the plan was for Stella, who had been home in Rye a few days already, to pick me up from the station on Christmas Eve. When the train left Harlem, the buildings along the track blurring as we accelerated, I texted Stella to remind her. She didn’t respond, but I wasn’t worried. We’d talked just that morning.
“Hurry up and get here,” she’d said. “They’re driving me insane.”
“They’re your parents,” I’d said, my work phone pinned between ear and shoulder. Using the landline at my desk made it look like I was busy with actual work, even when I was just talking to Stella. “That’s what they’re supposed to do. Anyways, cheer up. It’s Christmas.”
“Christmas is a fucking sham.”
Stella’s mood had worsened since she returned to New York. She kept pestering me to go out with her, to stop being so lame, and I kept saying no. Lesson learned from that hungover Monday: Stella and I couldn’t revert to old ways if I actually wanted to succeed in my job. “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” she interrupted, when I tried to explain. She didn’t care. She only saw it as an obstacle.
“It is a sham,” I said. “But it’s our job to play along with it.”
“I hate it when you get like this,” she’d said.
“Rational, you mean?”
“It’s the worst. Okay, whatever, see you at six thirty.”
But it was 6:30, and soon the crowds and cars at the Rye train station dissipated, with no sign of Stella. I could imagine the possibilities—Stella waylaid because she’d picked a fight with Anne, criticizing the dinner menu, refusing to change into nice clothing for the guests. In the previous week, when Stella made it clear that she preferred to spend her time in the city rather than the suburbs with her parents, Anne came to her. But their day of lunching and shopping devolved, like always, into argument. What did Stella and Anne have to fight about? They had everything they could possibly want. Their misery was of their own invention.
By 7 p.m., with the night getting colder and Stella failing to answer my calls or texts, I decided to take a cab to the Bradleys’. There were twinkling lights in the shrubbery along the driveway, and bright red poinsettias framing the front door. It was perfect, which is what I’d come to expect from Anne Bradley.
But when she opened the front door, her face fell. “It’s only you?” Anne said.
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
She stepped outside and peered down the driveway. “I mean, Stella isn’t with you?”
“I took a cab from the station,” I said. “I couldn’t get hold of her.”
“It’s been hours,” Anne said. Her voice was hoarse, on the verge of breaking. “I have no idea where she is. Are you sure you don’t know?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who is that?” Thomas Bradley appeared in the doorway. “Oh,” he said. His disappointment matched Anne’s. “Let’s go inside, everyone. No need to put on a show for the neighbors.”
The kitchen was aromatic, saucepans on the stove and casserole dishes in the oven, Christmas music playing softly in the background. At the counter, Stella’s older brother, Oliver, was flipping through the Wall Street Journal and drinking a glass of milk. Milk! Somewhere inside my brain, I could hear Stella snorting with laughter.
Oliver smiled, smarmily. “I’m sorry your delightful friend isn’t here to greet you.”
“Oliver, please,” Thomas said.
“What? It’s true. Someone needs to apologize for her awful manners.”
“I’m still not sure what’s going on,” I said.
“They got in a fight,” Oliver said. “And then she ran away.”
Anne sighed. “She was very upset. She needed some space.”
“That was around lunchtime,” Thomas said. “Violet, we were hoping you might have heard from her. She’s not at the apartment, either. The doorman promised to call if she shows up.”
“I talked to her this morning,” I said. “Around ten, I guess? But not since then.”
“No texts? Nothing?” Anne said.
I shook my head.
The timer on the stove beeped. Anne hurried over, releasing the smell of rosemary and caramelized vegetables from the oven, and Thomas looked at his watch. “Almost seven thirty,” he said. “Our guests will be here any minute.”
“Violet, honey, you’ll want to freshen up?” Anne said, over her shoulder.
“I’m a little surprised your parents are going through with dinner,” I said to Oliver as we walked upstairs. I thought my outfit looked okay—work clothes, black pants and a cardigan—but to Anne, “freshen up” meant “put in more of an effort.”
Oliver laughed. “I thought you were more insightful than that, Violet.”
“So what exactly happened?” I said, stopping outside the guest bedroom.
