“You do all this old-people stuff,” Connie said. “How do you stand it?”

“We like it,” Meredith said. She refrained from telling Connie that what she wanted most in the world was to marry Toby. She pictured the two of them having kids and settling down on the Main Line, in a life not so different from that of her own parents.


To this day, Meredith couldn’t explain how the whole thing fell apart, but fall apart it did.

Toby broke up with Meredith on the night of her high-school graduation. The O’Briens threw a huge party for Connie; the party was tented and catered and there was free-flowing alcohol for the adults, which inevitably trickled down to the teenagers. Toby was drinking Coke and Wild Turkey, but because Meredith’s parents were in attendance, she was sipping lukewarm Tab. Connie was drinking gin and tonics like her mother. She had given up on her romance with Matt Klein and was now dating the star of the Radnor lacrosse team, Drew Van Dyke, who was headed to Johns Hopkins in the fall. Connie and Drew disappeared from the party at ten o’clock, and Toby wanted to ditch, too-he suggested skinny-dipping in the pool at Aronimink, then making love on the rolling hill behind the ninth tee. But this was too dangerous for Meredith; Chick was the president of the board at Aronimink, and if Meredith and Toby got caught, her father would be humiliated, which wasn’t something Meredith was willing to risk. She told Toby she wanted to stay and dance to the band.

Toby said, “What are you, a hundred years old?”

It was true that the people remaining at the party were all older, friends of Bill and Veronica O’Brien.

“My parents are dancing,” Meredith said. “Let’s stay.”

“I don’t want to stay and dance with your parents,” Toby said. “I’m getting kind of sick of your parents.”

Meredith was aghast at this statement. She felt her cheeks grow hot.

“I’m nineteen,” Toby said. “And you’re eighteen. Let’s go act our age.”

Meredith glanced back at the dance floor. Her mother and father were jitterbugging.

“That looks like so much fun,” Meredith said.

“It does not look like fun,” Toby said.

Just then, a man approached Meredith. His name was Dustin Leavitt, and he worked with Bill O’Brien at Philco. Dustin Leavitt was a bachelor; he was tall and handsome and polished and charming-he was an adult-but he seemed to especially enjoy talking to Meredith. Over the winter, he’d seen her dive against Lower Merion-Dustin’s niece swam the butterfly for Lower Merion-and that had been Meredith’s best meet. She’d gotten 9’s on her reverse one and a half pike and broken the pool record. You’re quite the shooting star, Dustin Leavitt had said to her in the hallway of the school after the meet.

Since she’d arrived at the party, Meredith had felt Dustin Leavitt looking at her. Even Connie had noticed it. She’d said, “I think Dustin Leavitt has a thing for you.”

And Meredith said, “Please shut up.”

Connie said, “I’m serious. He’s hot. And he’s a man.”

Meredith knew he was fifteen years her senior. Thirty-three. It seemed impossibly old.

“Hey there, Toby,” Dustin Leavitt said. “I’d love to take your girlfriend for a spin. Do you mind?”

Meredith was certain Toby would object, but he just shrugged. “Go for it.”

“Meredith?” Dustin Leavitt held out his arms.

Meredith was uncertain. She was flattered by the gesture, certainly, but she didn’t want to upset Toby. But she wanted to dance, and Toby was drinking and he was being mean. She let Dustin Leavitt lead her to the dance floor, and it was only when the song was over and Meredith and Dustin were flushed and perspiring, clapping for the band, that Meredith realized that Toby had left the party without her.

Meredith went home with her parents a while later, panicked and heartsick about Toby. She was afraid he’d left because he was mad or upset about her dancing with Dustin Leavitt. But when Meredith finally talked to him-she walked over to the O’Briens’ house first thing the next morning, ostensibly to help clean up-he told her that he didn’t care about her dancing with Dustin Leavitt. In fact, he said, it had come as kind of a relief.

“What does that mean?” Meredith asked. They were in the backyard under the tent. Toby was stacking the folding chairs, and Meredith was picking crumpled cocktail napkins out of the grass.

“I think we should break up,” Toby said.

“Break up?” Meredith said. “You’re breaking up with me?”

“I think I am,” he said. He nodded once, definitively. “I am.”

Meredith had sat down in the grass and cried. Toby stretched out beside her and leaned back on his hands. It was like he had changed overnight. He was distant and cool. He was leaving for Cape May in a few days, he said, to work as first mate on a sailboat; he would be gone all summer, she knew that. Yes, she said, but she was supposed to visit him. Every weekend!

He said, “Right. But I think it would be better if I was free.”

“Better for whom?”

“Better for me,” he said. He went on to mention that, although he really liked Meredith’s parents, he didn’t want to become Meredith’s parents. Not yet, anyway, and maybe not ever. “Besides,” he said, “you’re going to Princeton in the fall. You’ll have so many amazing opportunities in front of you…”

“Jesus Christ!” Meredith screamed. She thought of the stories she had heard about Divinity Michaels locking herself in the janitor’s closet and threatening to drink the ammonia. Now Meredith understood. “Don’t patronize me!”

“Okay,” Toby said. His expression was one of concern, but probably only because Meredith had taken the Lord’s name in vain-which she never did-and he feared she was becoming a psycho like his other ex-girlfriends. “Geez, Meredith, I’m sorry. I can’t change how I feel.”


Meredith cried in her bedroom, she cried on the phone with Connie (who, if Meredith wasn’t mistaken, sounded almost happy about the breakup), she skipped meals and her parents worried. Chick Martin took Meredith to the Villanova parking lot to practice for her driving test, but this turned into hour-long sessions of Meredith crying and Chick attempting to console her.

