Until one winter night when the roads of our Boston suburb froze over, and my parents died in a head-on collision. That’s when I learned about the razor’s edge of it all. The slip of a wheel. The wrong angle of a turn. One misstep, and your whole life can be rewritten—no matter how studious or clever you might be.
I waited up all night in wool socks for them to come home, and when my mother’s younger sister, Delia—my wild, charismatic, childless aunt—came to get me the next morning, the scaffolding of my organized life collapsed.
I was sixteen. And told her I never wanted to be cold again.
So she moved me to her house in the Garden District of New Orleans.
“Darling, ‘America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland,’ ” she had told me as our plane touched down. “Tennessee Williams said that. You’re about to find out why.”
She took me to parties, she never wore the same pair of heels twice, and unlike my parents, Delia thought rules were for other people and money existed to be spent—the faster the better.
She was right about New Orleans. My life went from the black-and-white pages of textbooks to Technicolor. Music and art. Parties and dancing. And I went from dutiful prodigy to Delia’s Magazine Street shadow, sitting in the corner, book in hand as she swanned through restaurants, gallery openings, cocktail parties, and long dinners with friends who always smelled faintly of French perfume, champagne, and cigarettes.
Delia’s social circle was a carousel of poets, actors, and musicians who graced New Orleans’s art scene, but also businessmen and -women, and the occasional foreign diplomat. She was one of those connectors—a person who always knew someone who knew someone else, and she got her ya-yas from pulling strangers into each other’s orbits. Gatherings at her house were of the “if you could choose five people to have dinner with” variety. For me, they were glittering distractions from the fact that my entire childhood had been obliterated in a single night.
Who could grieve in the middle of a party?
Through all of the brunches, luncheons, teas, and late-night jazz-infused cocktails, I was an unnoticed observer, soaking in the chatter and music that drifted through the air like the smoke. I’d pretend to read while secretly studying the way my aunt ordered wine, the way she could make a laugh sound like a melody, the way people leaned toward her like flowers toward the sun.
On weekdays in the summer—when we were out of school and all the other kids were getting bug bites in camp cabins or swimming in community pools—my parents had taken me to museums. But Delia took me to restaurant patios where Iwatched fashionable businesswomen hurrying past on their lunch breaks. With mobile phones pressed to one ear and their eyes fixed on the path ahead, they stalked the city streets like predators. They were alive with purpose. They were in control.
After seeing how quickly a life could collapse, I wanted all the control I could find. So I aspired to be exactly like them. Powerful. Assertive. A little aloof. Ambition would be my ticket to freedom.
My parents had raised me to be voracious for information, to be fastidious and mature. So I asked Delia for a subscription toThe Wall Street Journal.I became a hybrid model of my two lives—sapient protégée of my parents and Delia’s barfly companion. After graduating from Tulane with a double degree in business and economics, I bolted for California.
Determined to shed my orphan persona for good with a designer wardrobe, a corner office, and fuck-you money.
And when I landed my job with Simon, the first thing I did was get highlights and buy a skirt from The Row off The RealReal.
Now, I worked long days in head-to-toe designer clothes—some I still bought on consignment in Venice. And my life had become an endless loop of meetings, negotiations, and late nights.
I took a few deep breaths, and then my cellphone rang from somewhere on my desk.
“Where are you right now?” Gemma Klein said as I pickedup.
Back then, Gemma was the barback at Greenleaf, the one place in Venice everyone frequented—from start-up bros to actors to venture capitalists sipping mescal cocktails. We began as casual acquaintances, but Delia had taught me that the right bartender could be your fairy godmother—not as a conduit for drinks, but as one for intel, introductions, and discreet little assists when you needed them most. A year prior, when Simon was seeking inside information on a property he was trying to acquire, Gemma knew the realtor.
While I made it a habit not to rely on anyone—razors’ edges being what they were—Gemma had found a way to slip into myinner circle. And right around this point in my life, she was my friend who was on a mission to set me up.
“Where am I ever?” I laughed. “I’m at work.”
“Well, leave. Some club rugby team just walked into the bar. This place is nothing but accents, tree-trunk legs, and square jawlines.”
“Sounds…Irish.”
“No, Este,” Gemma insisted. “It’s hot. And you’re coming. We’re breaking your dry spell and my bad-date streak with one rugby ball.”
I let out an exaggerated sigh. “I can’t tonight,” I said. “I’m buried in something for Simon.”
This earned me a full-throated “Booo!” Then she said, “Call me tomorrow,” and hung up.
I watched the screen go dark and sat there for a second longer than I meant to, thumb hovering over the call button to redial her as the quiet of the office at night got a little loud.This is the time of my life with the fewest responsibilities I’ll ever have—or so I had thought at the time.
Shouldn’t I want to be at a bar with my friend and a rugby team?
Maybe. But I wanted Simon’s approval more.
That’s when the light from the hallway was briefly eclipsed, and I looked up to find Simon in my doorway, his tall frame leaning casually and a half smile tugging on one corner of his mouth. His dark hair was always perfectly styled, like he’d just run a hand through it, and his sharp, intelligent eyes could size up a room in seconds. Simon carried himself like he belonged everywhere, possessing the quiet confidence that came from knowing he’d already won.
