Oh no! Elizabeth thought as she glanced at her iPhone a few weeks later. Three texts and two missed calls from Abby in the last fifteen minutes? I hope she’s okay.
Elizabeth quickly speed-dialed her older sister. The phone rang once and then went to voice mail: “Hello, you’ve reached the office of Abigail Davis-Powers. Sorry to have missed your call. Please leave a message or, if it’s urgent, contact my assistant, Rebecca Burke. Thank you!” Beep.
“Abby, it’s me,” said Elizabeth. “Call me. I hope everything’s okay.”
Elizabeth contemplated calling Rebecca but decided against it. Rebecca was Abby’s new, fresh-out-of-college assistant. Odds were good that Rebecca wouldn’t know what the missed calls and texts were about.
God, I hope it’s not something with one of the kids, thought Elizabeth. Maybe she ran into one of Colin’s old colleagues. That always upsets her. Her last call was just five minutes ago. Why isn’t she picking up?
Colin had been married to Abby for eleven years when he jumped off the roof of the University Club in midtown Manhattan. Abby had been inside at Stewart Browning’s forty-fifth birthday party.
It was a lavish affair with over three hundred guests—largely investment bankers and their perfectly groomed wives. Stewart’s wife, Michelle, had spared no expense making the ballroom look absolutely beautiful. Individually spotlighted from above, the silk moiré-covered tables were decorated with large, artful arrangements of cherry blossoms, stargazer lilies, and trailing ivy. In honor of the year Stewart was promoted to managing director at J.P. Morgan, vintage 1996 Dom Pérignon was poured. After the cocktail period, a main course of filet mignon and lobster was served. Stewart’s favorite childhood band, The Eagles, started up their set as dinner was ending.
Before excusing himself and heading to the roof, Colin commented that the event must have cost over $200,000. “I wanted to host a party like this for your forty-fifth birthday,” he’d said to Abby. Abby didn’t say anything at the time, but she’d felt it was inappropriately extravagant.
Parties like this were common until September 2008, but after the economic crash, even the word “luxury” seemed stricken from usage. The overnight disappearance of so many finance jobs negatively impacted bankers as well as those who provided services for them—contractors, landscapers, grocers, doormen, personal trainers. And yet here was smug Stewart and pretentious Michelle acting as if the world economy hadn’t almost collapsed.
After slowly surveying the room, Colin looked Abby in the eyes and said, “I’m sorry I let you and the kids down.” He then turned and walked away.
Sensing his distress, Abby had followed him to the ballroom’s doorway. She grabbed his hand and looked pleadingly into his eyes. “Colin, what’s going on?” she’d asked. “Talk to me.”
“I’m okay,” he’d said. “Really. Just going to get some air. I’ll be back shortly.”
Colin and Stewart met as undergraduates at Tufts University. They’d remained close friends since, but Abby had contemplated throwing away the party invitation when she first received it. She knew the gala would upset Colin.
He’d lost his job as the head of the Lehman Brothers’ Credit Default Swap Desk along with most of the family’s money the year before. Somehow Stewart and many of their friends were still employed and, although impacted by the great recession, few were in such a dire place as the Powers.
Colin appeared unemployable. No one was investing in the unregulated structured finance products that he had spent nearly his entire career managing. Dubbed “financial weapons of mass destruction,” they were blamed for the crash. His expertise made him toxic. Big banks wouldn’t hire him. Hedge funds didn’t want to be associated with him. Fear was rampant in the financial industry.
For four months, Colin had been trying to get another job. He’d attended job fairs, which were beneath him even in his early twenties, but he was desperate. After one such fair, he contemplated stepping in front of a subway train. He pulled himself back from the yellow line, but the thought had nonetheless been planted.
Abby, a successful real estate broker with Benedict Mathews Farnsworth, was struggling, too. After the crash, all her seller clients pulled their listings. Her buyers were only interested in predatory deals from desperate sellers. Brokers used to years of escalating real estate prices were panicked and increasingly difficult to work with.
The Powers had decided on a plan: intending to downsize, they listed their apartment and would rent it if they didn’t get the price they wanted. They rented their vacation home. They looked for alternative school options for their two kids. They asked for financial help from their parents.
On the day the Brownings’ invitation arrived, Abby said, “Let’s go just to be polite. He’s a good friend and contact for you. When you want to leave, we will.”
Within an hour of Colin’s suicide, the story led the ten o’clock news: FORMER LEHMAN EXEC JUMPS, DISTRAUGHT WIFE AT SCENE. There was limited reporting but plenty of striking visuals:
A hastily taped-off crime scene between Cartier’s flagship store and the granite façade of The University Club.
A body under a tarp on Fifth Avenue.
The suicide victim’s black tie-attired friends cradling one another, tourists in denim and sneakers acting as a striking counterpart.
A line of chauffeured town cars waiting to take the victim’s distraught acquaintances home.
In the following days, the Powers suicide received a lot of play. It was front-page international news and appeared in the Manhattan tabloids for a week. Not since the fall of Lehman Brothers had one news event so profoundly symbolized the impact of the financial market collapse on the one percent.
The night of Colin’s suicide, Elizabeth and Andrew were sitting in a movie theatre. They had turned their phones to vibrate, planning to only pick up if their babysitter called. A half hour into the film, Elizabeth’s phone started a perpetual quiver. She ignored the first few calls from her mother and one from Abby, thinking they were related to an upcoming family gathering. But when Abby’s best friend’s name appeared on her phone, Elizabeth picked up.
Today, two months after that awful night, Elizabeth was panicking. When her phone finally rang with Abby’s return call, she rushed to answer.