“I can’t stand to see you hurt like this,” Chick said. “Your mother and I feel so helpless. Do you want me to talk to Toby?”

“No,” Meredith said. Her father could do many magical things, but he couldn’t make Toby love her.


It took two days for Meredith’s glasses to be ready, and when they were, the transformation was complete. She put on the dark wig with the pigtails and slipped on the new glasses, which had wireless rims. The lenses seemed to float before Meredith’s eyes. They offered no definition the way her signature horn-rimmed glasses had.

“That’s what you want,” Connie said. “Trust me.”

It was true that with the wig and the glasses, Meredith looked nothing like herself. From a distance, even Freddy wouldn’t recognize her.


On Saturday morning, Connie suggested that they go shopping in town. Meredith declined. “Town” meant other people and she couldn’t do other people.

“But you haven’t even seen town,” Connie said.

“I’ll see it another time,” Meredith said.

“Like when?” Connie said.

“When it’s less populated,” Meredith said. She was thinking of midnight in the middle of March. “When there’s less chance of being recognized.”

Connie argued that the more people were around, the less likely someone would notice Meredith. Plus, she and Wolf had always gone into town shopping on Saturday morning; it was what they did.

“Someone out there is watching me,” Meredith said.

“The police checked the area. It’s not like someone is watching you twenty-four, seven.”

“It feels like it.”

“It was a scare tactic, Meredith. That’s how they want you to feel. But we’re not going to let them win. We’re going to live our lives. And if they’re watching you today, then they’re watching you shop in town.”

Meredith had little room to argue, and she was desperate to get out of the house. Once they got to town, Meredith realized Connie was right: There was such a happy buzz on Main Street that no one had time to take notice of her. There were people everywhere-parents with children in strollers, couples holding hands, older men in pink polo shirts walking golden retrievers, women wearing Lilly Pulitzer skirts and carrying shopping bags from Gypsy and Eye of the Needle. Meredith used to be one of those women. Now, of course, she couldn’t afford to buy a thing. But it was fun to be part of the crowd. She and Connie stopped at the Bartlett’s Farm truck, and Meredith let her eyes feast on the fresh, organic produce nestled into sixteen square boxes on the tilted truck bed. It was a patchwork quilt of color-the purple cabbages, the green zucchini and cucumbers, the red hothouse tomatoes, the yellow summer squash. Connie bought some beautiful, tender lettuce and an armload of bright gladiolus that Meredith offered to carry. She felt lucky to be carrying flowers and shopping at farm trucks. She wondered what the boys were doing. She hoped Leo was with Anais, mountain biking or playing golf, momentarily free from anxiety. Poor Freddy had finished the first week of his one hundred and fifty year sentence. He was staring down an eternity of barbed wire and desolation. For all Meredith knew, this time next year, she would be in prison herself.

But she couldn’t let herself think about that.

Connie led her around the corner and down the cobblestone streets to Nantucket Bookworks, where they browsed for a luxurious stretch of time. Meredith stayed away from the nonfiction shelves; already there were books about the evil empire of Delinn Enterprises. These books had been written quickly and must have contained hundreds of inaccuracies and suppositions. Meredith assumed at least one of the books contained background information about Freddy and possibly about her as well. But would they have gotten it right? Would they have written about Meredith’s idyllic upbringing on the Main Line? Would they have written about how she adored her father? Would they have written about her good grades, her excellent test scores, her near-perfect reverse one and a half pike? Would they have wondered how a girl with so much on the ball had allowed herself to get mixed up with Freddy Delinn?

Meredith immersed herself in the novels. For some reason, fiction hit on the meaning of life so much more concisely than real life itself did. She browsed Atwood and Morrison, Kingsolver, Russo. She picked up a novel by Laura Kasischke that she’d seen written up in Town & Country months before. There was a shelf of classics, too: she could pick up the one Austen she hadn’t read yet or Pale Fire by Nabokov. There were holes in her canon. One couldn’t read everything, though Meredith could try. Now, she had the time. For one second on a sunny Saturday morning in a bookstore in Nantucket, her life seemed good, at least in that one aspect.

Then, she looked up. Connie had bought the new Barefoot Contessa cookbook and was waiting patiently, browsing at the travel section. Meredith had to make a decision. Would she buy anything? Yes, she would buy the Kasischke and Persuasion. She put the other books back where they belonged-Meredith wanted to follow the rules in even the smallest things now-and when she turned to the register, she saw Amy Rivers. Amy was holding a copy of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, asking the woman behind the counter if she could get it autographed by the author. Her voice was so familiar that Meredith panicked to the point of absolute stillness. Connie was waiting, they had other places to go, but Meredith couldn’t move. Her disguise of wig and glasses wouldn’t be enough. If Amy Rivers saw her, she would know her.

Amy Rivers sensed something, perhaps. She turned toward Meredith. Meredith bowed her head. Amy Rivers had left a message on the answering machine in the Delinns’ Park Avenue apartment, a screaming, hysterical message in which she’d used the word “fuck” as every part of speech. She could not fucking believe it. Freddy was a lying, criminal bastard, an inexcusable fuck of a human fucking being. Then Amy lit into Meredith. Meredith had fucked her, fucking betrayed her. And I thought we were fucking friends. What the fuck? Meredith wanted to call Amy back, to remind Amy that it was she who had begged Meredith to get her in with Freddy. Meredith had given Freddy Amy’s business card as a favor. Meredith had no idea Freddy was running a Ponzi scheme. She had no clue she was setting Amy up to lose all her money. Amy said herself that the returns were “unbelievable.” Things that seemed unbelievable usually were. Amy was smart enough to know that. Where was Amy’s due diligence? Why was this Meredith’s fault?