“She’s a brat. What else?”
“Let’s stick to the facts,” I said. “No editorializing.”
“Well, the fact is that my parents are tired of her traveling the world and spending their money. Do you know what her credit card bill was in October? Twenty thousand dollars.”
“In one month?”
“So they finally decided, enough. Time for Stella to settle down and get a job. The plan was for the four of us to have a civilized conversation about it over lunch. Stella saw it from a mile away. She freaked out. She said she wasn’t going to be bullied by us. And then she left.”
“Just like that?” I said. But it made sense. She hated being backed into a corner, hated being told what to do.
“My father set up an alert in case she uses her credit card. My mother is finding out whether the cell phone carrier can track her location.”
“And if that fails, they’ll get the CIA to track her down,” I said.
Oliver chuckled. “I wouldn’t put anything past my parents.”
Despite all of this, dinner was remarkably smooth. To their guests, Anne and Thomas didn’t betray that anything was wrong. “Stella decided to spend Christmas in Paris with her friends,” Anne said, as she poured the wine. “We miss her, of course, but I can’t blame her. Paris is so romantic at this time of year.”
I’d learned this during my time with the Bradley family: cognitive dissonance came easy to the wealthy. Thomas Bradley was the CEO of Bradley Pharmaceuticals, a massively profitable company founded by his grandfather, and the Bradleys had more money than they could spend in a lifetime. And yet they complained about the tax rate and the price of gasoline. They donated to Democratic candidates, but they left stingy tips for bad service when the waitress was making five bucks an hour. Wealth was not something to be spent. It was to be protected by trusts and lawyers and tax havens so that it could endure for generations to come. Part of me admired Stella’s ballsiness, in going against this. She took the money at face value: a liquid asset, meaningless in itself, that ought to be used to pursue pleasure in this lifetime.
But the truth about Stella—her hot temper and impulsive spirit—that was too coarse for dinner. The lie was better suited to the festive spirit of Christmas Eve. Anne directed the conversation like a maestro. At one point she asked me to tell the guests about my fascinating job. They leaned forward as I shared a few juicy but anonymized tidbits from KCN. The guests around the dinner table were rich and successful, but our TV stars were in a different realm: they were famous. When they died, their names would outlast them. The value I brought, as a guest, was an ability to induce a delicious feeling of schadenfreude in the Bradleys and their ilk. They loved hearing about these more famous people losing their tempers, or screwing up an interview, or slipping in the ratings.
Over time, I realized that the Bradleys may have liked me as an individual, but they loved me for what I represented. People who came from nothing, who busted their asses to get college scholarships, who hustled into a winning career. Look at me, climbing the ladder at KCN: I was a perfect example of that bootstrappy, self-reliant, equal-opportunity American spirit. (Never mind the various advantages I’d had: my skin color, my good health, my friendship with an heiress.) It allowed the Bradleys to sleep easy at night. To believe that the meritocracy functioned as it was supposed to. Their generosity was real, but Anne and Thomas took a calculated kind of pride in me, like I was proof of a successful charitable experiment, excellent ROI on the money they’d spent.
The next morning, Anne decided that enough was enough. She was calling the police.
A few hours later, the doorbell rang. There was a tall man in a dark overcoat, his face weary and rumpled as if he’d just awoken from a nap. “Detective Fazio,” he said, shaking hands with Anne and Thomas. The police had been reluctant to come, but the Bradleys loomed large in town, with their sizable annual donations to the police memorial fund.
The five of us sat in the living room. In the distance, through the wide windows, the skyline of the city rose from the gray waters of Long Island Sound. The presents beneath the twinkling tree were untouched. It felt nothing like Christmas morning.
“Mrs. Bradley, one more time, walk me through what happened yesterday,” Detective Fazio said. From the breast pocket of his coat, he took a pen and notebook.
Anne, visibly pleased by this attentiveness, repeated the story: the conversation with Stella, how she’d gotten annoyed and then angry, how she’d grabbed the car keys and bolted. Fazio nodded along. “So what should we do?” Anne said, after she’d finished.
“Just a few more questions,” Fazio said. “Has this kind of thing happened before?”
