Casey found herself pressing the tiny button to lock the door of her new bedroom and then stopped. She forced herself to leave the door a little open instead.
Now that she was on the outside, what would she do? Where could a convicted felon find work? Surely not art auction houses. She could try her hand at writing, but that would bring her the publicity she wanted to avoid. Would a court allow her to legally change her name? Lots of questions, very few answers.
She had heard stories from women who left the prison, only to come back again, that it was difficult to adjust to freedom on the outside. Never once did she think that would apply to her. But, here she was, afraid to sleep with the door open in her own mother’s house.
Nothing had been as awful as that trip to buy clothes. It didn’t dawn on Casey until they walked into the shopping center how strange it would feel to be among strangers in public. No uniforms. No unwritten rules of conduct. On the train ride to and from the city the following day, she had hid behind the pages of a newspaper.
Maybe her mother and Angela were right. She could forget the past and try to start a new life. But where, and doing what? Was she supposed to change her name, move to the middle of nowhere, and live like a hermit? What kind of life was that? Besides, if she’d learned anything in the first few days, it was that she couldn’t even go to a mall in suburban Connecticut without the past finding her.
And not her entire past. No one remembered her as a top student at Tufts, the star of the college tennis team, or the president of the local chapter of the Young Democrats. Or as one of the few people to get a job at Sotheby’s straight out of college. Or the way she made Hunter laugh the first time she met him by reciting Picasso’s full baptismal name from memory: Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso. Or the night he held her and sobbed while describing the pain of watching his mother die from breast cancer, the same disease that stole her aunt Robin at such a young age.
No one will ever recall one kind thing about me, Casey thought, as she began to undress. She was a persona, a caricature, a punch line.
Unwillingly, she thought about Mindy Sampson. She was the one who had coined most of those nasty nicknames for Casey.
She would have thought Mindy would be retired by now. She knew Mindy had been fired by the New York Post. She hadn’t realized until tonight that Mindy had taken her column online instead, to a blog called The Chatter.
The medium may have changed, but her garbage remained the same. Even before I was arrested, Casey thought, Mindy was out to get me. She was the one who ran that awful photograph of Hunter standing next to that miserable Gabrielle Lawson. The day it ran, I could hear the other women at Sotheby’s whispering I-told-you-so’s and I-knew-it’s. I told you she couldn’t hold on to him. I knew they’d never make it to the vows. So many people were jealous of what she’d had with Hunter, and Mindy had cashed in on that jealousy to sell papers.
Now Mindy was at it again to get more publicity at my expense for her website, Casey thought.
Casey put on her new pajamas, then picked up her new cell phone, which she’d been using to read The Chatter’s posts about her release. She used her fingertip to refresh the screen the way her mother had shown her and scrolled down to the comments. She felt an old, familiar chill run down her spine when she saw a new message in the comment section. No surprise. Everyone who knows Casey can tell you she’s a narcissist. In between shooting Hunter and drugging herself, she probably freshened her makeup to be ready for the cameras. The user had signed the comment with a nickname: RIP_Hunter.
The room was quiet, but Casey could almost hear her heart thumping in her chest. The top of the little screen told her it was a little after ten o’clock. Thank heavens she still had one person who’d take her phone calls, no matter the hour.
Her cousin answered after two rings.
“Angela,” she said, her voice breaking. “Go to Chatter.com and put in my name. There’s another horrible comment about me from RIP_Hunter. I swear it must be Mindy Sampson getting dirt from Gabrielle Lawson. They’re throwing knives at me again.” She began to sob. “Dear God, haven’t I gone through enough?”