He already knew that she didn’t like air-conditioning or oaky chardonnay or anything in the realm of S&M, because she’d told him. He also knew what she did like, what sequence, what positions; she’d told him those things too. The only point of disagreement was the air-conditioning.
Ariel had never really believed in the best-sex-of-your-life superlative. She’d never had that experience. Some sex had been memorable, some not, some of it was downright awful. But sex had never been transcendent. Until that Sunday night in Lisbon.
*
John takes out a small envelope, and shows her the contents: two brass keys and a business card from a bank branch on the rue du Rh?ne in Geneva, with a box number stamped on the back.
“No.” Ariel shakes her head. “I told you that I don’t want any of the money.”
For her, the whole thing wasn’t about the money. This was a battle in the war; survival was Ariel’s first priority, and victory second. But profit would feel like profiteering, getting rich off war. So they’d agreed from the get-go that all the money would be Lucy’s.
Ariel was about to come into another windfall with the sale of the bookshop to the Brooklyn hipster, another woman transplanting out to the country to start a new life with her conceptual-artist husband and seven-year-old son whose hair appears to have never been cut. She’d probably be thrilled to buy the goat as well.
“This is just a little something. In case of an emergency.”
“An emergency? One that I find myself in while visiting Switzerland?”
John smiles. “You never know.”
The sun has just dropped below the horizon somewhere over Italy. Another spectacular view that they’re facing.
“Listen,” she says, gathering her strength. “About that night in Lisbon.”
This is something she has learned: the importance of being clear, and unequivocal. Not just about what she doesn’t want, but also about what she does. That’s important too.
“Yes?” John looks at her with that glint in his eyes, that smile across his lips. He knows that this is her choice, and he can tell from her smile what she has chosen.
Anger and rejection had only gotten her so far, saying no to this and no to that, hating this one and that one, lumping all men together in a giant heap of no, along with her discarded hair and tight jeans, until her epiphany, her vision of a different path not only to her own life but also to holding a powerful man to account in a way that can’t be achieved by waving around proof of suffering, by telling a story to only those who want to hear it—a story that could always be subject to dismissal, to dispute, to derision for one reason or another, to counteraccusations of bias, of agenda, of politics, of purely personal animus—and instead she saw a clear path to using this man’s very wealth and power as weapons against him, to use his own demands to reveal the depths of his depravity, to use her lifetime of being disbelieved as a tool, inducing other people to pursue her story from the outside, to make her story credible precisely because she was not the one shouting it loudly into an echo chamber, but because a fact is a fact, and there’s no such thing as an alternative.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As I type this in late 2021, I’m in my thirty-second year of working in publishing. I’ve been a marketing temp and editorial assistant, copy editor and managing editor, senior editor and executive editor and associate publisher, ghostwriter and, most recently, novelist. During twenty-seven of those thirty-two years, I worked in wildly divergent capacities for the same company. Book publishing is like a small town, and the place that’s now called Penguin Random House is where I grew up, filled with people I’ve known for decades, at Triple Sixes and 201 East 50th Street, at 1540 and 1745, in conference rooms and the cafetorium, dive bars and book parties, Langan’s and Ashton’s, working on TI sheets and pre-pre-sales and endless revisions of uncountable P&Ls.
Sooner or later, almost everyone leaves the house where they grew up, and for this book I finally decamped PRH and moved to FSG, where I’m grateful to find a few familiar faces, and excited to meet the new ones. That’s the trade-off of moving out: sacrificing the security of home for the thrill of adventure.
Daphne Durham was the editor who extended the invitation to come live at this new house, and I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to the family at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Editing a book, like parenting, is a complex endeavor that encompasses many different, seemingly unrelated activities, and Daphne is good at all of them. Thanks too to Gretchen Achilles for the beautiful interior design, Alex Merto for the sensational cover, Musa Gurnis for the final critical read, Chandra Wohleber for the copyediting, Janet Renard and Elizabeth Schraft for the proofreading, Lydia Zoells for everything every day, and January LaVoy for taking on the challenge of narrating the audiobook.
Also at FSG and Macmillan, thanks to Mitzi Angel, Madeline Day, Daniel Del Valle, Nina Frieman, Jonathan Galassi, Brian Gittis, Jennifer Gonzalez, Debra Helfand, Sean McDonald, Caitlin O’Beirne, Guy Oldfield, Shelia O’Shea, Brianna Panzica, Hillary Tisman, Claire Tobin, Don Weisberg, and Amber Williams.
When I was a kid at Doubleday in the early nineties, the editor in chief of the house seemed like a parent (sort of), and that’s still how I’ve thought of David Gernert for the decade that he’s been my agent. David patiently worked through every one of this manuscript’s many revisions, humored me through innumerable sessions of overthinking everything, then he went out there to find the book a new home, and held my hand throughout the move.
Tremendous thanks to the other people who read the early drafts of this book: Lily Burnes-Heath, Hannah Griffiths, Katie Lundstrom, Paula McLain, Sarah McNally, Jennifer Wallace, and Anna Worrall, who were extremely generous to provide insightful and invaluable feedback that’s reflected on every page. This book would not exist without everything you taught me.
And finally, thanks as ever to my wife, Madeline McIntosh, who has been with me in this same small town for a quarter-century.
I’m immensely grateful to all of you.
A Note About the Author
Chris Pavone is the author of The Paris Diversion, The Travelers, The Accident, and The Expats. His novels have appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal; have won both the Edgar and Anthony awards; are in development for film and television; and have been translated into two dozen languages. Chris grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from Cornell, and worked as a book editor for nearly two decades. He lives in New York City and on the North Fork of Long Island with his family.
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