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Chapter 1

Claire Martin didn't want to throw herself in front of a bus, exactly. But if a bus happened to mow her down, knocking her instantly out of existence, that wouldn't have been the worst thing in the world.



If she were floating in eternal nothingness, at least she wouldn't have to hear Vagabond's music in every fucking bar in New York City. It happened for the fourth time not long after New Year's Day, as she sat on a stool in some Upper West Side dive, performing her fun new ritual of Drinking to Forget. She'd managed to swallow her way within sight of that sweet, sweet tipping point-the one where all her sharp-edged self-loathing melted into something squishy and Jell-O-like-and just caught the eye of a curly-haired guy nearby when "Idaho Eyes" came over the speakers, as jarring and rage-inducing as the clock radio blaring "I've Got You Babe" in Groundhog Day.



She turned away from her new prospect and leaned over the bar. "Hey," she said to the bartender, who held up a finger in her direction and continued his conversation with a middle-aged man a few stools down. Automatically, she drummed her fingers along with that catchy opening beat before she caught herself and closed her hand into a fist. "Hey!"



"What?" the bartender asked, glaring.



She squinted at him, trying to make him come fully into focus. He was a big, scowling bear of a man and alarmingly fuzzy around the edges. "Can we skip this song?"



"No," he said.



Claire considered leaving, but the guy with curly hair intrigued her, and she liked Fucking to Forget almost as much as Drinking to Forget. She swallowed, then flashed the bartender what she hoped was a winning smile. "Please? I'd really appreciate it."



Her smile, bright and effective enough to be a form of currency, had worked wonders for her in the past. In the early days of touring with Vagabond, rattling around in a van for which they could barely afford the gas, the guys had joked about it and had sent her into convenience stores to see if she could get them all free snacks for the road. But this bartender remained unmoved. He folded his hairy arms across his chest. "My bar, my playlist."



Claire gritted her teeth as the verse turned into the first chorus. A nearby couple began to dance, shout-singing along, the man looking into the woman's face with pure love. At times like these, Claire thought that maybe God did exist, not as some benevolent being or terrifying father, but as the omniscient equivalent of a prank show host. An Ashton Kutcher kind of God. She took another large gulp of her whiskey. "Don't be a dick, man," she said as the bartender turned away. "The customer's always right, right?"



"I'm a customer, and I love this song," said the middle-aged man down at the end of the bar.



"Well, you shouldn't," she said as a wave of nausea rose in her stomach. "They're terrible." She took a couple of shallow, panicky breaths as, over the speakers, Marcus's and Marlena's voices mingled in harmony. Dammit, they sounded good together.



The middle-aged man, apparently some kind of regular at this dive, made a wounded face, his shoulders slumping. The bartender noticed and pulled out his phone, holding it up right in front of Claire to show her the song playing on his Spotify app. His finger hovered over the skip button. Then he deliberately turned the volume up. The sound grew loud enough to suffocate her, to smother her. She lunged forward to grab the phone away from him.



As the bartender ejected her, none too gently, into the stinging January night, she realized that perhaps it was safer to drink alone in her apartment instead.





A month later, Claire's cousin Thea called.



"How's the wallowing going?" Thea asked in her brisk way.



"I don't know if it's fair to call it 'wallowing,'" Claire said. "That sounds so masturbatory. I think your band getting super-famous right after they kick you out is a great reason to become a shut-in."



"Mm-hmm," Thea said.



Over the past couple of years, Claire had spent so much time on the road that all she'd wanted from her home was a place without roommates where she could immediately take off her pants and collapse into bed. What did it matter that her "kitchen" only had room for a mini fridge and a hot plate? She wasn't exactly whipping up five-course meals for herself. Who cared that the bars on her window blocked out most of the natural light or that she'd stuck up all her posters with tape instead of framing them? But now, from underneath her sheets, Claire cast a look around her tiny studio, at the stacks of boxes from Pizza Paradise starting to grow mold, at the piles of discarded beer cans, at the torn-up remains of a note her parents had sent her, reading: You can always come home. Jesus forgives, and so do we.



