1 | The Slap Heard Through the Glass My name is Elena Marsh, and for a long time I told the story of that night as if I were the villain of it.

I had told myself it was an old photograph, somebody’s cousin, somebody’s client, a face from a business dinner I had simply never met.

But when I saw her cross the carpet in a white dress, I stopped telling myself anything.

I crossed the room faster than I had moved in years.

My heels were silver, and the dress I was wearing was long-sleeved, high-necked, dark green sequined, and heavy in a way that made me feel armored.

I reached her just past the second archway.

I did not say her name.

I grabbed her arm.

I said, and I remember every syllable, “Who let you in here?”

She turned.

Her face was young.

That is what I noticed first.

She looked like someone whose life had not yet had time to get complicated.

She opened her mouth to answer, and then a hand closed around my wrist from behind, hard enough to hurt, and Richard was between us.

Not beside me.

Between us.

He pulled me off her arm like I was a stranger in his house.

I heard the room go quiet in layers, the way a party does when nobody wants to be the first to stop talking.

The flute section kept playing for a few seconds past the moment.

Richard said my name, low, the way he used to say it when he wanted me to smile for a photograph.

He did not ask me what was wrong.

He did not ask who the woman was.

He turned his shoulder to me and put his back between the woman in white and the rest of the room.

I remember looking for one face in that crowd.

My best friend Nora was flying back from a deposition in Chicago and had not landed yet.

My mother is gone.

My father is gone.

I looked around a room full of two hundred people I had known for a decade and not one of them stepped forward, and I understood in that second that I had been optional to every single one of them.

I let go of her arm.

I did not cry.

I walked toward the entry table by the elevator, where the caterers had set down the handbags and the wraps, and I picked up the small beaded clutch sitting on top of the stack.

I knew the moment my fingers closed on it that it was not mine.

Mine was black, satin, sitting at home on my dresser.

This one was covered in hundreds of tiny seed beads and it felt warm in my hand, like it had been held all evening, like it had been set down only seconds before.

I did not put it back.

I walked into the elevator.

I pressed the button for the lobby.

On the way down, the elevator was so smooth that the only sound was the clutch buzzing softly in my hand.

Somebody was calling it.

Somebody had been calling it all night.

When the doors opened on the ground floor, I stepped out into the marble lobby, and I sat down right there on the polished floor in front of the doorman, my back against the cold stone wall, and I looked up at the ceiling of a building I was supposed to be married inside of in six weeks, and I thought to myself, Elena, what in the world did you just pick up.

1 | The Slap Heard Through the Glass
My name is Elena Marsh, and for a long time I told the story of that night as if I were the villain of it.

I want to be clear about one thing before I go any further: the party was mine.

It was my engagement party, thrown in the penthouse Richard kept on the sixty-second floor of a building so far above Manhattan that the traffic noise never made it past the glass.

The windows ran the length of the living room, and the room smelled like champagne and the eight dozen white roses he had flown in that morning.

Everyone I knew was there.

Everyone I had ever introduced to him was there.

That is the detail I keep coming back to, even now.

At some point I stepped away from the catering table to check on the musicians, and when I turned back, I saw a blonde woman in a white dress slip past the caterer and move toward Richard’s study.

She was calm about it.

She did not look lost.

She looked like someone who had walked that hallway before.

I know that hallway.

I know the photograph of her face that I had found two weeks earlier in the inner pocket of Richard’s wool coat when I was looking for my gloves.

I had told myself I was crazy.

I had told myself it was an old photograph, somebody’s cousin, somebody’s client, a face from a business dinner I had simply never met.

But when I saw her cross the carpet in a white dress, I stopped telling myself anything.

I crossed the room faster than I had moved in years.

My heels were silver, and the dress I was wearing was long-sleeved, high-necked, dark green sequined, and heavy in a way that made me feel armored.

I reached her just past the second archway.

I did not say her name.

I grabbed her arm.

I said, and I remember every syllable, “Who let you in here?”

She turned.

Her face was young.

That is what I noticed first.

She looked like someone whose life had not yet had time to get complicated.

She opened her mouth to answer, and then a hand closed around my wrist from behind, hard enough to hurt, and Richard was between us.

Not beside me.

Between us.

He pulled me off her arm like I was a stranger in his house.

I heard the room go quiet in layers, the way a party does when nobody wants to be the first to stop talking.