When Winnie comes to, she’s recumbent in a soft leather recliner, an ice pack draped across the top half of her face. Her eyes throb mildly, as though she accidentally rubbed them after mincing a chili pepper. Her ears fill with the steady soothing rush of waves, the surround-sound speakers so crisp and clear she could be lounging on the shores of a tranquil white sand beach, an icy cocktail and a fat paperback at her fingertips, far, far away from this doctor’s office on the thirty-sixth floor of a skyscraper in one of the densest cities in the world.
It had been a colossal headache to wrangle an appointment with Beijing’s most coveted plastic surgeon, a man who works only two days a week and whose office wall is covered in signed photographs of him standing beside various Chinese movie starlets, their smooth white faces as indistinguishable as eggs in a crate.
There’s a soft knock on the door and the surgeon enters, his low honeyed voice telling Winnie to stay put, relax, don’t remove the ice pack. The procedure, he says, has gone exactly as planned. In a few minutes his nurse will be in to explain how to care for the stitches, and then Winnie can be on her way. He’ll see her in five days for a routine checkup.
She opens her mouth to thank him, and her voice is a foreign sandpapery hush. If only she could keep it, along with the other alterations.
“Don’t mention it,” he says and is gone. He’s rumored to be so skilled he performs eight double-eyelid surgeries a day.
The anesthetic has yet to wear off completely, and when Winnie lies back, she feels a pleasant rocking sensation, as though aboard an aircraft caught in mild turbulence.
During the initial consultation, the surgeon asked why Winnie was unhappy with her original double-eyelid procedure. She concocted some tale about how she’d had it done in her early twenties, when all she’d cared about was making her eyes appear as large as possible. Now, though, when she looked at pictures of herself, they seemed so unnatural, so fake.
He drew on her eyelids with purple ink to show her different options, saying, “You’re right, the trend is toward a more subtle look. The young girls don’t want to be cartoons.”
His nurse held out a hand mirror and said, “How lovely you are.”
Winnie had to hold back a laugh. With her eyes streaked in ink, she resembled a sad clown.
Now the same nurse materializes beside her, helping her sit up, holding out a little paper cup of water, telling her she can take a look, but not to be alarmed by the swelling and the bruising, all of which is completely normal.
Winnie waves off the warnings and peers at her reflection. Even amid the redness and the puffiness and residual ink stains, it’s clear her eye shape has morphed from orb to oval. She turns her head this way and that, admiring the surgeon’s handiwork. In a couple of weeks, once she’s healed, there’ll be appointments for mole removals, lip and cheek injections, eyebrow microblading, hair dyeing. The possibilities for minimally invasive, maximally transformative cosmetic procedures are endless. What a time to be alive. When the cadre of beauty experts is done with her, she’ll dare anyone to hold up her wanted notice right by her face and declare them one and the same.
For now, however, she must lie low. She dons a pair of sunglasses with lenses the size of saucers, ties a silk scarf over her hair, and reaches for her orange Birkin. As she walks down the long hallway, the nurse flits around her, insisting she have someone come fetch her, as opposed to making her own way home.
When Winnie emerges into the waiting room, the receptionist joins in, saying, “At least let us call you a cab, Miss Zhou.”
Winnie begs them to stop worrying. “It’ll take less time to flag one down. I live five minutes away.” She’s rented an apartment near the clinic, away from the tourists and the major hotels.
Out on the street, the city closes in around her. The autumn chill knifes through her shearling coat and the smog makes her nostrils burn. People speed walk past, clipping her with their sharp-edged briefcases. An impatient driver leans on his horn, prompting others to join in, like a discordant orchestra. After a few shaky steps, Winnie stops to rest and has to admit that the clinic staff’s apprehension was not misplaced. Fortunately, a taxi pulls up to let out a passenger and she slides right in.
In her little Dongzhimen rental flat, Winnie double-checks the dead bolt, and then falls back onto the squat hard sofa. All the furniture that came with the apartment is squat and hard, as though designed for ascetic gnomes. On the coffee table, her burner phone springs to life. Momentarily forgetting her condition, she lunges for the retro flip device, and her head swirls, nearly toppling her over. She removes her sunglasses and blinks once, twice to settle her vision. Only one person in the entire world knows how to reach her, but she can’t be too careful. She checks the number, sees that it’s Ava, and then rejects the call.