"The wallowing is getting pretty gross," she said.



"Well, then, get up. I got you a job." Even as a child in their tiny Ohio town, Thea had been the one who got shit done. She'd organized all the bored neighborhood kids into teams for kickball. She'd harangued all the grown-ups until they signed up to bring something for the church bake sale. And then, when her parents had discovered she was gay and threatened to kick her out of the house unless she agreed to go to a conversion program, Thea had wasted no time in getting a full scholarship to Harvard and leaving on her own terms.



"A job? What is it?" Claire asked.



"Singing 'Old MacDonald' to the future CEOs of America. Some woman named Whitney Morgan e-mailed the Harvard list, looking for a playgroup musician, so I sang your praises."



Claire bit her lip. "That's really nice of you, Thea, but that's the kind of stuff I was doing five years ago. I don't know if I want-"



"How much money do you have left in your bank account?" Thea asked.



"Um," Claire said. She swung herself out of bed too quickly and, a little dizzy, reached for her computer to pull up her account balance. When she saw what her self-destructive spiral had done to her savings, her mouth went dry. Her rent was already overdue because she'd run out of stamps and hadn't been able to muster the energy to go out and buy more. And once she sent in that check, her bank account would be down to double digits. She cleared her throat. "What's the address?"



"I'll text you the details," Thea said.



"Thanks," Claire mumbled.



"I'm looking out for you, cuz," Thea said, a note of tenderness creeping into her voice. "Can't have you going back to Sacred Life Christian Fellowship. We're the ones that got out."



"Yeah, we are."



"And, Claire? Before you go, please take a shower," Thea said. "I can smell you over the phone."





It was a doorman building, of course, with a limestone facade on the Upper East Side, bordering Central Park. The doorman, a shrunken man in a forest green uniform, peered at Claire as she caught her breath and wiped the sweat off her forehead. She'd forgotten, over the month she'd spent floating around her apartment like a tipsy ghost, just how unpredictable the New York subway system could be, and had ended up having to run part of the way there, the shifting weight of the guitar on her back giving her the gait of an ungainly penguin.



"Penthouse B," she said, and he picked up the phone on his desk to call up. As he announced her to the person on the other end of the line, she checked the time again. Two minutes late. That was early for her, but Rich People Time worked differently from Charmingly Flighty Creative People Time.



He directed her toward an incredibly well-appointed elevator, all mirrored panels and marble accents. As she zoomed to the twentieth floor, she steeled herself. She knew how this would go. When she'd first moved to New York, she'd gotten a part-time job teaching baby music classes for one of those bouncy children's entertainment companies, thinking it could be a fun way to make some cash while she pursued what she really wanted to do. Instead, she'd encountered a bunch of bored, rich moms in yoga clothes and diamonds, talking over her and her fellow teachers, alternately ignoring their babies and documenting their every move with their phones. Somehow these women were paying just enough attention to complain about various parts of the class to the front desk in excruciating detail afterward. Once, Claire had called a child by the wrong name, and the mother had looked at her like she'd just revealed a "Bin Laden 4Ever" tramp stamp. It was all a perfect recipe for feeling small. For feeling . . . not real.



The long hallway had only two doors, one marked "A" and one marked "B." She pasted on a shit-eating grin and knocked on the latter. Ten seconds later, the door flew open, revealing one of the most beautiful women Claire had ever seen. Claire's first thought was that the woman framed in the doorway would have been right at home in an eighteenth-century painting of European aristocracy. She was the image of a sheltered, prerevolution French princess, complete with alabaster skin, pink cheeks, and swan neck. She wore a cream-colored blouse with a ruffled collar. (Claire usually called tops "shirts," but there was no way around it-this was a blouse.) But the most perfect thing about this nearly perfect woman was her hair. It was silken and unnaturally shiny, as if she'd stolen it straight from the mane of a well-groomed show horse.



"Claire?" the woman asked.



