On the subway, she checked Ingrid’s Instagram account. The most recent photo showed a sunlit vase of daffodils. The caption said, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Florence thought Bill probably hadn’t raged against death all that hard—a heart attack sounded sudden—but she appreciated the sentiment. The post already had over four hundred comments and two thousand likes. She tentatively liked it, then panicked and unliked it.
An idea occurred to her. Perhaps Ingrid would pick up the children from school herself that day. Were they too emotionally fragile for the bus? For the coach?
When Agatha got into work, Florence told her she had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon.
Agatha nodded distractedly. “No problem.”
Florence was up at the Harwick School by ten of three. She sat on the same bench across the street where she’d sat the day before and read The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark. When the school doors opened, she took out her phone and brought up an image of Simon’s daughters that she’d found online. It had been taken at a fundraiser for shelter dogs the previous summer on the North Fork. In it, the younger girl, Tabitha, cradled a scrawny and frightened looking Chihuahua, while Chloe, the older one, flashed a peace sign. Behind them, Simon and Ingrid smiled serenely with their arms around each other. Florence zoomed in on each face one at a time.
Florence looked up to scan the crowd of students pooling outside. A young teacher was trying to usher them into the waiting buses, but her soft-spoken exhortations had no effect on the wild mob. Florence spotted Chloe in a huddle of girls crowded around an iPhone. She guessed they were in seventh or eighth grade. Chloe gesticulated grandly, like a stage actress, but she was chubbier than you’d guess Ingrid’s daughter would be. Florence used the camera on her phone to zoom in for a closer look, and then, because she had it in her hand, she took a picture. She captured Chloe mid-laugh, her mouth thrown open grotesquely. Florence thought it slightly unseemly for her to be so giddy after her grandfather had just died. She wondered what Ingrid would say if she saw her.
But Ingrid did not show up. The girls scrambled onto Coach One, and Florence waited to watch it drive away.
8.
The rest of January unfurled in a series of mild, sunny days, as if atoning for the bitterness of December’s chill. Florence was grateful for the reprieve—took it as an endorsement, for she was now spending one or two afternoons a week on the stone bench across from the Harwick School. If pressed, she wouldn’t have been able to articulate a reason for these trips uptown; all she knew was that something kept drawing her back. On Fridays, when dismissal was at one thirty, she went up during her lunch break, even though it took close to an hour to get there. Other days, she invented appointments to explain her absences from work.
Sitting there, she almost felt like she was a part of that life. A life that was, simply put, better than hers in every possible way. She noted the two-hundred-dollar ballet flats on feet that hadn’t stopped growing. The way the teachers lingered in the crowd, joking with the students. Florence had never joked around with her teachers. She had never even seen her teachers joke around with one another. Her seventh-grade teacher had gotten spit on, right in her eye. She didn’t even yell at the kid. She just walked out of the room and didn’t come back for the rest of the period.
The entire area around the Harwick School seemed insulated from everything ugly and vulgar in the world. Florence always left feeling cleansed and energized, like she’d breathed pure oxygen.
But the truth, if she could have admitted it, was that she was there to see Ingrid, who had thoroughly replaced her husband as a figure of fascination for Florence. Simon’s collar stays did nothing for her anymore. He was an ordinary man with ordinary weaknesses. Ingrid, on the other hand, was a true artist: She twitched an eyebrow onscreen, she shed a tear, and somebody thousands of miles away, even years later, felt something. Someone’s inner chemistry changed because of Ingrid. What power—to impose a new reality on a total stranger. To hold them in your thrall. That was what Florence wanted to do with her writing.
She had spent the past few weeks watching Ingrid Thorne movies on her roommate’s Netflix account and poring over pictures online. She longed to see Ingrid in person. To convince herself that this woman was real, had flesh like hers, because she and Ingrid were inextricably connected; Simon, after all, had chosen both of them.
In early February, her persistence paid off.
Instead of getting onto one of the idling coaches like they usually did, Chloe and Tabitha ran ecstatically into the outstretched arms of their mother. Florence drew in her breath sharply. Ingrid wore narrow black pants and a white blouse with complicated folds. Her hair was newly short, and undoubtedly expensively cut. Her face had more wrinkles than it did onscreen.
The trio walked westward, Ingrid in the middle. Tabitha held her mother’s hand and swung it back and forth with violent jubilance. Florence followed half a block behind on the other side of the street. When Ingrid and the girls caught the M86 bus on York, Florence had to sprint to make the same one. She was breathing heavily by the time she climbed aboard. A few people turned to look at her, but not Ingrid.
The family got off at Lexington and disappeared into a doctor’s suite on Eight-Seventh Street. Florence forced herself to wait a full minute before following them in.
“Can I help you?” A fortyish woman with bleached blond hair smiled at her expectantly from behind the reception desk. Florence glanced at the pamphlets in front of her. She was in an orthodontist’s office.
“Um, I have an appointment with Dr. Carlson?” she said. Dr. Carlson was the name of her dentist growing up.
“I’m sorry, there’s no one here by that name.”
“Oh. Hm. Do you mind if I just sit for a second and check my email? I have his information in here somewhere.”
The receptionist smiled and nodded.
Florence sat across from Ingrid and the girls. They had briefly fallen silent during Florence’s exchange with the receptionist, but Tabitha started talking again.
Florence scrolled through her phone and listened to the child tell a dull story about gym class.
Then Ingrid’s phone rang and she said, “Hang on, goose, I have to take this.”
She swiped the screen. “Hi, David.” Florence could hear a man’s tinny sing-song through the phone. Then Ingrid cut in: “That’s absurd. I’m not doing that…No…No…Well, let’s try to get someone else then…She did that show about felons?…Yeah, that’s a good idea. Alright, call me back.”
Ingrid hung up and sighed. She made eye contact with Florence and rolled her eyes. “Sorry about that.”
“That’s alright.” Then Florence added, “You have a lovely family.”
“Thank you,” Ingrid replied with a pleased smile, turning it on her girls one after the other.
At the sight of Ingrid’s white, even teeth, Florence pressed her lips together, suddenly ashamed of her crooked smile. She’d never been to an orthodontist. She forced herself to rise from the couch and surrender the warmth of the waiting room.
Outside, it was turning dark and a cold rain had begun to fall. She was tempted to wait for Simon’s family to emerge, so she could follow them home, but she didn’t want Ingrid to think she was stalking her. Besides, she had to get back to work. When she’d told Agatha that she was getting a cavity filled—she’d claimed an appointment for a dental exam last week—Agatha hadn’t received the news as serenely as she had in the past. She had a tendency toward passive aggression that Florence didn’t understand—she was already in a position of power; why didn’t she just use it to ask for what she wanted? Instead, she had dropped a manuscript loudly on Florence’s desk before she left for lunch and asked for her thoughts by the following morning, adding pointedly, “if you can find the time.”