Her mom had met Richard in April. She was working as a caterer, a part-time job that became full-time when Alice’s dad left the family just after Christmas. The party was for the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Richard was a guest faculty member that semester. She’d just assumed he was a struggling academic with no permanent post and more brains than money when he wandered into the hectic kitchen area, pinot noir dripping down his front. He asked if she had any club soda. Feeling sorry for him, she convinced a male colleague to swap white button-downs. Little did she know that the absentminded professor standing in front of her looking sheepish in his wine-stained undershirt, the one she was scolding for blocking the bus boys’ path to the dishwasher, was world famous in his field, having designed several of the most well-known silhouettes in New York’s celebrated skyline, not to mention the grandson of one of the richest men in the city’s history.

Apparently getting yelled at was new for Richard, and he liked it. Scratch that. And he loved it. It had been such a whirlwind romance. He was a guy who knew what he wanted and how to get it. His pursuit of Alice’s mom had been swift and relentless. She didn’t stand a chance. She was divorced on a Friday, married on a Saturday. Had left behind the falling-down duplex she’d rented for the past seventeen years in a borderline neighborhood in the working-class section of Cambridge, right on the Somerville border, to head, with her two teenage daughters in tow, to a house—one of three her new husband owned, the others in Aspen and Palm Beach, plus a co-op apartment on Park Avenue—in the toniest town in Connecticut. Well, on the Connecticut shore, at least.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” whispered a voice to Alice’s left.