When did she first see beyond Ava’s perfect, unblemished shell to the darkness smoldering within? It must have been back at Stanford, the day Winnie realized she had to leave campus and withdraw from school before the administration figured out what she’d done.
That last afternoon, she’d knelt over her suitcase, hastily packing her things, as a clueless Ava hovered over her, fretting about Winnie missing her final exams.
“Want me to tell your adviser? I’m sure they’ll let you make them up. Kids must have emergencies like this all the time.”
Winnie wanted to throw something at her to shut her up. She needed to think. Her Stanford career couldn’t be over; there had to be a way out of this mess.
Ava bit her lip. “You know that Hamlet essay you’ve been stressing about?”
Winnie seized a ball of socks and chucked it into her suitcase. Could she please stop talking?
Ava pressed on. “I was thinking you could use mine.” (All the freshman humanities courses read Hamlet at one point or another.) “I got an A-minus.”
Even though the essay had plummeted to the least of her worries, Winnie stopped folding sweaters. She swiveled to face her roommate. “Why would you do that?” If they were discovered—unlikely, but not impossible—Ava, too, could face expulsion.
Ava sat down on her bed and fingered the edge of her comforter. “You would have gotten an A if you’d had time to finish yours.”
“But why would you risk getting caught?”
Ava broke into a grin. “I wouldn’t get caught. If they asked, obviously I’d tell them you stole it.”
And so, a decade later, when Winnie needed reference letters in support of her green card marriage to Bert, the first person she thought to call was Ava, never mind that they hadn’t spoken in ten years.
“Look,” Winnie said. “The optics aren’t good. He’s twice my age. He was married to my late aunt. I need all the help I can get.”
“But you do love him, right?” Ava asked.
Winnie fell silent, unsure how to play this, and Ava erupted into laughter. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do what I can.”
The resulting letter was everything the authorities wanted to hear. Ava focused on their time together in college (omitting that it had only lasted a little over two months). She praised Winnie’s tenaciousness, her sense of self, her thoroughly American willingness to buck convention and follow her dreams (and her heart!). In less than two pages, Ava framed Winnie’s marriage to Bert as nothing short of an act of valor between two kindred souls.
At the start of the interview, the agent glanced at Ava’s letter and her face opened up. “My daughter’s at Stanford, full scholarship, class of 2012.”
This, Winnie thought, was the wondrous paradox of America: they all saw themselves as scrappy outsiders, when in reality they formed one giant country club.
The agent reached across the table and shook Winnie’s hand. “Welcome to the US,” she said.
Another decade would pass before Winnie reached out to Ava again. This time, she needed to get to her husband, but in the back of her mind she wondered if she might take the opportunity to introduce Ava to a new line of work. (Ava’s social media accounts indicated she’d left the firm.) Winnie certainly could use the help, as well as her old friend’s tax law expertise.
She only had to hang out with Ava a couple of times before she saw her opening. Of course Ava’s Harvard-educated doctor husband was absent and neglectful; of course she couldn’t admit that she hated being a lawyer and twisted herself into contortions downplaying her son’s developmental issues. As far as Winnie could tell, Ava’s entire life could be boiled down to this: great on paper, rotten everywhere else. And Winnie was sorry to see it. Her old friend deserved better. Truly, when Winnie decided to bring Ava into her business, she was doing her a favor. As much as she needed Ava’s help, Ava needed hers.
The first step was revealing the counterfeits scheme to test Ava’s interest. Winnie convinced Ava to come with her to Neiman Marcus and watch her in action. Afterward, they went to a run-down, deserted coffee shop to debrief.
“But that’s cheating,” Ava sputtered, once she’d affirmed what she’d seen.
Winnie was prepared. She trotted out her well-worn argument: the corporations were the real villains. They abused their workers, paying them pennies and then going out and hawking the fruits of their labor for thousands. Words she’d spoken so many times, they’d lost all meaning and might as well have been gibberish.
Ava’s upper lip curled into a sneer. “Spare me the excuses,” she said. “You’re no Robin Hood. Just say you saw an opportunity to make money and took it.”
