I am voluntarily participating in the activities at 527 Park…I understand the risks associated…physical and psychological injury, pain, suffering, illness, disfigurement, temporary or permanent disability, economic loss or death.
I keep swiping, eventually landing on archived security camera footage. It’s Brit, hurrying out of 527 Park with Quinn, looking over her shoulder, spooked. Molly’s voice slices through me—“If she’s trapping you here against your will, I can help.”All at once, I am dizzy, flooded with warnings…The gut pulls that I’d ignored, dread in my chest. Roman drinking his IPA. “You’re not leaving my son with a hooker…”and “I just don’t think it’s a good idea…”Jersey, makingcircles at his temple, warning me that Daisy is not well in the head. “Jesus willing, she comes out of it on the other side.”
What if Daisy hasn’t come out of it on the other side? What if she’s come out of it as the madam of a commune of unstable moms who’ve become embroiled in whatever she’s selling? Who’ve become so dependent on a luxury condo tower and quality childcare that we’ll do whatever she asks of us? Ignore the decay beneath the decor? Drink all the matcha latte Kool-Aid? Had I mistaken safety for a cage? Nobody joins a cult. They follow a friend into the woods and wake up too far from the road to turn back.
It’s this alarm that tells me not to go home. The one that tells me that if I can move mountains to locate Daisy, if I can wean myself off Percocet while keeping a tiny human alive, if I can blackmail my boss and keep my flex spending, and collapse my stroller on the M14 crosstown bus, then I can do anything. I can stop being afraid.
I can find out what happens in the penthouse.
—
You need a secure code to take the elevator to the ninety-eighth floor, to the eighty-two-million-dollar condo allegedly owned by Atlantis Investments LLC. But due to red tape, the developer hasn’t yet installed the same high-security system in the stairwells. Turns out, fire safety rules even apply to anonymous billionaires. So I walk upstairs and open the door. The stairwell spits me right into the staff quarters. I try several doors, eventually landing in a mechanical room. Grainy CCTV security footage on a slight delay from the main bedroom shows Daisy’s naked back. She is on top, riding a man. I can’t see his face. Is he the Greek? Another client? Is she running a brothel up here? The black cube spits me out into a wine room. From there, I enter the 8,255-square-foot unit’s sterile kitchen.
I wade deeper inside, past six bedrooms, a library, a gym. Whydoes anyone need six bedrooms? I walk down a long white hallway toward the main bedroom, a cantilevered glass box floating high above Manhattan.
What exists after that lives in my mind only in moans, and that is where I will leave it. By the time I finally force myself to enter the bedroom, it is empty. The Egyptian cotton sheets tangled. La Perla panties crumpled on the floor. The shower running. An urge overcomes me, pulls my body closer to the marble bathroom and then inside. It’s all steamed up. But behind the mist, and the smell of eucalyptus oil, I can make out a man’s nude figure. He is alone. No trace of Daisy. I walk closer until I see it. I walk closer until everything that came before that is gone, washed away, and there is only one thing that remains. “Daisy, that you, babe?”
It is Roman, naked, in the shower.
PartThree
• • • • •
Chapter Thirty-Five
• • • • •
The tears really startto come now. I close the bathroom door in Leo’s apartment and vomit and cry and cry and vomit into the trash can between my knees.
I’d rushed out of the penthouse before Roman ever knew that I’d been there. I took the elevator downstairs and rushed through the revolving doors. I couldn’t stay at 527 Park, but I couldn’t go home. There was no going back. To Roman. To the apartment with the scaffolding exoskeleton. To the large Lombardi’s pizza and talking about our taxes. I wanted to cuddle Holden, but that would mean going back to my old life, my life that had existed before I saw what I saw in the penthouse.
I’d called Leo because he was the only person I knew who wouldn’t ask any questions. He hosts a podcast with a guy who used to work for Rick Rubin and writes a Substack in the style of an oldEsquireeditor’s letter. Or maybe it’sVanity Fair. Either way, it is pretentious and uses the word “leitmotif” a lot. Leo lives in a brownstone apartment in Fort Greene. Maybe he had a couch I could sleep on for the night.
My voice cracked. “Hey. It’s Emily. Are you alone?”
Leo wasn’t alone. Leo had a serious girlfriend, a bisexual divorcéenamed Phoebe, who taught women’s studies at Fordham and had shared custody of her three kids. But when I called, and Leo explained to Phoebe that one of his old students would be sleeping over, they had a big fight and she stormed out. Once a dog, always a dog.
It was almost midnight when I made it to Leo’s apartment. I had seventeen missed calls from Roman and several from Marcela. (“Roman is home so I leave now, Miss Emily.”) I hadn’t called Daisy and she hadn’t called me.
Leo puts on a Sonic Youth album and heats up a kettle to make hot tea. “I’ve been writing again,” I tell him.
“Can I read it?”
“It’s just ramblings really. Can I make sure it’s coherent first?”
Leo nods. Of course. He gets a couple of blankets out of a closet and tucks them onto a futon. He is too old to have a futon. “You had a kid, right?”
I smile. I can’t even believe that my body has this reflex. I have sad beyond anything I have ever felt before, and yet when Leo asks about Holden, when I think about Holden, I smile. “Thirty-seven weeks—” I stop myself. “Almost nine months.” I show him my phone. The wallpaper is a picture of Roman and Holden at the pumpkin patch. I see Roman’s face and I rush to the bathroom and vomit.
“Hey. You okay in there?” Leo asks.
I don’t answer. I hold my mouth to muffle the sobs. I don’t come out until Leo is asleep. I crawl onto the futon. I stare at his collection of old issues ofThe New York Review of Booksand the literary magazine he used to run—and it occurs to me that the greatest thing Leo will ever have is that he edited Jonathan Franzen in the early aughts. I have a child who needs me.
—
I let myself into my apartment. I walk straight into Holden’s room and lift him from his crib. He is awake and hungry. I give him abottle. I sit in the rocking chair in the nursery with the shadows of marsupial stuffies and the view of the playground. I rock him and kiss him and cry, counting forward and back to three hundred. I put him in his crib, and then, for the first time in nine months, I get into bed with Roman.
In the morning, I will take Holden to Texas. I have no choice but to see my mom, to finally let her meet her grandson. I will stay in the home that I once ran away from and think about what to do next. But for now, I will sleep next to my Australian husband who is slightly snoring and who has a pet turtle and who, in the morning, will misplace his wallet. Roman detects my scent. He cracks his eyes.
