Chapter 4
Laura
Four Years Later
Once, I believed the city would make me invisible, if not invincible.
Now, New York in December only magnifies every raw place, a bruise pressed by cold air and the too-bright holiday lights.
My feet crunch over blackened ice leaving a trail that disappears in the sunlight.
With my hands stuffed in my mother’s old cashmere coat, I watch my breath rise and vanish with each exhale.
Before long, I spot Frida Larson at our usual bench, posture military but gaze disguised behind cateye sunglasses, a Starbucks cup bleeding heat into her gloved hands.
She doesn’t look up, so I break the ice. “You’re early for once,” I say, and she gives a tiny, sharp-toothed grin.
“You’re late. That’s different.” She pats the bench and I sit beside her, close but not touching.
I see myself reflected in her glasses — eyes large and black, hair escaping its beret in little static sparks.
We look like two sisters on a day out, if you squint, which is what I want the city to believe.
The air is cottoned with distant noise: children shrieking on the playground, wheels slicing over glass-smooth ice at the Wollman Rink down the slope. The only true privacy left is in the open, where no one expects secrets.
Frida passes me the coffee, the cup scalding my palm. “Espresso with oat milk,” she says. “Because you’re a martyr.” She brushes flakes of something — snow, dandruff, who knows — from her thigh. “I assume you have a plan, Laura.”
I stare at the ice skaters twirling in loose orbits, their faces pinked with weather and glee. “No plan. Just a request.”
Frida makes a humming sound. “I’m listening.”
My fingers clench around the cup until the cardboard sleeve buckles inward. “I want you to start preparing. Quietly, off-grid. Safe location, offshore account, new identity.” The words are heavy, and I dislike their shape. “I’m not ready yet. But I want the option.”
Frida’s response is a perfect North African neutrality. She’s so good at this, better than I’ll ever be. “If I do this, it is not reversible,” she says. “Will you need to take anyone with you?”
A couple clutching rental skates pass near — the woman’s lipstick is smeared, the man’s scarf trailing like a leash. I say, “No. Just me.”
There is a pause. Frida examines my face as if inspecting a bomb casing for hairline cracks. Did she know about the panic attacks, the weeks when breathing was work, the nights I toyed with a bottle of clozapine like a talisman? Possibly. “You’ve never run before,” she says.
“I’ve never had to. Before.” My voice is low, and the words taste like frost.
Frida opens her phone, thumbs rapidly, then slides it into her bag. “The account?”
“The Cayman number you set up for me when I was nineteen. Use what you need, but move in small amounts. I’ll check in weekly, but not from anything traceable.” I hand her a Moleskine with the new passphrase inside, torn from the spine and folded four times. She pockets it without looking.
For a minute, we pretend to watch the skaters. A small boy in a mustard coat keeps falling, skinning his knees on the ice, each time popping up with a face full of astonished joy.
Frida speaks first: “When you’re ready, use this.” She sets a phone on the bench between us — not a burner, but something older, heavy as a stone, the kind I sometimes call a “dumb phone.” “For when the time comes,” she says.
We lapse into silence. The whole landscape seems rehearsed for isolation: the trees sway in the wind, and the pond has gone opaque under a thin film of ice.
I catch a memory of Pierce, singular and immediate, the way he’d lace his fingers into mine at this very spot, as if we were playing at being ordinary people.
His voice comes back in those old rhythms: You are not what’s written in your blood, Laura. You’re more.
Frida interrupts my thoughts: “Do you want to talk about it?” She is not offering comfort, only a vessel for secrets.
“No.” My nails dig crescents into my palm. “I want to pretend it was somebody else’s life.”
She nods, as if this is mercy. We finish our coffee.
On my way out of Central Park, I pass the Plaza.
It’s gaudied up for Christmas, windows bordered in pine and cheap gold, an inflatable bear clutching gifts at the entrance.
Once, Pierce and I took the service elevator to a tenth-floor suite to avoid cameras, spent forty-eight hours marooned on starched sheets, soaked in gin, telling each other tall tales about people we would never become.
Now, Fifth Avenue is a river of red and green and white, and every windowpane reflects a better, cleaner version of myself — one who got out, or maybe never existed at all.
Past the St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I remember our first kiss, the way the bells rang so loud it made the ground shudder.
It was all so stupid and simple then: we believed our love was more dangerous than my father’s men, more enduring than the city’s rot, more sacred than anything the Church could offer.
I cross myself, not out of faith, but because I promised my mother I’d never enter a church without doing so. Her ghost haunts me quietly than any priest.
When I finally reach home, I crack open the window and let the city’s cold mouth fill my bedroom. I light a cigarette, cupping the ember with fingers that still shake when the wind changes. The phone Frida gave me sits on the kitchen counter, mute and patient as an animal.
I watch the snow filter through the sodium haze, alight on shoulders, soften sirens, hush the traffic. My loneliness feels palpable, and there’s no one left to offer comfort. My mother is gone. Pinky died last year, shattering what little was left of my heart.
I know Pierce is long gone, living somewhere I can’t follow, loving someone easier. But I still speak to him in these dead hours, hoping he hears, hoping I’ll see him again and ask why I wasn’t good enough to fight for.
“All’s well,” I whisper to the glass, and the words fog and vanish, as if they were never true.