Winnie peered down at the greasy table, unsure of how to proceed. “Okay,” she said slowly. “You’re right. The scheme is foolproof and I’m proud of it. I make good money. Great money, actually, and I could use your help.”
When she raised her head, Ava’s eyes bored into hers. “You’re disgusting,” she spat before charging out the door, leaving Winnie behind.
The only other customer in the coffee shop, an elderly man in a fedora, gave a low whistle from behind his newspaper. Winnie sat there, hands clutching opposite elbows, wondering how she’d gotten it so wrong. She’d expected shock, displeasure, sure, maybe condemnation. She hadn’t expected rage.
And then she understood: Ava took Winnie’s cheating as a personal affront. She saw Winnie as taking something that was rightfully hers—a life of wealth and delight and adventure, a life she’d been promised if only she worked hard enough and followed the rules and never, ever slipped up. Except Ava had done all those things. She’d gone to the right schools, chosen the right career, married the right partner, formed the right family—and made enormous sacrifices in the process, and yet here she was, thoroughly miserable, horrified by the prospect that her entire existence had been built on lies.
In that moment, Winnie was sorry she’d barged back into her friend’s life. She texted an apology and resolved not to bother Ava again. She even informed Boss Mak that her connection had fallen through; they’d need to find another way to get his liver.
Who would have predicted that within the week, Ava would wind up in Hong Kong visiting her family, and that Oli, that asshole, would freeze her bank cards? That all these disparate factors would converge to push Ava to take a peek into Winnie’s world and consider it anew?
Once she landed back in San Francisco, Ava called to report on her Guangzhou escapade. “I can’t believe you sent me into some strange man’s apartment.” Her voice was bright. She sounded exhilarated, alive. “I was honestly prepared to gouge out his eyes with my car keys.”
“Please, Ah Seng? He’d probably cower into a shivering heap the second you threatened him.” Winnie wondered if she should nudge Ava into another assignment or wait for her to broach the topic herself.
Too casually, Ava said, “You know, Oli offered to give up his place in Palo Alto.”
“But the commute,” Winnie deadpanned, and then dropped the sarcasm. “That’s great, though. It’s exactly what you wanted.”
On the other end of the line, Ava paused. “I told him to keep the apartment.”
“Why would you do that?”
Ava’s voice fell to a mutter. “Like you said, a little independence in a marriage isn’t bad.”
Winnie’s heart was a hummingbird trapped inside her chest. She hadn’t expected Ava to commit so quickly to this work.
Softly, almost as though to herself, Ava said, “What kind of husband freezes his wife’s bank cards?”
When Winnie didn’t answer right away, Ava added, “I know that you know. He told me he ran into you.”
Winnie exhaled. “I guess the kind who can’t stand not being in control.”
“He didn’t used to be this way.”
This time, Winnie didn’t respond because, really, what was there to say?
Now, with Ava fully aboard, the next step was to get her comfortable with returns. Together they drove down to the Stanford Shopping Center to pay a visit to the Chanel boutique. Winnie stationed herself at an outdoor table with a clear line of sight into the store. From behind her oversized sunglasses, she watched Ava glide through the glass doors with the Gabrielle superfake. She nodded at the security guard, the very picture of a woman accustomed to being around people who wanted to offer their help. Casually yet smartly dressed in a loose silk shirt and cigarette pants, her hair pulled back in a low ponytail, Winnie’s Evelyne bag slung over one shoulder, Ava exuded money, polish, class, but in a way that had been earned through hard work, not merely granted at birth. That was what made her so likable, endearing. That was what made her the perfect con.
Inside the store, Ava confronted her first decision. She veered away from the Mainland Chinese sales associate to the white one, already a pro. Winnie observed her easy banter, the way she set the superfake on the glass countertop for inspection, and then, right as the sales associate opened the dust bag, held up her own Evelyne as a distraction, pointing out some detail or another. What were they giggling about? What did the sales associate coyly reveal, prompting Ava to graze the woman’s forearm as though they were close friends?
It would have been a strong first performance, even without Ava’s final flourish—leaving her cell phone on the countertop so that the sales associate would be forced to run after her instead of continuing her inspection of the returned handbag.
Indeed, as the woman pursued Ava out of the store, Winnie noted the way the Chinese sales associate took over her colleague’s task, cursorily looking into the dust bag at the superfake without bothering to remove it completely and then toting it into the back room.