"Yup. Hi," Claire said, waving. "I'm sorry I'm a couple minutes late. The trains . . ."



The corners of the woman's plump lips turned down. "We don't put up with tardiness here. You should just go home," she said.



Shit. Claire's breath caught in her throat as the realization knocked into her-she was going to have to go home, and not just to her apartment. She'd have to move back to Ohio. A twenty-eight-year-old failure living in her high school bedroom, if her parents hadn't turned it into a home office or something. The people from her church would shake their heads in sympathy, but inside they'd feel that she'd gotten exactly what she deserved for her sins.



Then the woman broke into a laugh-a sunny, bell-like peal that transformed the very air around them. "I'm kidding!" she said, and then registered Claire's expression. "Oh, no, your face! That was mean. I'm so sorry."



"Wait. What?" Claire asked, confused. "I thought-"



"I didn't mean to- I forgot you probably actually have to deal with people like that all the time. It is totally fine. We didn't even realize." To Claire's great surprise, she stepped forward and hugged her, her breasts bumping against Claire's collarbone. She smelled faintly of lavender. Claire relaxed, the tiniest bit, into this unexpected intimacy, her first hug in over a month. "We're so excited to meet you. I'm Whitney. Come in, come in!"



In the foyer, Claire kicked off her boots and placed them next to a neat line of heels. Whitney kept up a steady stream of questions-How was her commute? Was she thirsty? Was this temperature okay for her?-as she took Claire's hand in hers and led her to where the apartment opened up into a living room. Everything was white. Well, white with silver and chrome accents, glacierlike, clean. Along one wall, floor-to-ceiling windows revealed the trees in Central Park, skeletal and damp from melting snow. The ceiling was higher than normal, as if the apartment extended up a story and a half, not content to occupy just one floor of a building like everyone else's did.



A couple of women sat on a white leather couch, wineglasses in their hands, while two others stood by a low table, trying to coax a couple of babies to stand up and grab the fruit on it. In the center of the room, a final woman sat on a checkered mat as more babies crawled and lolled around her like ants at a picnic. There they were: Claire's big audience.



"Have you tried putting his favorite toy out of reach?" one of the women by the table was saying to the other. "That might motivate him."



"No, I've just been dangling a big bag of heroin above his head. Can't understand why it doesn't work," said the other, rolling her eyes. "Yes, of course I've tried the toy. He just wails until I hand it back to him."



"Well, that's the problem. You can't hand it back-"



"Claire's here!" Whitney said, breaking the other women out of their conversations. They all turned to Claire, looking her over and chorusing hellos. The force of their collective smiles nearly knocked Claire backward. She'd forgotten what it felt like to have a whole roomful of people excited to see her, anticipating that they all were going to have a delightful time together. She grew flushed with pleasure even as her brain fired off a running commentary about how demeaning this whole situation was.



God, these women were glamorous. Claire had always thought that for the first couple of years after having a baby, you looked like a swamp monster, with spit-up smeared in unlikely places and under-eye circles so deep spelunkers could get lost in them. And yet here these women were, on a random Tuesday afternoon, ready to star in a yogurt commercial. They were so thin too, no signs of baby bellies remaining, even though none of these kids could have been much older than a year, if that. It was like the babies had lived within them for a while-raucous, all-consuming tenants-and then once they'd moved out, the bodies had been fully renovated (fresh-painted walls, resanded floors, new appliances) to hide any sign of wear and tear. Claire was the one who had almost been a rock star, and yet, comparing herself to these women, she felt unkempt and mundane.



Whitney scooped up a little pink-clad baby from the floor.



"This one's mine," she said, jiggling her in front of Claire. "Meet Hope." Whitney's baby wore golden slippers and what Claire hoped was a fake-fur shrug over her dress. God, even these babies were glamorous. How many hours of her life had Whitney spent jamming Hope's pudgy body into beautiful clothing that she'd soon outgrow?



"Hey, Hope," Claire said as Hope stared at the ceiling and popped her fist into her mouth. Whitney kissed the top of Hope's head before putting her back down.