“I meant you, Lily. The city’s a distant second.” He reached for me but I stepped away, pretending to focus on belting my sweater. The rejection didn’t faze him. He came up behind me as I stood in front of a mirror and wrapped his arms around me. “I don’t want you to leave,” he whispered. “I’m afraid if you do, you’ll never come back.”

I could see our reflections in the mirror, dark silhouettes obscured by the bright city. It was strange that neither of us wanted to turn on the lights in the room. It was as if we were each determined to keep the other in the dark.

❖

When I arrived at Jesse’s, there was a note for me, in his loopy handwriting, that read Studio—back by 7. It was a relief that he wasn’t there. Jesse was the sharpest person I knew and he’d figure out, sooner or later, that something was very wrong.

I was tempted to call Kaylee Quan; I’d memorized her number and typed it into my phone as soon as I left Martin and got into the hotel’s elevator. What was he doing, calling her? Quan was stonewalling the police, and I knew she’d hang up on me once she heard who I was. As I paced around Jesse’s, I wished I had a cigarette. I took a shower and reapplied my makeup, trying to cover that stubborn bruise and thinking all the while about what to do. Quan was someone I needed to see in person. I put her number into a reverse-lookup directory and came up empty. All the detectives had said was that she worked out at the same health club as Claudia’s impostor. Wait, that was it. The credit card bills listed Sinotique Health Club & Spa, next to an exorbitant charge. I typed the club’s name into Google, pressed return, and pulled a black dress over my head; Sinotique’s address was on the screen before I’d zipped up the back. The club was all of seven blocks from Jesse’s building. I looked at the clock. It was just after six-thirty, prime workout time for New York gym rats. I pulled on my boots and coat and headed out the door. Too impatient to wait for the elevator, I took the stairs down and escaped into the cold night air.

❖

“Would you be able to page her?” I asked the receptionist. “I hate to bother you, but Kaylee forgot to sign this before she left the office, and we could lose our biggest client.”

The receptionist chewed her gum and looked worried. “I’m really not supposed to page members unless it’s, like, life and death, you know?”

“I understand. It’s just that Kaylee will probably kill me, and everybody else in the office, if this doesn’t get signed.”