CHAPTER 1

I left the rental just as the sun poked its head above the nearby mountains, and golden light filled the broad stretch of river that ran alongside the little town. Nisa was still curled up in bed, breathing deeply, her dark curls stuck to her cheek. I brushed them aside but she never stirred. Nisa slept like a child. Unlike me, she was never troubled by nightmares or insomnia. It would be another hour or two before she woke. Longer, maybe. Probably.

I kissed her cheek, breathing in her scent—lilac-and-freesia perfume mingled with my own imported Jasmin et Tabac, one of my few luxuries—and ran my hand along her bare shoulder. I was tempted to crawl back into bed beside her, but I also felt an odd restlessness, a nagging sense that there was somewhere I needed to be. There wasn’t—we knew no one around here except for Theresa and Giorgio, and both would be at work in their home offices overlooking the river.

I kissed Nisa again: if she woke, I’d take it as a sign, and remain here. But she didn’t wake.

I scrawled a note on a piece of paper—Nisa often forgot to turn her notifications off, she’d be grumpy all morning if a text woke her. Going for a drive, back with provisions. Love you.

I dressed quickly, propelled by an anticipation I couldn’t explain. Being in a new place, perhaps, and out of New York City after such a long time.

The night before, we’d polished off a bottle of champagne in our rental, and that was after beers and celebratory shots of twelve-year-old Jura at the bar that Theresa had recommended as the best in this part of upstate. The rental had been Theresa’s idea, too. She and her husband, Giorgio, had bought a second home here years ago, but during the pandemic, they’d forsaken their Queens apartment and moved permanently. Ever since, they’d been on me and Nisa and their other friends still in the city to do the same.

“Seriously, Hols, you will love it,” Theresa had urged me the night before. “You should have done it years ago, you know that, right?”

“Right,” Nisa retorted. She thought Theresa and Giorgio were going insane with boredom, which was likely true. They came down to the city at least once or twice a month, couch-surfing because even for them short-term rentals had become too expensive, and they’d sublet their own beautiful two-bedroom in Sunnyside. “And I should have had a father who left me a million dollars when his ultralight crashed last time he was out at Torrey Pines. Why didn’t I think of that?”

Nisa smacked herself in the forehead. Theresa smiled ruefully, made a touché gesture, and ordered another round for all of us. She and her father had long been estranged. The inheritance was a surprise, and she liked to share her largesse.

Still, Theresa had a point. It was beautiful up here. The long winding journey along the river, the city’s sprawl giving way first to outer exurbia—apple orchards, pastures repurposed as solar farms, and warehouses, all those not-yet-gentrified, sketchy-seeming river towns, poisoned by brownfields and decades of poverty. Nisa and I had passed a lot of For Sale by Owner signs, in front of houses that seemed too derelict to merit anything but a teardown. And you’d still have to remediate soil made toxic by runoff from mass agriculture and factories that had been shuttered half a century ago.

But after several hours, the long drive had rewarded us with jeweled villages like this one. Little towns long since colonized by self-styled artists and artisans who are really just people rich enough to flee the city and call themselves whatever they want. Craft brewers, textile designers, glass artists specializing in bespoke bongs and neti pots. Dog chiropractors. Masons who would demolish a centuries-old fieldstone chimney, number each stone, and then rebuild it, piece by piece, in an adjoining room. People who distilled rare liqueurs from echinacea and comfrey, or made syrup out of white pine needles, or wove intricate rings and brooches from your own hair, charging what I earned as a teacher in a month. A very good month.

I tried not to think about that as I eased my old Camry along Main Street, craning my neck to see if the café was open yet. Nisa and I had chatted with the owner the day before—he was from Queens, too. He’d only been here for six months, but he told us that there were lines outside the café every morning when he arrived to unlock the door.

Apparently, he still kept city hours—it was six a.m., and the place was closed. But the parking lot at the Cup and Saucer, on the outskirts of town, was packed, pickups and SUVs sprawled across the cracked asphalt. I pulled in alongside a tractor-trailer rig and stepped inside, past three guys who stood by the door, talking.

“Morning,” one said. He caught my gaze and held it long enough that I felt obligated to smile, though he hadn’t.

I grabbed a to-go coffee, heavy on the half-and-half, glanced at the donuts on the counter. I decided to hold off and get some croissants at the café when I returned. They’d cost twice as much but Nisa didn’t like donuts. Too bad, since these were homemade and the real deal, fried in lard.

