It wasn’t that Hannah knew Jackie well. It was that at first glance Dawn, the unknown matron of honor, looked so blonde, so southern and painted with rouge and eye shadow, that Hannah felt the need to see Jackie’s dark curls and pale skin.

The last time Hannah had seen Jackie was at Bee’s twenty-fifth birthday party a few years before. She and Jackie had spent much of the night making fun of everyone in the bar. Hannah honestly enjoyed Jackie, at least while drunk. She would cast Julia Stiles as Jackie because, even though the actress was blonde, she shared Jackie’s wry smile and husky voice.

Bee and Jackie had known each other since they were babies. They shared a bunk at summer camp in Maine for six consecutive years and played tennis as a pair through high school. They went to the prom with twin brothers, Chris and Ed Shanahan, and were each other’s first phone call when they lost their virginity during their freshman years of college.

But they’d grown distant as they moved closer to their thirtieth birthdays, which is why Jackie had been passed over as maid of honor. Jackie’s longtime boyfriend, Kevin, had committed several over-the-top betrayals before leaving her last year. Since the split, Jackie had been aloof and occasionally mean to friends—namely Bee—who were happy in love.

At the bar in Atlantic City, on the night of the bachelorette party, Bee told the story of Jackie and Kevin so that all the other bridesmaids knew what to expect from her oldest, dearest, and somewhat estranged friend, who had yet to arrive.

Jackie, Bee explained as the women leaned in over their cocktails, had majored in finance in college and now investigated corporate fraud. Her firm, which had office space in a high-rise in New York’s Financial District, was hired by big company executives to find out which of their employees were misusing corporate credit cards. Jackie had saved her clients millions by finding the businessmen who had used their company-sponsored American Express accounts to pay for personal car repairs and steak dinners. She’d once caught an exec using his card to withdraw thousands of dollars in cash advances, which he used to pay his kid’s thirty-thousand-dollar private-school tuition.

Kevin had been Jackie’s boyfriend in college and had moved with her to New York. The relationship was blissful and she’d assumed they’d get married—until she discovered that Kevin had not only been cheating on her with one of her work acquaintances, but that he’d opened a credit card in Jackie’s name without her knowledge.

According to Bee, Jackie was still paying off the twenty-six-thousand-dollar debt that Kevin had racked up paying off old debts from college, buying himself toys he didn’t need, and taking the other woman on secret lunches.

Jackie had discovered Kevin’s fraud in the most basic way, when a credit card company—one she often dealt with during work investigations—called to inform her that she was two months late on her payments. She explained that she didn’t have a credit card with that company, that there must be some mistake. The representative read off the last four digits of her social security number and date of birth as confirmation and then gave her the details of her ballooning balance. Jackie assumed she was the victim of identity theft until the credit card agent began to read a list of what was purchased with the card—the Xbox that now sat on her living-room floor and the bright green, supposedly aerodynamic running shoes that Kevin had brought home the month before.