“Nice move with the cell phone. How did you come up with that?” Winnie asked when they were in the car, driving back to the city.
“The art of misdirection, right?”
The left-behind cell phone would become Ava’s signature move.
Within months, Ava took charge of hiring and training their shoppers. She rented a unit in a nondescript South San Francisco office park so the shipments wouldn’t come to their homes. She incorporated their business in the Cayman Islands and opened them both Swiss bank accounts to maximize privacy and minimize taxes.
Five months into their work together, with profits growing steadily, Mandy Mak called with her preposterous plan to build their own black factory. Ava was the one who pushed Winnie to go along with it.
Following the extended conference call, they locked themselves in Ava’s study to go over the details of the proposal.
“Mandy is playing with fire,” Winnie whispered, so as not to risk being overheard by Maria, the sharp-eyed nanny. (Ava insisted Maria was safe—the woman was smart enough to know it was better not to know—and while Winnie concurred, she always took extra precautions.)
“It’s an audacious move,” Ava agreed.
“If any of the brands even suspect what she’s up to, Mak International will be done for.”
“Thankfully,” Ava said, “that’s not our problem.”
Winnie started. Even after observing the way Ava addressed their shoppers, her ruthless pragmatism still occasionally took her aback.
Ava continued. “Here’s how I see it. If we decline to sign the contract, they’ll be free to replace us. They’ll find some lackey to implement your genius scheme exactly as we’ve done, and then it’s all over for us.”
“But if we say yes,” said Winnie, “the balance of power flips completely. They control the inventory. We’re at their mercy. We work for them.”
Ava sank her fingers into her hair and massaged her scalp, as though that could somehow clear the blockage in her brain. “Unless they’re in our debt. Unless they owe us, like really owe us.”
Winnie didn’t follow. The Maks were so connected, so influential. What did they lack that they couldn’t easily procure?
“Like, what if we did them the kind of favor that is impossible to repay? The kind of favor that engenders eternal loyalty and gratitude?”
“Like, say, by giving Boss Mak the liver transplant that saves his life?”
“Or, barring that, leading him to hold out hope that we’ll eventually make it happen.”
The nape of Winnie’s neck tightened. She pictured Boss Mak’s cheekbones jutting out of his gaunt, sallow face, his Adam’s apple protruding like something that should be kept under wraps.
Ava softened her tone. “Look, I’ll do everything I can to convince Oli to do the transplant. But just in case.”
In this way it was decided: they would sign the contract rendering the Maks sole supplier of their counterfeit bags, and they would reap the profits that came with it—profits that they would then direct into a new, even more innovative and lucrative scheme. All Winnie had to do was come up with it. For wasn’t creativity at the core of her work? Wasn’t it the reason Winnie loved the job? In this business copycats were an occupational hazard, and only the most inventive, the nimblest, deserved to stay on top.
From Dongguan, Ava reported the discussions had gone smoothly. The new factory was even better than they’d hoped. She ticked off Manager Chiang’s advancements: instead of a traditional assembly line, workstations were arranged in the shape of a U, with the sewing machines on one side and the assembly on the other, to cut the time it took to pass work from one station to another. Yes, Ava said, every second counted, as evidenced by the plastic signs displaying the precise number of them needed to complete each task.
“You should have seen these workers. So focused, so efficient.” It didn’t hurt that they were paid nearly as well as their legitimate counterparts, unheard of in black factories.
Ava told Winnie about meeting a young worker, no older than fourteen, who shyly revealed that her salary was enough to put her little sister through school. “Westerners love to talk about ethical labor without asking what the laborers want themselves.”
“You tell ’em, sister,” Winnie said. Her use of such Americanisms always amused her friend.
For the celebratory dinner, the men had taken Ava to the rooftop restaurant of the Great World Hotel, the cacophony of gaudy glitz that was Boss Mak’s preferred spot.
“I’ve never seen so many bottles of wine for so few people,” Ava said. “And all of it ultraexpensive, ultra-French.” Matching the men drink for drink, she felt like she was back at her old law firm, with limitless youthful energy to burn.