I headed back to the car and for a few minutes sat, sipping my coffee as I debated what to do with my restless energy. I didn’t want to return and wake Nisa, not without croissants and lattes. But in the past two days, we’d already combed through the village. I remembered that Theresa and Giorgio had also given us ample suggestions for other well-heeled towns nearby.

“Just don’t bother with Hillsdale.” Giorgio had flicked his fingers, as though Hillsdale were a mosquito buzzing by. “It’s a dump.”

Theresa had nodded. “There must be a problem with the water supply or something. That whole town’s been depressed for as long as we’ve been coming here. You’d think they’d be happy to expand their tax base, but they really, really hate outsiders.”

This seemed odd—that one small town would remain blighted, when surrounded by so many places that had benefited from the real estate boom. But it also suggested that Hillsdale might be someplace where Nisa and I could afford to buy a fixer-upper someday. I decided to do a quick bit of recon. If Hillsdale seemed interesting, we could both head out later to investigate. I finished my coffee, rolled down the window, and drove out of town. I didn’t bother to check my phone for directions. Route 9K was the only real road here, and I was on it.

The air had the intoxicating bite of early autumn: goldenrod and dry sedge and the first fallen leaves, cut with the river’s scent of fish and mud. With the road straight before me, my mind began to wander. Some people hate summer’s end, but I always loved it, the same way I always loved the beginning of the school year as a kid.

That had changed once I started working at a private school in Queens, a job I fell into by chance nearly two decades ago and had never learned to love. I’d had no teaching degree, I wasn’t certified, but you don’t need that to teach at a private school. Not the one that employed me, anyhow. The pay wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible, and the school covered half my health insurance. For years I’d told myself it was only temporary, I’d find theater work again soon.

That had never happened. If I ever complained, Nisa pointed out that I was lucky to have a job even marginally related to my interests. Who wants to employ an unsuccessful playwright? I taught English, and as time passed, I’d at least been able to incorporate plays for the eighth graders, starting with heavily stripped-down versions of Shakespeare—Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, even Hamlet.

The students read the scripts I adapted aloud in class, and sometimes performed them in the small gymnasium that doubled as an events space, for an audience of parents, siblings, and the few teaching colleagues I could guilt into attending, and filled with the overwhelming scents of Axe, Victoria’s Secret cologne, and fruity lip gloss, like a Walgreens had exploded. It was all light-years away from what I’d set out to do with my life after I got a BFA in playwriting from a top drama school.

And yet those afternoons with the students did, sometimes, ease my despair. Running lines with them; watching them slowly gain confidence; witnessing the magic that never failed to take over, when they finally put on costumes and makeup and looked at themselves in amazement, realizing they had become someone, something, new and wonderful and strange. For those few hours, I could imagine that it wasn’t too late. That I, too, might still be transformed.

Delighted parents, learning of my background, would ask why I didn’t write something for the kids to perform. I always begged off, politely. I was terrified to see my work performed, even by kids. I knew this made me seem standoffish, and I never developed any real relationships among my fellow teachers. Instead, I kept up with a few close friends in the theater world. And while I hadn’t had a play produced since everything blew up all those years ago, I continued to write. More recently, I’d even begun to apply for grants and fellowships.

I didn’t tell Nisa. Instead, over the last few years I’d collected dozens of rejections in secret.

Part of this was superstition—I didn’t want to jinx my possible success. Most of it had to do with the fact that Nisa’s own career was taking off. She’d always had a small but intense following as a singer-songwriter. As the pandemic faded, she’d begun auditioning for acting jobs as well. No one had cast her yet, but she’d had some callbacks. Obviously I wanted my girlfriend to succeed. But I wanted to succeed, too.

And now, at last, it seemed like I had. In the early summer, I’d received a grant for a new play: the first sign of hope in decades, which made it seem like, at last, things really would be different. Ten thousand dollars, to be used however I wanted to further my work. I’d immediately arranged for a leave of absence from teaching for the fall semester. It wasn’t enough money to quit my job (if only!), but it bought me a few months of freedom.

That summer was a wonderful time for me and Nisa, celebrating my good luck with our friends, culminating in this long weekend upstate and this beautiful drive. After all those years of teaching, autumn again felt like possibility—a chance to be someone else, not who I’d been just weeks earlier. A shift in attitude and wardrobe. New shoes; a new career. Being out of the city now, following the river north, made me feel like wonderful things were about to happen. Maybe it wasn’t too late for me to dream, to imagine a life that could conceivably align with the one I’d anticipated, twenty years ago, before everything got derailed by Macy-Lee Barton’s death.