Within minutes, he’d messaged me. And it occurred to me, as my phone buzzed with a notification, that there was no way to tell when he’d “liked” me first, that he could have been waiting for months, since the moment I’d first logged off the app. And just like that, he pounced the moment I “liked” him back.

Are you a fan of Eyes Wide Shut?

And that made me smile, because that was my answer to the prompt “What’s one thing you can never stop talking about?” And I’d said: “Nicole Kidman’s poison-green Galliano for Dior dress from the 1997 Oscars.” It was a cheeky answer for a straight woman to give; it easily filtered out the men who would automatically dismiss me as a “fashion chick” and swipe left.

I typed out a reply. Then deleted it. Typed it out again. Quinn wasn’t paying attention to me anymore; he was back on his own phone. I didn’t want his opinion, anyway.

Yes, but I prefer To Die For if you really want vintage Kidman.

That was the beginning of the end, I guess.

2

Present day

In my mother’s guest bedroom, all I do is sit and think.

Mom never had great taste. And somehow even in this gorgeous landscape, with a view of the mountains, the house itself seems stale and brittle. The cherry-patterned wallpaper is garish, yet somehow faded, though she’s only lived in this house for a few years. The curtains are brown and made of hemp, thin as well as ugly. The kissing swans lamp on the bedside table is one she found at a flea market. One swan’s eye is chipped.

I’m used to staring at her, the one-eyed swan. I hardly leave this room some days and I know she isn’t judging me. Like even my closest friends are.

After all that happened in the city, I needed to escape. I’d grown up in Westchester, a breath away from Manhattan, but when my parents divorced in my early twenties, my dad moved to Seattle and my mom sold the Westchester house and bought this smaller one farther north, in the Hudson Valley.

Mom was almost too happy to take me in. My brothers were long gone—Oliver, living abroad and Theo, in the Midwest. I had collapsed at her feet the moment I stepped over her threshold, choking on the sage she had used to cleanse the house.

She had hugged me, told me it was all going to be okay, patted my cheek, sprayed my pillow with lavender for a good night’s sleep. And it worked.

It wasn’t until a few nights later, when we were having a late-night cup of expensive, loose-leafed tea, that I remembered why I rarely came up here. Why my mother, with all her supposed good intentions and New Agey “vibes,” could be such a damn bitch.