The accompanying meal had floored her. How long had Ava spent describing the Peking duck, cooked in a special oven transported over from Beijing, fueled with freshly cut wood from apple and date trees that infused the meat with intense aromatics?
The men treated her like the guest of honor, keeping her glass full, offering her the choicest morsels, including the sweet, tender cheeks of the fried grouper.
Winnie had worried that they would consider Ava an outsider and hold her at arm’s length, but her friend assured her they’d gone out of their way to make her feel welcome.
“They really tried to talk to me, to get to know me. Thank god Kaiser Shih was there to translate.”
This, Winnie always knew, was Ava’s superpower—her ability to make people want to take care of her. She projected such harmlessness, such innocence, and that rendered her lethal.
After dinner came karaoke in a swanky private room decked out with an immense TV screen, state-of-the-art acoustics, psychedelic disco lights, endless whiskey and champagne.
“You should have seen the men’s faces when those hostesses barged in,” Ava said. “They were so embarrassed. It was kind of sweet.”
The men chose songs they thought she’d know—by ABBA, Bryan Adams, Madonna, Bon Jovi. Before long they were all on their feet, yelling in unison, shimmying and shaking, clinking their glasses again and again and again.
At some point in the evening, Ava lurched out of the room to stealthily pay the check. On the way back, to tease the men, she peeled off a few bills for the manager and told her to send in the girls. They spilled through the door in their identical black dresses right as the opening notes of “Dancing Queen” filled the room. The men hollered in protest until they saw Ava in the doorway fighting to suppress her laughter. Everyone joined in to sing. The girls draped their thin arms over the men, swaying their hips from side to side. The police chief took Ava by the waist and twirled her around the room, surprisingly agile for someone of his age and girth, while Kaiser Shih rattled a tambourine.
“You can dance, you can jive,” they blared into each other’s faces, “having the time of your life.”
Hours later, ears ringing, throats hoarse, they staggered outside. Was that dawn bleeding into the eastern sky or merely the lights of downtown Dongguan? The men took turns clapping Ava on the back, complimenting her alcohol tolerance, and thanking her for footing the bill. Before she climbed into her ride-share back to the hotel, they hugged one another and slapped palms like teammates who’d won the big game.
Hearing Ava recount all this, Winnie felt an almost parental pride.
Three weeks later, Manager Chiang’s first batch of superfakes arrived at their rental unit, ready to be mailed out across the country to their shoppers. The Bottega Veneta Pouches and Dior Book Totes and Valentino Rockstud bags, in all the latest colors and finishes, were so precisely rendered that a one-to-one grading didn’t do them justice; these were in a tier of their own. The shoppers returned the bags to unsuspecting boutiques, while their real counterparts flew out of Winnie and Ava’s eBay store. Profits doubled, spurred by handbag fanatics on the online forums, who raved about Winnie and Ava’s merchandise as well as their customer service.
Where do they get their bags? How do they get them so quickly? How do they stay in business? more than one user asked. I bought my beige-and-black Gabrielle from them at retail when there was a waiting list at Chanel, and other sites were selling lightly used versions at a premium!
To keep up with demand, Ava hired more shoppers and fanned them out to buy, buy, buy. (And return, return, return.) And through it all, Winnie and Ava reminded each other to never get complacent or let down their guard. They communicated with their shoppers via an anonymous Telegram account; they ignored interview requests from nosy fashion bloggers and journalists; they paid a service to scrub the internet of any details that might link their identities to their business.
In the end, though, despite their meticulousness and rigor, all it took was a single innocuous act to send the entire enterprise crashing to the ground.
The instigator was one Mary-Sue Clarke of Canton, Ohio, an otherwise unremarkable woman who happened to have turned fifty in October, three months after Ava signed the new contract with the Maks. To mark the occasion, Mary-Sue’s husband, Phil Clarke, gave her a Louis Vuitton Clapton wallet in the iconic Damier canvas. Phil had purchased the wallet at a Neiman Marcus in Orange County while on a business trip.
As Winnie’s private investigator would later report, Mary-Sue was thrilled with the gift—that is, until a mere few days later, when one of the tiny golden screws holding together the weighty clasp suddenly loosened and disappeared, rendering the wallet unusable.