“What do you mean?” Anne said.
“Has she ever run off without telling you where she’s going?”
Thomas cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. “A few times.”
Anne glared at her husband, but he continued. “Two or three times she ran off in high school,” Thomas said. “Always after an argument. She’d spend the night with a friend and turn up the next day. That may be what’s happening here.”
Anne shook her head. “This was different.”
“You said your name was Violet Trapp?” Fazio said to me. “One ‘p’ or two?”
“Two.”
“And you were her roommate in college?”
“That’s right.”
“And in college, did she ever run off without telling you where she went?”
“Well, there were a few times.” Fazio gestured for me to continue. “She’d disappear for the weekend with a guy she was dating. Or she’d go into the city. Usually I’d find out after the fact, when she’d call me to come get her.” The room was intensely quiet, and I was aware of how suggestible the direction of the conversation was. “But I think she just forgets,” I added. “To tell people her plans, I mean. She gets caught up in the moment.”
Thomas nodded, but Anne leaned forward insistently. “She was angry, Detective. Irrationally angry. I have no clue why. I’m worried she’ll do something reckless.”
“I spoke to her yesterday morning,” I said. “She was in a bad mood.”
“Why?” Fazio said.
“I got the sense she had been arguing with Mr. and Mrs. Bradley.”
“Is that true?” Fazio said.
“Yes,” Oliver said. “She was acting like a spoiled baby all week.”
“So?” Anne said. “What do we do?”
Fazio closed his notebook. “Mrs. Bradley,” he said, “we have to account for the circumstances. Your daughter isn’t a minor. She has the right to leave. You said she took her phone, her wallet, her coat. She was acting in a sound mind, blowing off steam after your argument. We can’t consider her a missing person if she left of her own volition.
“That said”—he produced a business card from his pocket—“I’ll leave my number with you. Call me if anything changes. In the meantime, I’d keep an eye on your credit card activity. And get in touch with her other friends. Ask if they’ve seen her.”
“Leaving so soon?” Oliver said that afternoon. He leaned against the doorjamb of the guest room while I zipped my duffel bag closed.
“There’s a lot going on,” I said. “I don’t want to impose.”
The truth was, I wasn’t sure how the Bradley family felt about me when Stella wasn’t there. I could clear the table and wash the dishes, but that wasn’t enough to make me a part of their family. There were moments of vague puzzlement when they looked at me, like, Why are you here, again?
“You’re never an imposition,” Oliver said. “But I can’t blame you for leaving.”
“I don’t mean any offense, just—”
Oliver waved a hand. “None taken. There’s a weird vibe around here right now.”
I attempted to smile. “Maybe that’s why Stella left.”
“I think she had other reasons. Let me get that.” Oliver picked up my duffel bag and ushered me toward the stairs. “You wouldn’t guess it,” he said, “but Stella can be prone to jealousy.”
“Well, sure. Everyone is.”
“Of you, I mean. Stella is jealous of you.”
My cheeks reddened. “I doubt that,” I said.
“Think about it,” Oliver said. “Stella comes back to New York and finds you succeeding. Thriving, even. And she’s utterly at loose ends. How do you think that makes her feel?”
We were downstairs, in the foyer of the house. Through the window, I could see my cab idling in the driveway, clouds of exhaust drifting through the winter darkness, the driver’s face lit by the glow of a phone.
“She feels competitive with you, Violet,” Oliver said. “You must know that.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. My heart was beating faster. “Anyway, that’s my cab. Thank you for carrying my bag, but I should really get—”
“It is true,” Oliver said, keeping his grip firm on my duffel bag. “And anything can set her off. Like when she found out that you were borrowing her clothes.”
My palms broke into sweat. An image of Stella, her features twisted with anger. I had apologized, and Stella had forgiven me. Conflicts like this had always slid easily into the past. But she kept alluding to it, several days later. Cute dress. Is that yours or mine? she’d said, snarkily. You need to borrow anything today, sweetie?
But why this, out of everything that had passed between us? She and Oliver barely spoke, and yet she’d told him? Anything can set her off. His words suggested culpability. But that was ridiculous. Wasn’t it?
