“Uh—fifteen years.” He laughed. “I know. It was too long. If I’d left Pearl I probably would have finished earlier. I liked being around all of you.”

“I never would have guessed that,” I admitted. “You don’t seem very math-y. I thought you were some cynical arty downtown critic who’d seen it all.”

“God, no. I like art, but I love math,” he said sincerely. “It has rules. It’s the one thing in the world that tells you what the rules are.”

“Did you give up on it? I mean—why are you in Berlin?”

“Oh, I’ll get a job,” he said, reassuring me. “I could have a job now. I—I don’t know. I wanted to see a world that wasn’t New York. Everybody’s leaving. I mean, look at you. You never came back.”

“I discovered that there was more world I wanted to see,” I said.

“Me too.” It turned out that Jonah, too, was a different person, once you got to know him.

After that—we were inseparable.

I never told Jonah, or anyone, about what happened at Pine City that summer. It took months to sort through it all. I was so lonely, so desperate for a hero, that I looked up to a hoax. I carried her with me like a talisman, like a saint, like an instruction manual, when she was a fraud, calculated to support the ambitions of privileged young people as they sailed around Manhattan, shooting rubber bullets at a world that for them would always ripple, and never break. But there was nothing in this world that could make my compulsion less lonely. There was no one who could show me how to be the person I wanted to be. I had to do everything for myself.

Carey—Maria, I still have to remind myself, after all this time—was, in the end, so much like the woman she pretended to be: uneducated, vulnerable, damaged—and like me, or at least who I was before the Academy. Yet her lines were merely that: lines. Maria didn’t write the story, and she didn’t learn the lessons. The tragedy was that she never learned to pick herself up after a failure. She never outed Pine City while she was alive; she was brave only in death. It was a shame. She should have been here tonight. She shouldn’t have been afraid to feel like a fraud.

I feel like one every day. It’s the cost of doing business.

I checked my watch, hailed a taxi, and scooted across its vinyl seats, the stuffing coming out beneath my fingers. I gazed out the window toward the life that waited for me—the one that I had built, and would keep on building, piece by piece.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to:

Grand Central Publishing, especially editor Lindsey Rose and creative director Albert Tang and his team for the cover.