“The Riviera gets old after a while,” she said, making them both laugh.
He invited her over to his place for a drink. She told him she had to check into her Airbnb （she didn’t have one booked）。 He insisted, spinning her Cartier love bracelet and saying, “Unless your heart belongs to the person who gave you this?”
“Uh, no,” she said, regarding the bracelet as she might a handcuff. （Giacomo had given it to her a few weeks before he was sent to prison.）
“Great!” Michael said. “Then come for a drink.”
“I really can’t.”
“Just one. Please?”
The house was more than Alessandra could have hoped for. It was one of the huge old family “cottages” right on the harbor that they’d passed on the ferry. It had a long, elegant pool that fronted their tiny private beach and a tennis court in the side yard. （“Do you play?” Michael asked. “A little,” Alessandra said.） The inside of the house was tasteful and fresh, magazine-worthy—lots of white wainscoting and exposed blond beams and a massive stone fireplace and a table laden with silver-framed photographs （the wife he was supposedly taking some time apart from and the four children） behind the wide, deep sofa.
Michael kissed her outside on the deck, right away biting her lower lip. He wrapped his hand in a length of her hair, tugging a little to let her know who was in charge. （He, erroneously, thought this was him.） He slid his mouth down to her neck, lingering in the kill spot just below her ear; good boy, he’d been well trained by wifey, though Alessandra would bet a schmillion dollars he no longer kissed Heidi Bick this way. He unbuttoned Alessandra’s blouse slowly, his pinkie just barely grazing her nipple, and Alessandra felt a pulsing between her legs that was replicated by the ruby beacon of Brant Point Light in the distance.
He had her panting—shirt open, breasts exposed, jeans unzipped—when he turned and walked back into the house.
Alessandra waited a second, wondering if he was having a crisis of conscience. She chastised herself; she had made a poor choice.
When she finally followed him inside, she had to let her eyes adjust to the dark. There was milky moonlight through a window, blue numbers on a cable box—and then hands grabbed her waist and she screamed, genuinely frightened, and realized she wasn’t in charge at all. She also realized Michael Bick had, very likely, brought home women he didn’t know before. Possibly he did it all the time.
But in the pearl-gray light of morning—fog covered the harbor like a layer of dust on an antique mirror—Michael traced one of her eyebrows and said, “Where did you come from, Alessandra Powell?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? Alessandra was originally from San Francisco, where her mother, Valerie, waited tables at the storied Tosca Café in North Beach. Valerie and Alessandra lived in a building down the street from the restaurant. Valerie kept their apartment clean, didn’t drink too much （wine occasionally）， and didn’t do drugs （weed occasionally）; there was always enough money for groceries and for Alessandra to get ice cream down on the pier or go to the movies or, when she was older, take the bus to Oakland and thrift-shop. But there was something a little off about Alessandra’s upbringing. While Alessandra’s friends were opening presents around the tree on Christmas morning, then sitting down to a rib roast, Alessandra was home alone watching R-rated movies on cable while her mother worked a double. She and her mother opened their Christmas presents on the twenty-sixth with eggs and a tin of osetra caviar and Springsteen singing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” On Easter, while Alessandra’s friends were going to church and hunting for eggs and slicing into honey-baked ham, Alessandra was watching R-rated movies on cable and eating straight from a bag of jelly beans that her mother bought as a nod to the holiday even though she didn’t celebrate Easter at all.
And then there were the men. Every week, Valerie would bring home married men who frequented the Tosca bar while they were in the city on business. These men would arrive after Alessandra went to bed, but she heard them in the shower the next morning while Alessandra’s mother ransacked their wallets in the bedroom. Every once in a while, one of the men would stay for breakfast and listen as Valerie played her favorite CD and sang along: Torn between two lovers, feeling like a fool.
Alessandra knew better than to follow in her mother’s footsteps but it was the only example she had. When Alessandra was eighteen, she seduced Dr. Andrew Beecham, the father of her best friend, Duffy. After Alessandra and Drew had been sleeping together for a few weeks, Alessandra realized she could cash in on the power she had—the power to tell Duffy and Drew’s wife, Mary Lou—and get something valuable in return. Drew was the chair of the romance languages department at Stanford. Alessandra audited a full year of classes—Italian, Spanish, French literature, art history—and then demanded a one-way plane ticket to Rome, which Drew Beecham was only too happy to buy for her.