Chapter Forty-Three
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The next thing I remember is the bright white light.
We are both on the floor panting and coughing and trying to breathe.
I rub my neck, a feeling like the time a regular tried to suffocate me with his boot after he couldn’t get it up.
Penelope’s eye is cut and bleeding, her nail badly broken. She sits on the floor across from me.
I feel it before she even says anything.
We both can. I am back to being good, simple, obedient, boring Emily.
Maybe I should tell her about my diagnosis—how it hadn’t been me at all.
I never could have invited half the moms in the tristate area to invade a luxury tower.
I never could have made her driver, Viktor, take me and Holden all over town in the Mercedes.
I wouldn’t even begin to know how to do what Daisy did.
But before I can say anything, I am surrounded by Juju Bean moms. Olivia, June, Claire, Jasmine, they are all bolstering me, helping me up, dabbing a drop of blood (maybe mine? maybe Penelope’s?) with their Alo no-sweat hand wipes (presumably shoplifted) and chilled, cucumber-infused towelettes.
When the NYPD walks in, they look at the scene. Penelope is the villain.
She snaps at them. “It’s about fucking time. Can you get these women out of here? They’re trespassing.”
“Hello, Officers. We’re not actually trespassing. We’re squatting.”
“That true?” the heavyset one with a goatee asks.
“Yeah, squatting. Whatever. Just get them out of here? Um, now?”
The cops look at each other. Penelope realizes right away that she said the wrong thing. I enter hostess mode. “Can I get you anything? Water? Espresso?”
“I’d love a coffee. Cream and sugar?”
“You got it.” I remove a piece of lint from the cute one’s shoulder. I am so good at pleasing men. It’s almost as if I used to do it for a living.
“Do you live here, ma’am?” the same cop asks Penelope.
She looks offended at the suggestion. “What? No. It’s an investment property. We just did a gut renovation on a town house off Gramercy. Well, it’s not finished. We still have three bathrooms and the topiary on the terrace—”
The heavyset one cuts Penelope off. “And how long have these ladies been using the apartment?”
“It’s been maybe four, five months,” I say from the kitchen. The other cop has joined me. I move around, entering his personal space, giving him permission to enter mine.
“Did you hear that? Five months. They’ve been here five months. I want to press charges,” Penelope says.
“We can’t do that. After thirty days, if a property owner or manager wants to evict a squatter, you have to seek a judicial eviction…”
“That’s not a problem,” Penelope says. “I have two words for you: August Levin.”
“Yo, I don’t know who this August guy is, but it could be a big problem. New York City law says they’ve got a legal right to stay.”
“How is that possible?”
“Don’t blame us, blame city hall. Give someone a latte and a lounge chair for ninety days, they own your ass.”
“But they’re trespassers. Criminals.”
The cute cop with the tight butt and the defined Adam’s apple is looking around, taking in the high ceilings, the terrace, the blindingly bright winter day. “Is the apartment in your name, ma’am?”
“Yes…I mean, not technically, it’s a limited liability…it’s just a tax thing. A technicality. This is my apartment. I bought it three—no, four years ago. I think. I don’t know exactly, but my family’s wealth manager advised we get in early. He’s an idiot. I’m at JP Morgan now. Why does it matter?”
“Four years and you’ve never lived here?
” The stocky one shakes his head. I bring him a coffee and offer the other a selection of waters.
“Sparkling or still?” He takes a Topo Chico.
I pop the top off and stick a straw in and he looks at me like he wants to take me into the bedroom and pour Ranch Water over my bare breasts.
Penelope points a finger at me. “She assaulted me. She stole from me.”
“Okay, Peepers,” I say, my voice calm and flat. I whisper in her ear, “Maybe people like me do blackmail people like you.”
Penelope collects herself. “You know what? I don’t even care about this place. It was never going to sell. We’ll make more money with it vacant. Maybe we can even write it off as a charitable donation.”
The police stop asking questions. They thank me for the refreshments and leave. For the first time in months, I feel safe. I feel like I won.
I give Penelope a sly smile on her way out.
Direct, my face framed by dark, savage curls.
Penelope is paralyzed, a sudden wrench to the gut.
She can’t believe it. Surely Emily wasn’t smart enough to have known about the adverse possession squatter laws this entire time.
To have known that if you squat in an unoccupied apartment in New York City for more than thirty days, you have the same rights as a legal tenant.
To have known that it is against real estate law for a property owner to change the locks or remove a squatter’s belongings, or even cut off utilities.
You can’t even make them use the poor door.
Surely Emily didn’t plan this whole thing.
She couldn’t have shown up in New York, just another girl wanting to be a writer, and intentionally taken a job working for an heiress, and then spent years pretending to be subservient, listening to and waiting on and befriending that heiress.
Years of dutifully doing odd jobs and keeping secrets for the heiress and her family, until she gained her trust. Until she became so indispensable, so innocuous, like beige wallpaper, that this heiress would trust her with anything.
Ask her to organize tax documents, property reports, credit card statements.
No. Definitely not. Emily wasn’t smart enough.
She didn’t even graduate from college. She could’ve never studied the every move of a Malaysian financier, taken notes when he’d talked about how luxury real estate was the next bastion of criminal activity.
Followed, over the next several years, as soaring ultra-luxe condo towers, mostly sold to investors and left vacant, popped up, ruining New York’s skyline.
Tame, milquetoast Emily wouldn’t have known any of this.
She ran errands. Fetched Pellegrino. And she wasn’t even good at that.
Surely she didn’t meticulously track that her heiress friend bought a thirty-seven-million-dollar condo under an LLC.
A condo that the heiress wouldn’t be caught dead living in.
No. Emily could have never put all of this together and started to see that there might just be a way—a legal way—to make her way back to a luxury condo in the clouds.
To bring her baby…Maybe even invite some friends over.