She tips her head to one side and feigns a little pout. “Poor thing. Has he finished with you? If I were you, I’d count myself lucky that I managed to escape relatively unscathed.” Her eyebrows lift ever so slightly. “Assuming you have, of course.”
“Get out.”
She turns, then glances back at me. “I’m not sure when Father will be home, but it won’t be long now, and he isn’t likely to be in a very good mood when he arrives. I’d think long and hard before mentioning Helene. Or the paperboy. I can promise it won’t end well.”
Forever, and Other Lies
（pgs. 77–80）
December 10, 1941
New York, New York
I’ve spent three days in a kind of twilight. Three days believing I’ve been hurt as deeply as it’s possible to be hurt. But I’m wrong. There’s more to come.
Shall I tell you how it was? How it felt? It only seems fair.
I’m still avoiding my sister, keeping to my room when I know she’s home. I have nothing to say to her, though I suspect at some point she and my father will have a great deal to say to me. About you. About Teddy. About my duty to the family. Because in the end, it always comes back to duty. They have no idea what I’ve already given up, the scandal they were spared for my sake.
I despise Cee-Cee for being right about you, and myself for being so completely taken in. I find myself reliving every moment you and I spent together, every word, every kiss, every touch, looking for something I should have seen but didn’t. Perhaps she’s right, though. Perhaps I have dodged a bullet. And perhaps in a few years—a hundred or so—I may even believe it. But it doesn’t feel that way just now.
I wait every day for the mail to arrive, hoping there will be something from you. A letter telling me where you are, asking me to come to you. Or at least explaining why you did what you did. There hasn’t been, of course. And there won’t be. Some part of me knows that.
But there has been a telegram from my father. Cee-Cee made sure it was on this morning’s breakfast tray. It seems the Boston rally has been canceled, though my father plans to remain for another week. Since the attack on Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh’s beloved America First committee has begun to fray and my father and his friends are hoping to hold it together. The last line is about me: a directive to keep an eye on me until he can come home and deal with me properly.
My sister is toying with me, dangling his return like a threat. I don’t care. I refuse to be bullied or remain in this house full of hatred and secrets. He’ll cut me off without a cent, but I have some money of my own, from the trust my mother left me when she died. Not a lot by my father’s standards, but enough for an easy life by almost anyone else’s.
That I will leave here has been decided. It’s the where I haven’t quite settled yet. I had pinned all my hopes on California, but that’s when it was us. I’m not sure I could bear it now. I should hate you. I do hate you. But I can’t help wondering where you are, what you’re doing, and if you ever think of me. I shouldn’t care. You’re not worth my tears. But of course, I care. You knew that when you left.
The war has begun in earnest. It’s just Japan for now, but it’s only a matter of time until Roosevelt declares on Germany too. I think of you, of your impassioned speeches about our moral responsibility to join the Europeans in their fight against the Nazis. You were right—about every bit of it—but all I can think of are the horrors of the last war, the blood and death and gore—and you, somewhere in the middle of it, writing it all down for the sake of history.
Your leaving has left me in a kind of strange twilight, a limbo of drowsy days and sleepless nights. I can’t seem to get my footing back. But time is running out. I need to make my plans, but I can’t think here, with the walls tight around me.
I strip out of my robe and throw on the first thing I find in my closet. I hold my breath as I step out into the hall, expecting to be waylaid and sent back to my room. But there’s no sign of Cee-Cee as I make my way downstairs.
Outside, the air is cold and sharp. I welcome the sting of it as I head down Park Avenue. I have no idea where I’m going. Certainly not anywhere I might be recognized. The last thing I want is to run into someone I know, to be forced to smile and make small talk.
I keep my head down and walk briskly for several blocks. Gradually, the scenery changes, stately houses giving way to brownstones and then to squatty brick apartment houses with shops tucked beneath, their windows decorated for the holidays. A pharmacy, a shoe repair shop, a music store with used clarinets and violins in the window. I study the parade of determined faces coming toward me, all too busy to pay me much mind. It feels good to be anonymous, to gaze at face after face without fear of being known. And then I realize what I’m doing. I’m looking for you—your face, your shoulders, your long-legged gait—somewhere in that swift-moving river of humanity.
It’s a ridiculous thing to hope. So ridiculous I feel the clutch of tears in my throat. I reverse course abruptly, nearly blundering into a woman with several packages in her arms. Something about her is familiar, the thin mouth and faintly birdlike nose. Lisa. Her name pops into my head. No, Lissa, a seamstress at one of the dress shops I frequent.
I pivot away from her, ducking behind a nearby newsstand. I pretend to browse the racks of magazines, papers, and tabloids. And then I see it—a grainy rendition of my parents’ wedding photo staring back at me from the front page of the New York Weekly Review, along with the garish headline: GRUESOME ASYLUM DEATH RAISES FRESH EYEBROWS.
My legs go limp and for a moment I think I’m going to be sick right there on the street. I wait until the sensation passes, then pull a copy from the rack. I’m shaking all over and the words shift and blur as I read, but the story is all too familiar.
Multiple suicide attempts, an unexplained knife, the thinly veiled suggestion that what had previously been labeled an accident might not have been an accident at all. There’s more on the second page, a laundry list of anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi groups with which my father is said to be affiliated, a longer list than I knew, and finally, the thinly veiled suggestion that he may have gone to nefarious lengths to conceal his wife’s Jewish heritage. At the bottom of the second page are two additional photos: one of me and one of Cee-Cee, with our names.
You haven’t left anything out. Not even me.
“Buy it or put it back, lady. This ain’t a library.”
I glance up to find a man with wind-burned cheeks and a day’s worth of beard glaring at me. I close the paper and toss it down, too numb to feel relief that he appears not to recognize me. He will by tomorrow.
By tomorrow, everyone will.
Forever, and Other Lies
（pgs. 81–83）
December 18, 1941
New York, New York
There will be no wedding in June.
Teddy’s parents have made it official, expressing shock and dismay at the Weekly Review’s recent revelations about my father. I suspect they’ll waste little time before arranging another matrimonial merger. There are faces to save, after all, and what better way to paper over their son’s brief but unfortunate engagement to me than to wed him to some new and unsullied bride—preferably one with pure gentile bloodlines.