She laid her hand on mine. “I know how you’re feeling, baby. No one was happy with me after what happened with your father. I was public enemy number one. Remember, your brothers didn’t talk to me for three whole months afterward?” She clucked her tongue and I quickly slipped my hand out from under hers, anger simmering at my temples.

“You don’t have any idea how I feel. You knowingly cheated on Dad with Mike. Mike knowingly cheated on Linda with you. You and Dad got a divorce, but you did not have fucking blood on your hands.” I scraped my chair back, the tea wobbling over and spilling onto the ugly tiled floor, and I went up to my hideous, cherry-lined room and cried. Cried until my head pulsed with it.

As a rule, I don’t cry. The sheer effort required to produce tears is too strenuous for me. And when I first heard the news that destroyed my life as I knew it, I didn’t cry then either, not at first. It took days for my eyes to shine, to leak. Even sitting at the precinct, being interviewed, I kept a poker face. Refusing to show any kind of perceived weakness, even at that point.

Someone, somewhere, probably on Twitter, called me a stone-cold bitch, sociopathic. But I do possess emotion. I just push it all down, down into the darkest, most unvisited depths of myself: sadness; self-doubt; any kind of wavering emotion that could catch me off balance. Perhaps it was a survival technique. But I’ve never been in therapy, so who really knows.

Now I’m soft, gummy almost with my feelings. Sometimes I can’t control my mind at all; no matter what I do it’s just endless, flashing reminders of the New York Post headlines, the descriptions, in scintillating, precise detail, my brain a super-cut on repeat.

The odd thing is, it’s not the scenarios that my imagination flashes back to me; my mind doesn’t project me to the scene of the crime. What flickers through my head are the banner headlines, the bold type, the black italics on my phone screen. I can get lost among the lettering, in the negative space. Even a year later.

I was told not to read any of it.

But of course I did. Of course I did.

3

One year ago

Our first date was at Piccolo Cucina on the Lower East Side. It was early spring. I wore a long-sleeved black dress with delicate embroidered flowers and painted my nails my signature burgundy, coffin shaped. I put my hair up halfway, lined my eyes. Wore expensive underwear, pink and diaphanous, and black patent stiletto sandals.