“That’s Stella.” Oliver handed me my bag. “No one overreacts like she does.”
Back at KCN, there was a dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s, no news breaking or big stories to report, the content vacuum filled by best-of-the-year recaps. Rebecca was skiing with her family, and Eliza was in an undisclosed tropical location. The newsroom was quiet. But the producers decided this was the perfect time to catch up on the stories we’d missed.
“Evergreen stories,” one of the producers said, slapping a stack of paper on the conference room table. Jamie was his boss, but Jamie was on vacation, too, so this producer reveled in lording his temporary power over the assistants. “Divide these up and chase them down. I want at least one good story in the bank by the end of this week. You’ll thank me the next time we need to plug a hole in the rundown.”
This was our utility as assistants: our time was worth less than that of the producers, so we could afford to squander several hours on a wild-goose chase. These stories had been ignored for a reason. Mostly, they were less important than whatever news was breaking on a given day. Or their importance hadn’t yet been revealed, because that required extensive and low-yield digging. Like excavating a fossil with a toothbrush, where we usually preferred jackhammers.
I took my assignments back to my desk. Most were obvious and immediate dead ends. But there was one that looked interesting.
In New Jersey, a company called Danner Pharmaceuticals had filed suit against several former employees for violating nondisclosure agreements. So far, the story had only been covered in a regional Jersey newspaper. But it was strange: the employees being sued weren’t high-level scientists or researchers, who might possess proprietary information. Instead they were janitors, and security guards, and cafeteria workers. Why would Danner have these employees signing NDAs at all?
An afternoon spent on research didn’t clarify anything. Maybe it hadn’t been covered because it wasn’t that unusual. Maybe companies like Danner sued gossipy janitors all the time. I drummed my fingers on my desk. Jamie talked about how important hunches were. “If your gut is telling you that there’s a story, you should listen to it,” he said once. “It means there’s more to find out.”
I couldn’t tell what to think. Then I had an idea.
“Oliver Bradley,” he said, after his secretary put the call through.
“Oliver, hi! It’s Violet.”
“Violet?” His tone went from brisk to puzzled. “What’s going on? Is it Stella?”
“Oh—no.” Consumed by the routine of work, I’d almost forgotten about Stella’s absence. “I’ve, uh, been calling and calling. Haven’t had any luck. Have you heard anything?”
He sighed. “Nothing.”
“She’ll be fine,” I said. “She always is.”
After a pause, he said, “So is that why you called?”
“Actually, no. I have a work question.”
Oliver was a lawyer, but he’d spent summers interning for his father, and he knew the pharmaceutical industry well. He’d heard of Danner, but not the story from the regional paper. “Basically,” I said, “I need to know if there’s a real story there. If this kind of thing is standard practice, or if this is unusual.”
“Hmm,” he said. “You know, our firm doesn’t really like us talking to the press.”
“This is just background. I’m only curious about how the industry works. You’re irrelevant to the story. No offense.”
“None taken.” Oliver laughed. Over the years, I’d absorbed Stella’s negative view of her brother. But it was much easier talking to him on the phone. He was almost normal.
He explained that while NDAs were common in the industry, it was unusual for janitors and security guards. “You have to ask yourself what they’re privy to, and why Danner would be so determined to keep it a secret. And the fact that they actually went through with suing these employees is noteworthy. Litigation is expensive. That’s a lot of billable hours.” He paused. “So what did they say? Who were they talking to?”
“You want to know what the real story is?”
“Well, duh.”
That tone—for a moment, he reminded me of Stella.
“Good.” I smiled. “This means I might be able to get my producer interested in it, too.”
He laughed again. “So you’re not going to tell me?”
“I don’t have any answers yet. But I’ll try.”
“Your job sounds fun,” he said.
“It is. Mostly,” I said. “Some days more than others.”
“Do you want to switch? Write this brief for me and I’ll take a turn as Murphy Brown?”
“The first and only time in my life I’ll be compared to Candice Bergen.”
“Well, you’re just as pretty as her.”
Both of us were quiet for a moment. I was relieved Oliver couldn’t see me blushing—but then again, if we’d been face-to-face, there was no way he would have said that. The phone, the office, the topic of conversation, it had neutralized the terrain. He wasn’t Stella’s big brother. I wasn’t her best friend. We were just two people, talking.
