Despite our increasingly thrifty lifestyle, by the end of the summer we were running out of money. Burke took a job busing tables at a Thai restaurant in our neighborhood. They paid minimum wage and ignored that Burke had checked the felony box on his application.
Burke did hustle, I’ll give him that. Whenever he wasn’t working at the restaurant, he was home at his desk applying for jobs, or out networking. He met with a couple of his old professors from NYU for guidance, and even one ex-colleague from Credit Suisse agreed to give him advice. Burke would come back from these meetings buoyed, a bright splash of hope on his face.
I, on the other hand, was sinking deeper into a pit of misery. I found myself wishing Burke had never gotten into the Credit Suisse analyst program in the first place. I wished he hadn’t transferred from CUNY to NYU. I wished he’d never found the drive to keep his transcript perfect. Because now, having had a sweet taste of the life we could’ve had, I knew I would never be satisfied by anything less.
I didn’t consider leaving him, not actually. I could have left, and I might have if it hadn’t been for Garrett and Hope. I was still young, and the way men’s eyes lingered on me in coffee shops and elevators told me that, even after two babies, I was still desirable. I’d accumulated a lavish enough wardrobe over my years in Manhattan to make myself appear as though I’d belonged. These were clothes I refused to sell, and Burke didn’t know enough about fashion to suspect that they were valuable. My point is, I could’ve found another man to love me, a man with the money and upward mobility that Burke had proven to lack.
But I’d meant the promise I’d made to myself, and to Burke, when I first found out I was pregnant with Garrett. We swore that we’d give our children everything our parents had never given us, all of the advantages we’d never had. And first on that list was a mother and a father who loved each other, who stayed together for better or for worse, whose marriage was the rock that weathered all storms. I refused to put my babies through the agony of growing up in a broken family.
Besides, I still loved Burke. Even though part of me hated him for his selfish stupidity, even though sometimes I wanted to wring his neck for the position he’d put us in, I knew I would always be in love with Burke Michaels. I found strength in that. I found power in knowing that our marriage was stronger than Libby and Peter Starling’s had been, and that because of this our children were going to be better off than Nate and Skye. To me, that counted for a whole lot.
That winter, nearly a year after Burke had been out of prison, he got a call from his old colleague Eric from Credit Suisse. Eric told Burke that Eric had a cousin who owned a small wealth management firm in New Haven called PK Adamson that was looking for someone to do data entry. Eric had vouched for Burke—unlike most people at the bank, he recognized Doug Kemp for the scheming scum that he was—and PK Adamson agreed to bring Burke in for an interview.
A week later Burke took the train out to New Haven for the interview, and Eric’s cousin offered him the job on the spot. The cousin said he was impressed with his background at Credit Suisse, and that he was willing to overlook his criminal history because he owed Eric a solid. The starting salary was $25,000 a year.
I couldn’t understand why Burke was so thrilled to accept a position that would be paying him a tiny fraction of what he’d been making before. He reasoned that it was an opportunity to get his foot in the door at a decent wealth management firm, that it could be a stepping-stone on the path toward becoming a financial adviser. He’d likely never make what he would’ve in investment banking, but he squeezed my hand and told me that perhaps a lucrative career in finance was still in the cards for him after all.
What neither of us admitted was the undeniable truth that this was our only option. Clearly no one else was going to hire Burke, and his gig busing tables at Bangkok Garden wasn’t sustainable—we had two young children, and we needed health insurance.
I wasn’t sad to pack up and leave Astoria; with two very mobile kids we were quickly outgrowing our nine-hundred-square-foot dump of an apartment. Besides, our downgraded life in New York nagged at me like a chronic ache, our proximity to Manhattan a constant, searing reminder of what we no longer were, of the promising future we’d lost.
When I used to imagine moving to the suburbs of Connecticut one day, I certainly hadn’t pictured New Haven. Libby used to say that Fairfield County was the only decent place to live in the state.
As far as I knew, she was still there in Westport, luxuriating in her daily schedule of spa appointments and tennis matches and luncheons at the club. Nate and Skye would be thirteen and nine by now. I’d have been lying if I said I didn’t still think about the Starling family. It was an unshakable obsession, a private indulgence, and certainly something I never mentioned to Burke.
When Burke was at Credit Suisse, I used to dream of the house in Westport that we’d buy one day—a big white Colonial with blue shutters sited on acres of lush kelly-green grass overlooking the ocean. Eventually I’d run into Libby at the supermarket or the post office; she’d be in her forties by then, her eyes sunken, crow’s-feet infesting the skin around them. I’d be golden and glowing, maybe with our third baby on my hip, and Libby would look jealous and tired because she was past her prime and her own children were moody adolescents who avoided her like the plague. If she tried to make small talk, I’d slip in that Burke had had a great year at Credit Suisse and we’d recently bought the big place on the water by the yacht club. Libby’s face would harden because she’d know I hadn’t needed her after all. She’d finally know that her intuition about Burke had been wrong, that he had been the real deal, and that I’d been right to love him, to choose him.
The first week of February, we packed all of our earthly belongings into a U-Haul and headed north for New Haven. As we drove over the Triborough Bridge in the weakening sunlight, I stretched my neck to catch a final glimpse of the city that had been mine for a sweet moment, and the dreams I’d leave behind there, its skyline dipped in muted-orange dusk, an almost unbearable blend of nostalgia and loss and rage tightening its grip around my heart.
Chapter Forty-One
Skye
NOVEMBER 2019
I stare at the open Moleskine. My heart bangs inside my chest as I reread the last sentence of Burke’s final entry.
I know I’m not actually going to go through with marrying Skye—that’s not part of the plan—but it doesn’t make this any easier, or any less evil. I just wish there was a way to—
I flip the pages of the Moleskine, searching for more. But this last entry is from February 23—that was shortly after Burke asked my father’s permission for my hand in marriage. Why isn’t there more? Why does the journal stop there?
Nonetheless, it’s on the page: confirmation, if the journal is authentic, that Burke wasn’t supposed to marry me. But that he did so anyway because he loved me.
Or so he says.
A storm pounds inside my head. My phone vibrates on the desk, Jan Jenkins’s name flashing on the screen. Wrenching guilt floods me, and I stare at the incoming call. I know I should pick it up, but I can’t talk to Jan right now. I just can’t.