To be fair, this was a design flaw on the part of Louis Vuitton and not indicative of the Mak factory’s workmanship, not that the distinction would have mattered to Mary-Sue. Dismayed by the quality of this so-called luxury item, she paid a visit to her neighborhood cobbler, who told her it’d be impossible to find a screw that would be a perfect match. She had no choice, then, but to get in her car and drive to the nearest Louis Vuitton boutique, an hour away in Cleveland.
There, a saleswoman with a sharp asymmetrical bob donned a pair of white gloves to examine the wallet—an affectation that Mary-Sue must have found theatrical, pretentious. The woman assured Mary-Sue that the wallet would be sent off to their workshop for repair, which would, of course, be complimentary because Louis Vuitton stood by their goods.
Mary-Sue left satisfied. From the car she phoned her husband to tell him the good news but was interrupted by another incoming call. It was the store manager. In a clipped manner he informed Mary-Sue that further inspection had revealed that the wallet wasn’t one of theirs. He used that phrasing exactly.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“This isn’t a Louis Vuitton wallet, madam.”
“What are you talking about? It says LV all over it.”
“I’m sorry, madam, but it isn’t an authentic Louis Vuitton.”
“How can that be? It’s from Neiman Marcus.”
“I suggest you take it up with them.”
After more back and forth, the manager told Mary-Sue that store policy technically dictated that they confiscate all inauthentic goods, but if she returned before the end of the day, she could retrieve her wallet.
And so she pulled off the freeway—in rush hour traffic, no less—and went back to the boutique. The young woman who’d been so helpful earlier handed over the wallet pinched between thumb and forefinger, as if it were a dead fish.
Once she was back on the road, Mary-Sue called her husband and berated him. How could he have humiliated her so? Why hadn’t he simply told her the truth? What else had he lied about? Would the diamond solitaire on her finger turn out to be cubic zirconia?
Phil Clarke, by nature calm and taciturn, knew to let his wife finish her rant. When she finally paused to take a breath, he said, “It cost one thousand and eighty dollars, plus tax. I kept the receipt in case you wanted to exchange it.”
That evening, he and Mary-Sue called the Newport Beach Neiman’s. They spoke to a supervisor who apologized profusely and offered an immediate and full refund, plus thirty percent off their next purchase. The supervisor also requested that they mail back the wallet for further investigation.
From there, things would swiftly unravel.
Overnight, Neiman Marcus tightened their policies, subjecting all returns of luxury leather goods to an extra layer of scrutiny. One of Winnie and Ava’s most reliable shoppers, a Korean American grad student who used the screen name Purse Addict reported walking into the Boston Neiman’s in Copley Square, right before closing time, to return a Balenciaga City superfake in hot pink. She grew wary when the sales associate unzipped the bag’s inner pockets and felt around as though looking for a breast lump, and then squinted at Purse Addict’s credit card (though the woman was way too young to need reading glasses). Turning her back on Purse Addict, the sales associate got on the phone and called for an “authenticity expert” to come to the floor.
Immediately, the shopper lunged for the replica and slipped out the doors.
A couple days later, another shopper ran into the same problem at a Neiman’s in Dallas. This time, the sales associate hung on to her credit card and never gave her a chance to get away. Thankfully the Bottega Veneta woven clutch in question, a particularly excellent replica made from fine intrecciato grosgrain, passed muster, and the return was accepted. But the shopper was so shaken she resigned minutes later.
Soon, it was clear that their Asian and Asian American workers were being racially profiled. What had once been their greatest strength—their perceived docility and obedience, their relative invisibility—had become their weakness. The narrative flipped. Now their Asian features read as scheming, perfidious, sly. Word spread from Neiman’s to Saks and Nordstrom and the rest. All the department stores unleashed stricter return policies. Profits plunged. The Maks demanded to be paid for inventory, even if the superfakes were simply piling up in their South San Francisco office unit, their car trunks, their homes.
Once law enforcement got involved, Winnie and Ava studied their predicament from every angle before concluding they had no choice: the handbag scheme had become a liability, and, like a gangrenous foot, they had to saw it off to survive.
But even if they shut everything down before the most incriminating information was uncovered, it was too late to clear their names.
Sitting before her laptop in her Los Angeles penthouse, Winnie purchased a ticket on the last flight out of LAX and then called Ava. “There’s a midnight flight from SFO to Taipei with one seat in business class.”
