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She was watching the shimmer of lights on the surface of the pool. When she looked up, one of the caterers was watching her, a young woman who was straightening deck chairs. Vincent looked away quickly. She had studied the habits of the monied with diligence. She copied their modes of dress and spe…

When everyone was gone, the lawn seemed enormous, a twilight landscape of round tables with flickering candles on wine-stained tablecloths, plastic cups glimmering in the trampled grass. “You’re so poised,” Jonathan said. They were sitting by the pool with their feet in the water, while the caterer…

(Had Vincent succeeded? She felt that by any rational measure she was living an extraordinary life, but on the other hand she wasn’t sure what the goal had been. Later she stood alone on the terrace, filming the Mediterranean, and thought, Maybe this could be enough. Maybe not everyone needs to hav…

She left the boutique with the gloves in her handbag and found her thoughts drifting a little as she walked. Her life in those days was so disorienting that she often found herself thinking about variations on reality, different permutations of events: an alternate reality where she’d quit working …

What Vincent’s mother probably wouldn’t have imagined: a life—an arrangement—in which Vincent wore a wedding ring but was not actually married. “I want you close,” Jonathan said, at the beginning, “but I just don’t want to get married again.” His wife, Suzanne, had died only three years earlier. Th…