha had told the press was true, if she and Fred had been lovers-at the thought of this word, Meredith gagged again-then what choice would Meredith have but to end her life?

She counted out three Ativan. She already had two, in a pill box in her bathroom. If she took all five, would that be too many? Maybe. She would save the two that she had and take three right here, right now. She knew what she was after: Something more than sleep, something less than death. She wanted to be knocked out, unconscious, unaware, unreachable, untouchable.

She made it back to her bedroom, shut the door, checked that the balcony doors were secure, climbed into bed, and buried her face in the sweet pink covers. It was too bad, she thought. It was such a beautiful day.


They had met Samantha when they bought the penthouse apartment at 824 Park Avenue. Samantha had seemed to come with the building. She was decorating three other apartments, and so her presence had been nearly as steady as that of Giancarlo the doorman. Meredith and Freddy kept bumping into Samantha in the elevator. Either she was holding great big books of fabric swatches, or she was accompanied by plasterers and painters. They bumped into her in the service elevator carrying a pair of blue and white Chinese vases once, and an exquisite Murano glass chandelier another time.

It was finally Freddy who said, “Maybe we should have that woman decorate our place.”

Meredith said, “Who?”

“That blonde we keep seeing around here. I mean, our place could use some help.”

What year would that have been? Ninety-seven? Ninety-eight? Meredith had tried not to take offense at Freddy’s comment. She had “decorated” the penthouse much the same way she’d “decorated” the other apartments they’d lived in, which was to say, eclectically. Meredith wanted to achieve the look of an apartment in a Woody Allen film-lots and lots of books crammed on shelves, a few pieces of art, a ton of family photographs, old worn furniture in leather and suede and chintz, most of which had been inherited from her mother and grandmother. Meredith liked Annabeth Martin’s silver tea service on a half-moon table next to a hundred-year-old Oxford dictionary that she’d found in a back room at the Strand. She liked a mishmash of objects that displayed her intellectual life and her broad range of tastes. But it was true that, compared to the apartments of the people the Delinns now socialized with, their penthouse seemed bohemian and cluttered. Unpolished. Undone. Meredith knew nothing about window treatments or fabrics or carpets or how to layer colors and textures or how to display the artwork they did have. As soon as Freddy suggested they hire a decorator, Meredith realized how pathetic her efforts had been in presenting what they owned. No one else had so many tattered paperback books on shelves; no one else had so many photographs of their children-it seemed immodest all of a sudden.

Furthermore, now that they had the penthouse, there were more rooms-whole rooms, in fact, that Meredith had no idea what to do with. The room that was to be Freddy’s personal den had walnut library shelves with nothing on them but his and Meredith’s matched framed diplomas from Princeton.

“It looks like a dentist’s office,” Freddy remarked.

And so, Meredith set out to introduce herself to this woman they kept seeing around, the decorator whose name (Meredith had discovered from eavesdropping) was Samantha Deuce. Meredith approached her one afternoon as she was standing under the building’s awning in the rain, waiting for Giancarlo to hail her a cab. Meredith introduced herself-Meredith Delinn, the penthouse-and asked if Samantha would be willing to come up to the apartment sometime so they could talk about the decorating.

Samantha had made a wistful face-not a hundred percent genuine, Meredith didn’t think-and said, “I wish I could. But I’m so slammed that I can’t, in good conscience, take on another project. I’m sorry.”

Meredith had immediately backpedaled, saying yes, of course, she understood. And then she’d retreated-shell-shocked and dejected-back into the building.

That night at dinner, she told Freddy that Samantha, the ubiquitous decorator, had turned her down.

“Turned you down?” Freddy said. “Who turns down a job like this? Were you clear, Meredith? Were you clear that we want her to do the whole apartment?”

“I was clear,” Meredith said. “And she was clear. She doesn’t have time for another project.” There had been something about the look on Samantha’s face that bugged Meredith. Her expression had been too prepared, as though she knew what Meredith was about to ask, as though she knew something about Meredith that Meredith had yet to figure out herself. Had Samantha heard unsavory things about the Delinns? And if so, what were those things? That they were nouveau riche? That they were without taste? That they were social climbers? Meredith and Freddy hadn’t known anyone else in the building at that time; there was no one to speak for or against them.

“I’ll talk to her,” Freddy said, and Meredith remembered that his decision to step in had come as a relief. She was used to Freddy taking care of things. Nobody ever said no to him. And, in fact, two weeks later, Samantha was standing in their living room, gently caressing the back of Meredith’s grandmother’s sofa as though it were an elderly relative she was about to stick in a home. (Which was true in a way: Samantha relegated nearly all of Meredith’s family furniture to storage first, and then, when it became clear that it would never be used, to the thrift shop.)

Meredith said brightly, “Oh, I’m glad you came up to see the apartment after all.”

Samantha said, “Your husband convinced me.”

Meredith thought, He talked you right out of your good conscience?

And now, it was clear that he had.


Samantha Champion Deuce was a brassy blonde, nearly six feet tall. She towered over Meredith. She had broad shoulders and large breasts and hazel eyes and a wide mouth. She wore lipstick in bright colors: fire-engine red, fuchsia, coral. She wasn’t a beauty, though there were beautiful things about her. She captivated. She was always the dominant personality in the room. She had a sexy, raspy voice like Anne Bancroft or Demi Moore; once you heard it, you couldn’t get enough of it. She would say to Meredith, “Buy this, it’s fabulous.” And Meredith would buy it. She would walk into a room and say, “We’re going to do it this way.” And that was how the room would be done. She never asked for Meredith’s opinion. The few times that Meredith expressed disapproval, Samantha turned to her and said, “You mean you don’t like it?” Not as though her feelings were hurt, but as though she couldn’t imagine anyone in the world not liking it.

Hmmpf, she’d say. As if Meredith’s response had stumped her.

Samantha moved through her life with extreme self-confidence. It was so pronounced that Meredith was drawn to studying Samantha’s mannerisms: her wicked smile, the way she swore to great, elegant effect (“fucking Scalamandré, I fucking love it!”), the way she shimmered in the presence of every man from Freddy Delinn to the Guatemalan plaster guy (“José, you are a beast and a god. I could eat you”).

As Meredith got to know her better, she learned that Samantha had been raised with four older brothers in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Her family was middle-class royalty. The four brothers were the best high-school athletes the town had ever seen; they all received Division I athletic scholarships. Samantha herself had played basketball all the way through Colby College. She married her college sweetheart, the preppy, handsome, and completely underwhelming Trent Deuce. They had lived downtown on Great Jones Street until their first child was born, when they moved to Ridgewood, New Jersey. Trent had worked for Goldman Sachs, but he’d been canned after 9/11. He then worked for a buddy who had a smaller brokerage firm-really, the details of Trent’s career were always presented vaguely by Samantha, though Freddy had gathered enough information to conclude that Trent Deuce was a loser and would be better off at a car dealership in Secaucus selling used Camaros. (Freddy rarely spoke badly of anyone, so hearing him say this was flabbergasting. Now, Freddy’s dismissal of Trent made perfect sense.)