Confessions on the 7:45(56)

The bartender was watching Martha in the reflection of the mirror behind the bar, a slight smile on his full lips. He ran a hand through his thick, dark hair, and Selena noticed a tribal tattoo on his wrist.

“Well,” she said. “Be careful, okay?”

Martha smiled sweetly, reached out to squeeze Selena’s arm. “You’re a good friend.”

  On the street, instead of walking back to the parking garage in the rain, Selena caught a cab and climbed inside.

“Where to?” asked the cabbie.

She thought about it a moment. Back to the car, then the long ride home? Back to a confrontation with Graham, another sleepless night. No. She gave the cab driver Will’s address, then dropped him a text.

He answered right away: The doorman will let you up.

On the way uptown, she scrolled through the pictures in a text from her mom. The boys were asleep in their beds.

Everything is okay, her mother had written with the photographs. This too shall pass.



TWENTY-ONE

Anne

One of her gifts was following people. There was a skill to it, a craft. Most people didn’t imagine that they were being followed, so that was a built-in advantage.

Beyond that, these days, most people weren’t present at all; they weren’t paying attention. If they weren’t lost in the storm of their own inner lives, they were numbing themselves with their devices. They were either obsessed with their wants, needs, grudges, aspirations, insecurities, watching a movie of themselves on the inside of their brains, or they were playing Candy Crush, trolling through social media, sending or receiving inane texts about the minutiae of their lives.

So these days, it was easy to observe, to move unseen through the world, to sneak up behind, easier than it had ever been.

Anne let Selena leave, let the other woman think that her new slutty friend was hanging around to hook up with the bartender. Which she could, of course. She could have him, or really almost anyone. But why? He was hot enough, but what was the point? She’d had Hugh that very afternoon; she could still feel him.

She waited a beat, then gathered up her things, and followed Selena. The other woman was still on the curb, hand in the air. Anne stayed inside the door, watching. A cab pulled up and Selena ducked inside; Anne grabbed the cab that pulled up right behind.

“Follow the taxi in front of you,” she said to the driver.

He didn’t respond, which she took as an assent. His phone rang, and he started talking in a language she didn’t understand. West Slavic? Russian? Polish?

Selena’s cab raced uptown, Anne close behind.

“Where are you going?” she whispered, though she had an inkling.

Prediction. That was her other gift. Where would Selena go if she found herself suddenly free from the things that held her to her life? When things got rocky, the ground shifting, to whom would Selena turn?

Up Tenth Avenue, across town through the park via Seventy-Ninth, then up Madison. The Upper East Side. The streets were slick; had it rained?

It was so easy to infiltrate a life these days between social media and everyone’s insatiable desire to broadcast their day-to-day, the show they put on of themselves. It only took Anne a couple of hours to piece together a picture of almost anyone’s life, where they lived and worked, where they shopped, ate, partied, where their kids went to school. It had never been easier to gain private information and access. People just gave it all away now, often without even realizing it.

Of course, she’d devoted more than a few hours to Selena, much more. Their encounter on the train was anything but chance. There was very little she didn’t know about Selena Murphy. She even knew things about Selena that the other woman didn’t know about herself.

When Selena’s cab came to a stop, Anne’s driver pulled over, too. Still talking, meter running. He seemed to know to sit and wait. Anne watched as her slim and elegant friend exited the cab and quickly ducked into a fancy doorman building with a maroon awning.

Anne snapped a picture quickly with her phone.

Well, she thought, that didn’t take long.

She watched as Selena had a quick, smiling exchange with the doorman, then disappeared into the luxe lobby. The lawyer, the ex. The first and last safe place Selena had known. She should have married him.

As much as she knew about Selena Murphy, the woman she met tonight had surprised her. Anne had expected her to be frazzled, confessional, insecure. But the woman who’d sat across from her at the bar was put together, intelligent and in control. She lied, easily and with purpose. She was calculating.

She was both stronger and smarter than Anne would have imagined. Not good traits in a mark.

“This plan is flawed.” Pop. “And it’s flawed because it’s personal. I taught you better. You chose her for the wrong reasons. Pull the plug.”

“I know, I know,” she said out loud, startling at the sound of her own voice.

But the taxi driver, if he heard Anne at all, probably assumed that she, too, was talking on the phone. She felt a buzz of anxiety, which quickly turned to a simmering anger. No, it wasn’t anger. It was something darker, meaner.

“Rage,” Pop never failed to mention. “It makes us sloppy. And in our business sloppiness kills. Remember that?”

“What?” asked the driver, glancing at her in the rearview mirror. “Where to next? Just sit? The meter is running.”