Mirella had never spoken with Vincent again after that, because how could Vincent not have known? But a decade after Faisal’s death she was at a restaurant with Louisa, her girlfriend of a year, and the first shiver of doubt crept in.
They were having dinner at a noodle place in Chelsea, and Louisa had been telling her about an unexpected birthday card from her aunt Jacquie, whom Mirella had never met because at any given moment half of Louisa’s family was feuding. “Jacquie’s kind of awful most of the time,” Louisa said, “but she came by it honestly, in my opinion.”
“Why, what happened to her?”
“I never told you this story? It’s epic. Her husband had a secret second family.”
“Seriously? What a soap opera.”
“It gets better.” Louisa leaned forward to deliver the punch line: “He parked the second family across the street.”
“What?”
“Yeah, it was amazing. Okay,” Louisa said, “picture this scene. Hedge-fund guy, Park Avenue apartment, nonworking wife, two kids in private school. Peak Upper East Side. Then one day Aunt Jacquie checks the Amex statement, and there’s a tuition payment to a private school that neither of her children attend. So she hands the statement to Uncle Mike, like, ‘What’s this crazy charge,’ and apparently he almost has a heart attack on the spot.”
“Go on.”
“So my cousins, at the time they’re in like eighth grade and ninth grade, something like that, but turns out Uncle Mike’s also the father of the kindergartner across the street. He put the five-year-old’s tuition payment on the wrong Amex.”
“Wait, literally across the street?”
“Yeah, the buildings face each other. The doormen at both addresses probably knew for years.”
“How could she not know?” Mirella asked, and just like that the past had swallowed her whole and she was talking about Vincent.
“A man who works long hours can hide anything,” Louisa said. She was still talking about her aunt, and hadn’t noticed that Mirella was elsewhere. “Lucky for you I don’t work.”
“Lucky for me,” Mirella echoed, and kissed Louisa’s hand. “What a crazy story.”
“It’s the across-the-street thing that gets me,” Louisa said. “That geography was brazen.”
“I can’t decide if it’s very lazy or very efficient.” Mirella was pretending to still be there in the restaurant with Louisa, eating noodles, but she was far away. Vincent had sworn she hadn’t known about her husband’s crimes, in deleted voicemails and in a deposition.
“Mirella.” Louisa’s hand rested gently on Mirella’s wrist. “Come back.”
Mirella sighed, and set down her chopsticks.
“Did I ever tell you about my friend Vincent?”
“The wife of the Ponzi scheme guy?”
“Yeah. That story about your aunt made me think of her. Did I tell you I saw her once, after Faisal died?”
Louisa’s eyes widened. “No.”
“It was a little over a year after his death, so March or April of 2010. I went into a bar with some friends, and Vincent was the bartender.”
“Oh my god. What did you say to her?”
“Nothing,” Mirella said.
She hadn’t recognized her at first. In the days of money, Vincent had had long wavy hair like all the other trophy wives, but in the bar her hair was cut very short, and she wore glasses and no makeup. In the moment the disguise had struck Mirella as vindication—of course you’re trying to hide, you monster—but now a certain ambiguity had entered the scene: a reasonable alternate explanation for the short hair/glasses/no makeup was that one or another of her husband’s defrauded investors could walk in at any moment. Manhattan was lousy with defrauded investors in those days.
“I pretended not to know her,” she said now, to Louisa. “As revenge, I guess. It wasn’t my best moment. She always said she didn’t know what Jonathan had been doing, but I just thought, Of course you knew. How could you possibly not have known. You knew and you let Faisal lose everything and now he’s dead. That was all I could think about in those days.”
Louisa nodded. “Stands to reason that she’d know,” she said.
“But what if she didn’t?”
“Is it plausible that she didn’t know?” Louisa asked.
“I didn’t think so, at the time. But you’re telling me this story about your poor Aunt Jacquie, and, well, if you can hide a five-year-old, you can hide a Ponzi scheme.”