Here’s what she knew:
Sara Strong was born Sara Anne Schweitzer in Toms River, New Jersey, to an ear, nose, and throat doctor and a secretary who longed to be a Broadway star. While her dad saw patients, Sara’s mom, Pam, saw musicals, anything she could get tickets to, on and off Broadway. She’d sheath herself like Isadora Duncan, line her eyes with dark kohl, and take New Jersey Transit the ninety minutes to Manhattan, sometimes bringing Sara with her, even on school days.
When she was eleven Sara’s dad announced to their small family of three that he was in love with his receptionist, Kathy. Their courtship was swift and Kathy was pregnant with the first of four of Sara’s step-siblings within six months. It wasn’t hard for Ivy to track Sara Strong’s stepmom down. Kathy was an incredibly active Facebooker who updated her personal page several times a day with inspirational quotes from her idols—Angelina Jolie and Elizabeth Gilbert—and mimosa ice pop recipes. She’d gotten back to Ivy within minutes of her sending a message. According to Kathy, Mr. Schweitzer tried to stay close with his daughter, having her stay with them on weekends, but the girl was wildly protective of her mom, and sometimes it was hard to convince her to leave Pam alone in the house.
With her husband out of the picture, Pam got fat. Fat like you saw on late-night television shows, the ones where people could no longer fit through their front doors. Within two years Pam could no longer walk up the stairs to the bedroom she used to share with her husband and took to sleeping in the small room off the kitchen that allowed her nightly access to the refrigerator. Kathy knew this from the times they’d gone to pick Sara up from the house.
Sara tried everything to help her mom lose weight. She’d cook elaborate healthy meals that went uneaten in favor of pizza and fried chicken delivery. She enrolled both of them in Weight Watchers but found herself at the meetings and weigh-ins alone. She bought the Richard Simmons Sweatin’ to the Oldies videocassettes, but she was the only one who ever broke a sweat in their living room.
Sara eventually went to Rutgers University for an accelerated program that gave her a bachelor’s degree and an MBA in five years, which she then used to move across the Hudson River and into a job working for Lehman Brothers, first as an analyst, then an associate, and finally as a vice president.
Ivy had been able to track down four former Lehman employees who were more than happy to spill about that period of Sara’s life. Lehman Brothers was where Sara met Jian. Chinese-born and brilliant, the Harvard MBA was three years her junior but mature beyond his years. Jian’s family was practically royalty in Hong Kong, and they were desperate for him to return home and start running his father’s electronics empire, but he was having way too much fun enjoying all the pleasures New York had to offer a young, handsome, and disgustingly rich businessman.
Every woman in their office was wildly attracted to his intense self-confidence and the fact that he didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought about him. Sara was his boss and used it to her full advantage, often keeping him late at the office when she knew he had plans with other women. She always scheduled their business trips together. The two of them both escaped Lehman before the collapse, moving over to even better jobs at Morgan Stanley. Finally, one drunken night during a work trip to Detroit, of all places, after several rounds of tequila shots with their clients and a visit to the saddest strip club in the world, the two made it official. They were a couple.
Friends of Jian’s said that he was smitten with her American-ness and her New Jersey accent, which she turned on high for him when she talked about growing up down the shore, eating fried dough and saltwater taffy.
When Pam died of liver disease, caused by her morbid obesity, Sara brought Jian home to the funeral. It was a closed-casket service.
Jian hadn’t told his own mother and father he was dating an American girl. They were hell-bent on him coming home to marry a Chinese socialite, someone with proper breeding. One friend recalled the words “proper breeding” actually coming out of Jian’s mouth.
The pair had a fight right in the office, in front of everyone.
The next part was hazy, but what Ivy was able to gather was that Sara was pregnant. Or at least she told Jian she was pregnant. At least one former friend was willing to admit that she didn’t think Sara was pregnant at all. But she did tell Jian that she would have the baby on her own, which forced him to propose to her. His parents disinherited him for lying to them. She had a “miscarriage” two months later.
After that the two of them were as happy as a couple whose marriage was constructed on a foundation of lies could be. Jian grew fascinated with the tech industry and began a fund based on placing risky bets in the start-up market. They had huge success early on with the sharing economy, Uber and Airbnb, but as the market began to correct the way it valued its tech unicorns, Jian’s returns shrank, and soon he was taking money from investors and depositing it into his own accounts.
By then Sara was happily settled into their eight-bedroom home in Stamford, Connecticut. Friends said that it took her six rounds of IVF before she announced another pregnancy. The day after she told her friends that she was going to be a mom was the day the Feds burst through the door of their house and dragged her husband off to jail.
Sara gained a lot of weight during that pregnancy.
“A lot,” one Connecticut neighbor told Ivy. “Like maybe a hundred pounds. She was probably the fattest person in the whole neighborhood. We used to see her sitting in the parking lot of Burger King eating like three Whoppers. It was sad.” Sara sold their house at a loss and barely covered their debts and moved back in with her dad and Kathy in New Jersey until she gave birth.
According to Kathy this was around the time that Sara made a new friend, Stella Bard. The pair met in a coffee shop in Manhattan while Sara was meeting with Jian’s lawyers.
“I think she was a witch,” Kathy said.
“A shaman?” Ivy had asked.
“Yeah, that’s the word she used. Isn’t that a witch? I know I saw a shaman on Game of Thrones.”