Chapter 1 1
NOTHING interesting ever happens in January, which is why January makes sense for killing. I can’t remember now who came up with that haunting sentiment—most likely it was Wesley, whom I can still picture teetering barefoot on the back of the threadbare sofa in our fifth-floor common room, practicing her Latin oration with such campy enthusiasm we would be rolling on the floor—but memory’s funny that way. The line between what’s real and what we want to be real becomes more porous with age. The truth is that any of us could’ve said it—that was how my college roommates Allie, Bee, Dina, Wesley, Claudine, and I saw the world back then, when January in Cambridge was cold and dead, two weeks of reading period and long days spent pretending not to care that our worth was so easily summed up in a handful of letter grades.

I always assumed the eccentric Harvard tradition we carried with us after graduation would peter out in the years that followed, a casualty of frenetic schedules, geography, or common sense. None of us imagined we’d drag it with us for two decades, across states and countries, through marriages, births, and deaths—especially when we grew into jobs, families, and reputations that couldn’t be put on hold for a game. But it makes a certain sense now. We made a pact on the eve of graduation to live unconditionally, and the Circus, as we affectionately called it, was how we made good on that promise. It made us feel powerful in ways our everyday lives didn’t. It was a secret that reminded us of who we were and the history we shared. And it was the tether that helped us find our way back to one another year after year, when the rough seas of circumstance might have otherwise scattered us apart.

In the three years since that last round of the Circus, I’ve come to view life as a series of tiny, seemingly unimportant decisions. The catch is that you never really know, even in hindsight, which ones matter in the end. Don’t get me wrong—I still beat myself up over the choices we made and rummage through memories of that time in a desperate search for a single fatal decision. On sunnier days, I think it could’ve been greed or just bad luck that sank us. But I suspect our fundamental misstep was simple: we were told at an early age we were special, and somewhere along the way we began to believe it.

The place to start, I suppose, is the night of Fabby’s gallery opening, which was the first indication that something was very wrong. It was a week before Christmas and I was intent on arriving early as a show of gratitude to Fabby, an older photographer who had been good to me. She had thrown me part-time work as one of her assistants and insisted I keep shooting, even though my photo series on women in invisible jobs was going nowhere. I was always grateful to have Coulter by my side at these arty parties, as he called them—he was a clever conversationalist, equally at ease with celebrities and art history students—but he still hadn’t come home and wasn’t answering my texts when we were due to leave. He was inundated at work after his front-of-house manager quit three weeks before; the stress had driven him to smoking again. But his prolonged funk was understandable, really. Neither of us imagined he would take over his family’s restaurant when his uncle passed or that his detour from travel writing would stretch into a six-year odyssey.

Thirty minutes later, I found myself clopping down Tenth Ave-nue in too-tall heels, a cold drizzle undoing my hasty blow-dry. I had just turned onto the side street where the gallery lived when I welled up with dread at the prospect of facing a den of art-world insiders alone.

Under the thin protection of a restaurant awning, I yanked off my gloves to text my college roommate Dina, imploring her to save me. She taught at Harvard four days a week and spent her weekends in Manhattan. I figured she would be riding the train back to the city after wrapping up her classes for the week, and the promise of free champagne wouldn’t hurt. I was about to slip my phone back in my hip pocket when a cab shot out of nowhere, honking obnoxiously at a man crossing diagonally up ahead.

That’s when I saw her.

A woman stood beneath the steel-pipe scaffolding across the street. Her figure was slight, her gray belted coat almost baggy. Blond hair tumbled past her shoulders. I sensed a skittishness—like a doe that would dart away the second I moved—but there was something familiar in the way she was standing. The hand in her pocket, the sharp bend at her elbow, the dropped hip. She was staring at me like she knew me.

I stood perfectly still. As a photographer in a city where the wildlife is temperamental, I had my phone ready, but I managed only one shot before she bolted toward Tenth, leaving me dumbfounded on the sidewalk.

When my fog dissipated, I zoomed in on the hazy image.

It was Claudine, the roommate who shattered our lives all those years ago.

The light in her eyes was undimmed by the years that had faded the rest of us. Incredibly, she looked the same as she had the day I first met her in the freshman dining hall. Tiny—barely size two, which made her easy to underestimate—but one of the most remarkable people I’d ever known. A free spirit, an artist, and a romantic for whom ancient Greek legends were as real as whatever was on the news that day. The perfect foil for the rest of us, who were too concerned with where we were headed and how fast we could get there. How many times would we be walking somewhere, only to discover Claudine had disappeared? We’d turn back to find her crouching down, entranced by a daffodil or a chubby-cheeked squirrel, or craning up to take in a night sky crammed with stars, and all we could do was stop and marvel beside her.

She still haunted my dreams, a queen parading around the Winthrop House courtyard on the shoulders of two senior boys, her flaxen hair glinting in the winter sun and her face lit up with a beatific smile.

I should’ve been thrilled to see her, but the sight of Claudine that night on the street was both electrifying and unnerving. My imagination had to be acting up; the stress of my uncertain livelihood and the strain of a mortgage Coulter and I could barely cover were catching up with me. Or perhaps it was the guilt that still plagued me over what happened all those years ago.

I remember thinking of the Fitzgerald quote Dina liked to throw around: the test of intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your head and still function, or something like that, but the thought only added to my alarm. The woman I had seen was my college roommate Claudine. I was sure of it. And yet that was impossible because I also knew with absolute certainty—for I was with her on that terrible day twenty-three years ago—that Claudine was dead.