“You can’t be serious,” Ava said. “I can’t just pack up and go.”
Winnie looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows of her bedroom. How she would miss this sky, so clean and blue, with clouds so fluffy they appeared painted on. She said, “I’m going to spell this out for you. We are a step away from being arrested and thrown into prison for months, maybe years. I’m getting the hell out of here, and I strongly suggest you join me.”
“And what do you advise I do with my son?”
“Is Maria there?”
“Winnie, don’t be absurd.”
Winnie jumped up and paced the room. “It’s temporary. We can figure out the details later.”
“You want me to leave my kid behind indefinitely?”
Winnie turned and kicked the wall, stubbing her big toe. “What do you think will happen when you get locked up?”
Her words were met with silence on the other end.
“Ava?” said Winnie. “Ava, did I lose you?”
“I’m here,” she said, her voice eerily composed.
“There’s no other way, you hear me?” Winnie drummed her fingers on her dresser, trying to figure out how to make her friend understand. “There’s no other way.”
“Wait,” Ava said. “I think there might be.”
Winnie pressed her forehead into the palm of her hand. They didn’t have time for this.
“What if, instead of waiting for them to arrest me, I turn myself in?”
Winnie bit down on her thumb to hold back a shriek. “Then you’ll go to jail for sure.”
There again was that same self-possessed tone. “Not if we execute this exactly right.”
In Beijing, the sun has begun to set. Its rays slice through the blinds, striping the floor like the bars of a cell. The stiff couch cushions make the muscles in Winnie’s lower back ache. She rolls onto her side, trying and failing to get comfortable, wondering why the pain seems to have spread to her head. She checks the clock on the mantel. Of course. It’s time for her meds. She places two pain tablets on her tongue and goes to the bathroom to gulp down water. Bringing her face close enough to fog the mirror, she squirts a layer of thick translucent ointment onto her mottled, puffy lids, tender as an infant’s skin. To her reflection, the only soul she’s spoken to, really spoken to, face-to-face this entire month, she says, “Here’s to new beginnings.”
She carries her laptop to the bedroom, flips down the quilt, and climbs into bed without changing her clothes. Opening the computer, she pulls up the video she’s watched at least once a day for the past week. The video is produced by a major British newspaper. It features a diamond lab in Cardiff, Wales—yes, a lab that grows diamonds that are apparently indistinguishable from natural stones, though a good deal cheaper, which is, of course, where the opportunity lies. For why not take the counterfeit handbag blueprint that worked so well, and shift it fifteen, thirty, forty-five degrees? This time, though, they’ll supervise the entire supply chain from beginning to end. This time, they will not cede control.
Again she watches the scientist place the tiny diamond seed into the complicated-looking growth chamber; again she watches the seed grow in minuscule increments within a cloud of purple light. In a few weeks, the scientist says, this seed will be a full-blown diamond, ready to be cut and polished and set in a ring. Winnie imagines weighing the rough stone in the palm of her hand, and her heart thuds like a kettledrum. She hasn’t told Ava yet, not until she has a clearer picture of what the plan will entail. Besides, Ava doesn’t need any distractions right now.
On the nightstand, Winnie’s burner phone clatters against the wood surface. She checks the number and this time she answers. “Well? How did it go with the detective today?”
“So far, so good,” Ava says evenly.
“And what am I supposed to do with that?”
“What did you say about getting too confident?” Ava reminds her. “It’s going as planned, but there’s a long way to go.”
“At least tell me what you said.”
Ava dives into the events of the previous day, the way she regaled the detective with stories of heartbreak and alienation—her dying marriage, her repulsion toward Winnie and those menacing men.
“Listen to this,” Ava says, her voice rising in pitch.
Winnie can see her now, eyes blazing, cheeks flushed, unable to contain her excitement.
“I told her the factory girl was missing two fingers, and, Winnie, you should have seen her face.”
Winnie screams and then covers her mouth, shaken by the sound her own body produced. How did Ava come up with that? Her friend could have been a bestselling novelist, effortlessly spinning tall tales from golden thread. What will she invent next? A gangster with a raised scar spanning temple to jaw? A sex worker who dreams of going back to school? Winnie can’t wait to find out.