Alessandra shrugs. “I’ve always thought of mosaic as this big metaphor for my life,” she says. “All these jagged, incongruous pieces…” She holds up a small shard of milky jade-green glass. “These are like the things that happen to you. But if it’s laid out a certain way and if you take a step back from it, it makes sense.”
Edie thinks about her own life: growing up the beloved child of two wonderful parents on an island where she felt safe and nurtured and championed, where she was such a success academically that she was accepted to an Ivy League college. Cornell was its own dreamscape. Edie loved the hotel school, her classes, her professors, the guest lecturers from New York City and Zurich and Singapore, and the natural beauty surrounding the campus. There was nowhere prettier than Cascadilla Gorge in the autumn.
But then, in January of her junior year, Edie returned from her facilities-management lecture to find Love and the dean of students sitting together on the bench in front of her dorm. When they saw Edie approaching, they both stood up, and Edie nearly turned and ran. She knew her mother hated to drive on the mainland, especially in winter—Edie’s father was the one who always brought her back and forth; he had dropped her off just a few weeks earlier. Love never would have made the seven-hour trip from Hyannis to Ithaca under anything but urgent circumstances. There was also an unfamiliar expression on Love’s face: a mixture of grief and dread. Edie dropped her backpack on the path and raced into her mother’s arms, knowing before Love even said the words that her father was dead.
Edie took ten days off from school, and when she returned, she had acquired the questionable mystique and celebrity of someone who had undergone a tragic loss. Students whom Edie knew only tangentially, including Graydon Spires, the most popular and successful student in the hotel school, offered condolences. Everyone talked about Graydon’s poise, his charm, his silver tongue, his social savvy. Edie’s best friend, Charisse, once remarked, “It’s almost freakish the way he always says the right thing.” And not only did he say the right thing, Edie learned as she got to know him, he also always struck the right emotional note. He wasn’t a conversational skater, he didn’t speak simply to fill silence, he didn’t do small talk. He listened and responded in a genuine and intelligent way. When he turned his light on Edie—asking her out for a midnight snack of burgers and coffee at Jack’s (“I’m guessing you’re not sleeping much these days”)—she fell in love.
They grew close very quickly. (“Too quickly,” Charisse said. She was offended by Edie’s sudden abandonment—within days of the date at Jack’s, Edie was always with Graydon.) When junior year ended, they both accepted summer jobs at Castle Hill in Newport, Rhode Island. They worked at the hotel’s front desk and found they were dynamic together. The atmosphere in the lobby all summer was electrifying; the air crackled with the barely sublimated sexual and romantic energy between Edie and Graydon. They tried to outdo each other in customer service in a good-natured way, and the guests (and management) ate it up. They scheduled Wednesdays off together, when they did all the Newport-y things: went to Annie’s for lunch, hung out on Thames Street, did the Cliff Walk, sailed on the hotel’s Sunfish, biked around Fort Adams. Edie couldn’t believe how Graydon had appeared just when she needed him most. She imagined the life they would have after they graduated—they would work together in hotels in Alaska, Australia, the Azores. They would climb their way up the corporate ladder at a major hotel chain—or they would start their own hotel chain. They would get married and have babies.
When they returned to Ithaca for their senior year, Edie was tapped to be the student director of the Statler Hotel—a very, very big deal. When Edie told Graydon, she expected him to pick her up and swing her around like it was the end of the war in a movie; she thought he’d take a selfie with her and post it on his Instagram with the caption #girlboss. But right away, she could see…he was jealous and resentful.
It was right after this that Graydon started asking for things in bed, things Edie wasn’t entirely comfortable with—and eventually was mortified by—but she consented because she felt she had to apologize for her success. Graydon recorded everything they did—he told her that made it “way hotter”—and Edie, who wanted only to please him, did what he wanted and recited her lines.
As Edie stands before Alessandra and her half-finished mosaic, she gets a text from Graydon. It’s a picture of a box of Pocky, the long chocolate-covered cookie sticks from Japan, and Edie feels a wave of nausea roll over her. She rushes into the one-person bathroom and can’t decide whether to cry or throw up. She does a weird hybrid of both, desperately hoping that Alessandra will be gone when she emerges. Please, Edie thinks, pack up your mosaic and leave. The mosaic of Edie’s life would be cute around the edges—bits of rose-colored glass and hand-painted bone china—but in the middle would be a chunk of tarry asphalt, black and oozing.
When Edie steps out, Alessandra hands her a bowl of vanilla soft-serve ice cream topped with M&M’s, which is Edie’s go-to snack. Edie didn’t realize Alessandra even knew her go-to.
“Sit,” Alessandra says. “Tell me what’s wrong. I want to help.”
For two months, Edie and Alessandra have worked side by side, and Alessandra has only been a hostile nation, the Axis to Edie’s Allies. Alessandra’s unyielding coldness has caused Edie hours of anxiety and, she’s not afraid to say it, a little heartache. It’s not fair for Alessandra to be nice now, when Edie has finally grown immune to her being not nice.
But Edie wants to tell someone, and who else does she have? She no longer speaks to Charisse (thanks to Graydon), she can’t tell her mother, she couldn’t possibly confide in Lizbet, and she can’t tell Zeke.
Edie picks up the spoon just so she’ll have something to do with her hands. “My ex-boyfriend is blackmailing me with videos I let him take of us when we were still together,” Edie says. “He sent me a Venmo request for a thousand dollars and told me if I don’t pay him, he’ll send the videos to my prospective employers. Before that, he threatened to send them to my mother.”
Alessandra nods ever so slightly. “Ah.” She doesn’t seem shocked or appalled—but then, she hasn’t seen the videos. She hasn’t heard the things Edie said into the camera; she hasn’t watched the acts. No one can see those things, Edie thinks. No one! She has to pay him the thousand dollars, even though that’s forty hours of work. “I have to pay him.”
Alessandra scoffs. “You do not have to pay him. You realize that posting revenge porn is a crime, right? A class-four felony? You can call the police.”
Edie thinks about calling the Nantucket Police and speaking to Chief Kapenash. There is no way. And that’s why women don’t turn in their abusers, she thinks. It’s humiliating—and the possibility of victim-shaming is very real.
“I can’t call the police,” Edie whispers. “He’s out in Arizona.”
“Phoenix?”
“Marana,” Edie says.
Alessandra’s eyebrows shoot up. “He works at Dove Mountain? I know the property. I’m sure the GM there would find his behavior very problematic.”
“I don’t want to…I’m not going to call his GM.”
“He’s threatening to post videos without your consent, is that right?”
Edie nods.
“And he’s blackmailing you. How much money have you sent him so far?”
Edie bows her head.
“Edie?”
“Fifteen hundred,” she says.
“What?” Alessandra jumps to her feet. “We’re getting that money back. Just give me his phone number and let me take care of it.”
“I can’t,” Edie says.
“Edie,” Alessandra says. “I’m going to scare the hell out of him. I’m going to pretend to be someone else. Now, I know I’ve given you no reason to trust me. But surely you have faith that I can be a convincing bitch on the phone and I can get this guy…what’s his name?”
“Graydon Spires.”