Gemma texted me on a Wednesday. *Brunch? I miss your face.* I said yes before I could think about it. That was my mistake—not the yes, but the not thinking.
We met at the place on the Upper East Side she loved, the one with the good eggs Benedict and the windows that made everything look golden even in January. She was already there when I arrived, coat draped over her chair, coffee in hand, smiling the way she always smiled when she saw me. Like I was something good.
I sat down. I ordered tea. We talked about nothing for a few minutes—her job, a movie she'd seen, the cold. Normal things. Safe things.
Then she set down her cup and looked at me with her careful eyes.
'How are you really doing?' she asked. 'And I mean really.'
'I'm fine.' I smiled. 'Better than fine.'
'Vienna.' She reached across the table and touched my hand. 'You don't have to perform for me.'
I kept the smile in place. 'I'm not performing.'
'Colson called me,' she said. Gentle. Like she was handing me something fragile. 'He's worried about you. He said you've been—' she paused, choosing the word carefully, '—erratic. Since the baby. He thinks maybe it's postpartum, and he doesn't know how to help, and he just—he loves you so much, Vienna. He's scared.'
I looked at her.
She looked back at me with so much genuine concern that for one second—just one—I felt the wall inside me tremble.
Erratic. That was his word. I knew it was his word because it was too careful, too clinical, the exact word a man would choose when he was building a case and not a conversation.
'I appreciate that,' I said. My voice was warm. Steady. 'I think I've just been tired. New baby, you know how it is.'
'Of course.' She squeezed my hand. 'But if you're overthinking things—if your mind is going to dark places—there's no shame in talking to someone. A professional, I mean. Colson mentioned—'
'Overthinking things.' I repeated it back to her softly. Like I was tasting it.
'He just wants you to be okay.'
'I know he does.' I picked up my tea. 'He's a good husband.'
She smiled, relieved. We talked about other things after that. The eggs Benedict came. I ate half of mine. I laughed at the right moments. When we hugged goodbye on the sidewalk, she held on a second longer than usual.
'Call me anytime,' she said into my shoulder. 'I mean it.'
'I will,' I said. 'Thank you for this.'
I walked home through the park.
The cold was clean and sharp and the path was mostly empty. A dog walker. A jogger. A nanny pushing a stroller. I watched the stroller pass and thought about Eiden, asleep at home with the sitter, his small fist curled the way it always was.
I let myself have one block. Just one.
For Gemma, who had no idea she was carrying his words in her mouth like they were her own. For the version of our friendship that existed before this, when I could have told her anything. For the marriage I had believed in completely—the 2 AM breakfasts, the swollen feet, the whispered promises—all of it now visible for what it was. A performance. A long, patient, well-rehearsed performance.
I stopped on the path. Breathed in. The air tasted like winter and exhaust and something clean underneath both.
Then I kept walking.
Gemma went on the list. Not as an enemy. As a closed door. There was a difference, and it mattered to me to know the difference.
Isolation is also clarity. I'd read that somewhere once. I understood it now in my body, the way you only understand certain things when they stop being abstract.
---
The social media post went up that Friday.
Two champagne flutes. A Manhattan skyline at night, the lights blurred soft and gold. The caption: *Some people were just built for this life. ✨*
Raquel's account. Public. Forty-seven likes in the first hour, including three people from Burke Enterprises who should have known better.
I screenshotted it. Timestamped it. Dropped it in the file.
She had also, that same week, hosted a client dinner in Colson's name—his name on the reservation, her voice running the table. Internal memos going out signed *EA to CEO.* Small moves. Territorial moves. The kind a woman makes when she believes the lease is already in her name and she's just waiting for the previous tenant to clear out.
She thought she was taunting me.
She was furnishing my case.
Every receipt. Every signature. Every champagne glass raised toward a skyline she had not built and would not keep. I felt nothing looking at it except the particular cold satisfaction of a woman who knows exactly how much rope she's letting out.
I touched my mother's bracelet.
I opened the file.
I kept building.
