“Excuse me,” she said, suddenly, hoisting the bag into a more secure spot on her shoulder and darting through the pedestrian crowd. She had an idea: there was no SoulCycle in sight, but there was a coffee shop on the next corner. She made a beeline for it, slipping through the door and falling into line behind a gaggle of college-aged girls who were ordering pumpkin spice lattes. She asked for the same. Skim milk, one pump, no whip. The barista picked up a cup in one hand, a Sharpie in the other.
“Name?”
“Adrienne,” she said, stressing the last syllable like always, because people never seemed to get the spelling right. “With two Ns and an E.”
Five minutes later, she picked up the steaming latte and found a seat at the countertop, resting her feet on the gym bag as she settled into position. Her phone in one hand, the cup with her name on it in the other. Something had gotten lost in translation—the cup read adrinenn—but that was all right. The photo was what mattered: she opened the front-facing camera and scrutinized the screen as she brought the cup to her lips, turned so that the shop’s logo could be seen, and widened her eyes above the rim. She tilted her head, and the rose-colored waves fell lightly alongside her face. She selected a filter that brought out the richness of her hair, and captioned the picture: Sugar, spice, everything nice. #fallhairdontcare #pumpkinspiceseason #caffeinejunkie #afternoonpickmeup
Even without whipped cream, the latte was cloyingly sweet. She managed to drink half of it before it went lukewarm, forcing herself to sit, wait, watch through the plateglass window as people passed by. A few of them glanced her way, their eyes skating past hers, but nobody approached her. For a moment, she was cocooned once more in that luxurious sense of having already disappeared, of being nobody at all.
On the counter, her phone buzzed briefly. She picked it up, punched in the code. The picture she’d posted had a smattering of likes, and one new comment.
It said: Privileged bitch.
She laughed in spite of herself, a high, hysterical giggle. A few heads turned, but that was all right. Adrienne was used to being looked at.
It was, after all, just a normal day.
Chapter 11
Lizzie
She really was a privileged bitch, you know. Adrienne Richards, née Swan, the heiress to a modest fortune made by a great-grandfather who owned a furniture company. The family had its roots somewhere south, near the Blue Ridge Mountains, and even before she married rich, Adrienne was definitely one of those girls. Private-school-educated, Southern debutante, sorority darling, a card-carrying member of the NRA. The kind of woman who still talked about going to college for her “M.R.S.” degree. I learned all this the same way everyone else did. It wasn’t hard to find; you’ve probably heard the stories, too. There was the splashy magazine spread on her million-dollar wedding. Or the time she insisted on building a basement spa, complete with plunge pool, in their hundred-year-old town house on the Green—when Adrienne told a local reporter that the neighbors who complained about the noise were just “jealous haters.” There were the rich-lady start-ups, from organic perfume to a line of vegan leather handbags to astrology-based interior design, all blithely abandoned when Adrienne’s attention span ran out and she discovered, to her horror, that running a company required actual work. There were the legendary tantrums. The obnoxious Instagram account. And then, eventually, there was the sleazy husband who made a billion dollars ruining people’s lives, people for whom Adrienne Richards couldn’t seem to muster a shred of sympathy, not even to save her own skin when the press came calling and their friends demanded answers.
And because of all that, you probably thought you knew every awful thing there was to know about Adrienne Richards. Maybe you even appreciated her in a twisted sort of way, for being such a perfectly drawn villain, the kind of woman people just love to hate. You wouldn’t be alone. But you didn’t know the truth.
Adrienne wasn’t just a privileged bitch. She was bad, cruel, rotten, in the way people are when they’ve never had to care about anything or anyone else. The stuff in the news was just the tip of the iceberg; it was the stories she kept hidden that really told you who she was. Like the time she adopted a shelter dog as part of some social media campaign, then sent it back to the pound three days later because it peed on the carpet, and when the rescue asked why she wouldn’t keep him, she lied and told them the dog had bitten her and should probably be put down. There was her mother, diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s and left to rot in a shitty nursing home down south. Adrienne hadn’t visited even once, she explained with a shrug, because “Why would I bother? She’ll just forget I was there.” And there was the underage drunken driving accident that her daddy’s fancy lawyer got bargained down to a misdemeanor and then purged from her record, even though the guy in the other car never walked again. He died of pneumonia five years later, right around the time that Adrienne was picking out the table settings for her wedding to Ethan.