I am a Vaughn. Lauraleigh Blakely Vaughn. It’s as pretentious as it sounds. My mother was a Blakely, and she insisted I carry her name in some fashion. And she insisted that having four names was just tacky. The Leigh in Lauraleigh was her consensus to a pseudo middle name.

Ever since that day on the playground, after I shoved a bully’s face in a bed of fire ants, I decided I could make my own choices for who I am, and that included my name. Blakely is what I go by most days (and I’m sure there’s a psychologist out there that would read too much into that; like my mommy acceptance issues), but it’s actually very simple; I just feel it suits me best.

But today, I’m Lucy Whitmore. Lucy has an ID and everything. She enjoys photography as a hobby, a side gig, hence the camera with the giant lens she carries around. She works part-time at a data publishing company until she can get her photography business off the ground. And if anyone ever gets too suspicious, I can make her disappear in a snap.

I remove my glasses and take a seat on the stone bench near a birch tree where I pull out my phone. I open his social media profile and scroll through his latest posts. Nothing from last night, but of course not. He doesn’t have to appear like he had to pull an all-nighter at the firm.

No, Ericson Theodore Daverns doesn’t have to fabricate excuses or apologize for who he is to anyone. Especially not to his meek little wife.

I close the app and place a call to Lenora. She answers on the second ring.

“Where was he?”

I can hear the desperation in her voice, the frantic need to quell the worry, the maddening suspicion. Lenora has already discovered the truth of her husband’s cheating; that’s not why she hired me. I’m not a private investigator, or a divorce attorney.

I’m revenge for hire.

To wit, most of my clients happen to be scorned women.

Oh, men. Since the dawn of time, you never fail at predictability.

I shoot her over an image of Ericson entering The Plaza last night.

“He was at Brewster’s,” I tell her. Brewster is a sleaze of a man who dabbles in NYC’s questionable hobbies. Such as gambling, wagers on underground MMA fights, drugs—lots of drugs—and prostitution. He’s not a pimp per se, but if one of the men who lines his pockets with spongy green cash wants a naughty schoolgirl for the night, Brewster provides. And he does so from the penthouse of The Plaza, aptly dubbed the attic.