I moved into Graham’s apartment a week later with only four suitcases—one of mine and three I borrowed from him—and a New Yorker tote bag stuffed with underwear. Graham offered to help, but I turned him down swiftly each time he brought it up. I’d told him—and Lena and anyone else who asked—that the reason they could never come over, the reason I couldn’t host a dinner party, the reason Graham didn’t have a toothbrush in my bathroom, was because the building was under construction. “It’s loud, it’s dusty... I’m better off at yours.” This person, Eliza, was made to live in a penthouse-adjacent twenty-fourth-floor suite in a prewar luxury building on the Upper East Side. My old apartment—with its holey floorboard and cockroach motels around the sinks; with its water-stained bathroom ceiling and yellowing kitchen caulk—was the last strand of Elizabeth in my life. The part that couldn’t afford things. The part that would never have been welcomed into the Walker clan in the same way Eliza was about to be.

Graham was never going to see that part. I worked hard to ensure that.

When I stood in my empty apartment, four suitcases and one tote bag in the center of the room like a woman about to embark on a two-week vacation to Greece, I found myself saying a prayer for my old life. I hadn’t prayed in years. Since school, really. Since the night I stopped believing. But I was suddenly praying all over again. Asking God—or someone—to please let this work. Please help me. So Ruthie—and I—can finally have peace.

I left four keys and two envelopes on the one foot of counter space my kitchen allotted. The first was for my landlord, Sun Lee, with the last month’s rent and a note to keep the bed if he wanted it. And the second was to Fyodor, my first friend in New York. I found my rich man, I wrote. Our conversations were delightful.

It felt like a suicide note.

I had one more thing to do before I left.

I walked over to the armchair in the corner, which used to live in the office of the Chinese food place downstairs before it was gifted to me; I’ve counted stains from at least five different kinds of chicken on it. I got down on the floor, turned onto my back, and shimmied beneath the chair like a mechanic under a humming Mustang. I pulled the zipper—there for easy removal and reupholstering—around the perimeter of the bottom of the chair to reveal an open crevice with a hole in the center, the perfect hiding spot.