“Abby, what’s going on? Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m okay,” Abby said, scanning the online Cannondale rental listings in search of a new home for her family of three. My kids are finally going to have a yard to play in and a driveway to ride bikes in, Abby thought, noting the listings’ lush green expanses and long driveways. That’s good. Maybe we’ll get a dog or two.
“Yes, everything is okay, Elizabeth,” Abby continued. “Nothing to worry about. I just wanted to tell you my news.”
“What news?” Elizabeth asked, relieved.
“Guess who’s moving back to Connecticut?”
“What?” Elizabeth exclaimed. “No way!”
“Yes, way,” said Abby. “That is, unless I pull a Colin and jump off a building. I have no other choice.”
“But you hate suburbia,” said Elizabeth. “Even as a child, you hated it. It’s too staid for you.”
“Well, life has a funny way of playing out, doesn’t it?” Abby quipped. “It isn’t public knowledge yet, so don’t repeat it, but Benedict Mathews Farnsworth is acquiring White’s Realty. The Bloom Brothers asked me about the firm a month ago—they know I grew up in Cannondale. I asked them if they’re going to keep the firm’s current manager. They aren’t, so I asked for the job.”
“You? A manager and mentor of other real estate agents?” Elizabeth said incredulously. “Really?”
“It’s a salaried job,” she responded. “I need a steady income, so I’m going to have to learn how to mentor. I start in two weeks.”
“Wow! That is fast. What about dealing with the suburban clients and your neighbors? You can barely hide your disdain for people out here, especially the Cannondale women.”
“I can fake it when I have to,” said Abby. “I’ve had to work with a number of them over the years. And I’ll have you nearby to meet for coffee so that we can have a good laugh over it. One upside to the move is that I can live near you again, and our kids will get to be together more often.”
“I’m sorry to say it, but I’m selfishly kind of thrilled by your news,” Elizabeth admitted. “What are you going to do with your apartment?”
“Rent it. Even in this market I can easily get $20,000 a month for it, which will cover the building’s maintenance and its taxes plus some. I’m definitely returning to the city when the New York market rebounds and the kids are older.”
“Abigail Davis back in the ‘burbs… Is there anyone we should warn?”
“Maybe Mrs. Harris, if she’s still alive,” joked Abby.
“Oh my God,” laughed Elizabeth. “The muffins. That poor woman.”
The day Abby and Elizabeth’s family moved into their second home in Stamford, their neighbor Karen Harris baked them blueberry muffins. She put them in a wicker basket and left them on their front stoop with a colorful “Welcome to the Neighborhood” note. Abby got to them first, and within an hour all of the muffins and the basket were littered across the Harris’ driveway. Abby and her best friend, Gigi Tollbrook, had thrown them at the house from Abby’s bedroom window. Little round stains appeared on the exterior paint where the muffins hit the home.
“I was horrified when you did that,” Elizabeth recalled. “Mrs. Harris was so sweet.”
“Her son used to follow me around at school,” said Abby. “He was totally creepy. I didn’t want anyone in the Harris family to think they could come over to our house just because we were neighbors. Is my old Confraternity of Christian Doctrine teacher, Mrs. Clement, still around?”
“Yes, Mom hangs out with her,” Elizabeth said.
“Remember when Gigi and I snuck onto her property and cut all the heads off her flowers the night before Mother’s Day?”
“I do,” Elizabeth said, smiling. “Her beautiful garden was transformed into a sea of green stalks. That was really mean, too.”
“She was so uptight,” Abby insisted, “and she told Mom that I skipped her classes.”
As a child, Abby was always in some kind of low-grade trouble. She was mischievous and fun, and boys loved hanging out with her. But as she got older, she became increasingly irreverent, and the trouble turned real. Abby spent her teens doing the exact opposite of what their prim mother wanted: she got kicked out of two private schools, she totaled her new car by driving it into a parked vehicle on the family’s street, she partied before coming home to their family’s daily formal dinners, and she never made curfew. Abby was so bad that when she left for college, the relief in their house was palpable.
Paradoxically, what saved Abby in adulthood was a desire to feel as powerful as she had felt in her family. After college, she moved to Manhattan, a place where money equals power, and realized that bravado without a career would get her nowhere. Not one to rely on someone else for support, Abby dabbled in the fashion industry before turning to real estate. In a business where most everyone you meet can be considered a potential client or point of referral, Abby started to care what people thought of her. In the ways that would directly benefit her, Abby conformed.
“Mrs. Milburn must be dead by now,” Abby continued. “She was old when she was our babysitter.”
“Yes, she’s long gone,” Elizabeth said. “Those clear glass marbles at the top of the stairs… She knew to be wary of you.”
“She was awful,” added Abby of their mother’s favorite and strictest babysitter. “If she had fallen and broken something, we would have been free of her for a few months. You would have been thanking me.”
“Thanking you?” Elizabeth repeated.
“Well, I’m tamer now,” Abby asserted.
“Only around people you want to make money off of,” responded Elizabeth. “Real estate was the best thing that happened to you.”
“Will you house hunt with me?” Abby asked Elizabeth. “I’m looking at rentals online now.”
“Of course,” Elizabeth said.
“What gym should I join?” she asked.
“FIT is good, or there are lots of boutique gyms,” Elizabeth offered. “Oh, and I definitely want you to come with me to Yogi Jack’s classes. Do you remember when I told you about him? The hot one with the groupies? He also offers private sessions that are supposed to be amazing. My friend Adair said her sessions with him are the best two hours of her week.”
“Sign me up,” Abby said.