From his end of the phone, there was the distant whoop of an ambulance from outside his office. In a minute or two, that ambulance would probably pass the KCN building. In those days between Christmas and New Year’s, the city was quiet. Sirens echoed louder through the streets. Some people chose to take vacation, or to be with their families. Other people chose work. Oliver, I decided as I hung up the phone, really wasn’t so bad.
A friend from college threw a party on New Year’s Eve. Her parents were in Sun Valley, and she was alone in their Central Park West penthouse.
The hostess’s smile deflated when she saw me arrive alone. “Where’s your other half?” she said, air-kissing my cheek.
“Stella?” I said.
“She still traveling the world? Lucky bitch. My parents won’t give me a dime.”
She put her hands on her hips and laughed harshly. We were in the marble-floored foyer of the apartment. The ceilings were double height and chandeliered, and there was a round table that held several dramatic orchids and what looked like a small Degas. This girl was skinny like Stella, but I could read the starvation on her body. The bony chest, the bobble-head effect. She had always sucked up to Stella in college. Stella, with her effortless beauty and natural measurements, made look easy what the hostess killed herself to achieve.
I’d arrived too early. There were a few docile boyfriends at the perimeter, but most of the group was girls. The party was still more of a pregame, clustered around the island in the kitchen, which was sticky with spilled tequila and lime husks. It was the moment in the night when the hostess was entirely pleased with herself, with the assembled group of women who reflected back her aesthetic ideals. The best pictures of the night would be taken now, when the apartment was still empty, the fridge brimming with liquor.
The girls kept asking me where Stella was. We’d been invited as a package deal, but they really wanted her. I was a little too plain, too serious, too sober. Everyone liked to say that after high school, popularity contests ended. That was true in most cases. But, like high school, the world of Manhattan trust-fund babies was an artificial construct. Nothing really mattered; everything was signaling; it was as insular and petty as a high school cafeteria. These girls were hungry and anxious, but they had perfect blowouts and designer clothing, and they took comfort in telling one another how hot they looked. Which was true—they did look hot. It was possible to envy them, and hate oneself for envying them, all at once.
Around 11 p.m., as the party started to fill up, I slipped out unnoticed. The subway was nearly empty. Most people would stay put, wherever they were, as the clock approached midnight. But being underground at midnight didn’t seem like the worst possibility. I’d never liked New Year’s Eve. So one year was ending and another beginning—did no one notice that life itself proceeded without interruption, indifferent to your resolutions and reflections?
If Stella were there, I would have leaned over and said this to her. She would have laughed and called me a cynical bitch, but she also would have agreed. Our friendship was built on those moments, when our perspectives overlapped like binoculars twisting into focus. We said to each other what we wouldn’t say to other people.
But for Stella, observation wasn’t the same as belief. She spent her opinions like she spent her family’s money: easily, constantly, but never as an investment in something permanent. She’d say something provocative, and often true, but then she’d abandon it. When pushed on a comment she’d made, she’d shrug and say that she wasn’t really serious; she didn’t really care. For a long time, Stella’s indifference had impressed me. Other people would feel bad about running away from home on Christmas Eve. Stella? She was probably drinking a mai tai on a beach somewhere.
And that was fine. Having Stella back in New York had been exciting, but it was also exhausting. At some point in the last several months, our lives had diverged. She wanted spontaneity and freedom. I wanted routine and discipline. I wanted to care about my work. If this was the new pattern, Stella coming and going as she pleased—maybe that was okay. Maybe we needed some breathing room. To occupy our own separate lives.
Pete, the doorman, was on duty that night. “Just a few minutes to midnight,” he said. “Did you race home to catch it?”
“Nah,” I said. “It’ll be a quiet night for me.”
“That’s good,” he said. “That reminds me, actually. Miss Stella asked me to tell you that she was very tired, and she was going to sleep. She was driving for hours.”
“Stella?” I said. “She’s back?”
Pete nodded, smiling brightly. “Happy New Year!” he said, as the elevator door closed.