CALLIOPE BROWN LEANED her palms on the cast-iron railing, looking down at the street seventy stories below.
“Oh, Nadav!” her mom, Elise, exclaimed behind her. “You were right. This is absolutely perfect for the wedding reception.”
They were standing on the outdoor terrace of the Museum of Natural History: a real exposed terrace, its doors thrown open to the syrupy golden air of September. The sky gleamed with the polished brilliance of enamel. This was one of the very last floors where you could actually step outside. Any higher and the terraces were no longer real terraces, just rooms with a nice view, enclosed in polyethylene glass.
Calliope’s soon-to-be stepsister, Nadav’s daughter, Livya, gave a little ooh of approval from where she stood near the doors. Calliope didn’t bother turning around. She was getting pretty tired of Livya, though she did her utmost to hide the feeling.
She and Livya were never going to be friends. Livya was an insufferable rule follower, the type of girl who still sent embossed thank-you notes and gave a shrill fake laugh whenever one of their teachers told a lame joke. Worse, there was something unavoidably sly and beady-eyed about her. Calliope had the sense that if you whispered secrets behind a closed door, Livya would be the one with her ear pressed hungrily to the keyhole.
She heard Nadav say something indistinguishable behind her, probably another quiet I love you to Elise. Poor Nadav. He really had no idea what he’d gotten into when he proposed to Calliope’s mom at the Fullers’ Dubai launch party. He couldn’t know that Elise was a professional at getting engaged, that his was the fourteenth proposal she’d received in the past few years.
When Calliope was a child, living in London, her mother had worked as a personal assistant to a cold, wealthy woman named Mrs. Houghton, who claimed to be descended from the aristocracy. Whether or not that was even true—which Calliope doubted—it certainly didn’t give Mrs. Houghton the right to abuse Calliope’s mom the way she did. Eventually the situation reached a breaking point, and Calliope and Elise ran away from London. Calliope was only eleven.
They had embarked upon a life of glamorous nomadism: jetting around the world, using their wits and beauty to, as Elise liked to phrase it, relieve wealthy people of their excess wealth. One of their many strategies for doing so was a proposal. Elise would trap someone into loving her, get engaged, then take the ring and run before the wedding. But it wasn’t just fake engagements; over the years, Elise and her daughter had fabricated all types of stories, from long-lost relatives to investment scams, tales of tears and passion—whatever it took to make people dip into their bitbanc accounts. The moment they had separated the mark from his or her money, Calliope and Elise would disappear.
It wasn’t easy slipping off the grid like that, not in this day and age. But they were very, very good at it. Calliope had been caught only once, and she still didn’t know how it had happened.
It was the night of the Dubai party, just after Nadav and Elise had gotten engaged—after Elise had turned to Calliope and offered to stay in New York for real. To actually go through with the wedding and live here, instead of taking the first train away. Calliope’s blood pounded in excitement at the prospect. She had been feeling a strange urge lately to settle down, to live a real life, and New York seemed like the perfect place to do it.
Then Avery Fuller had confronted her.
“I know the truth about you and your mom. So now you’re both going to get the hell out of New York,” Avery had threatened, unbearably icy and distant. Calliope knew then that she had to back down. She didn’t have a choice.
Until a few hours later, when she saw Avery and Atlas kissing, and realized she had something on Avery that was just as treacherous as what Avery had on her.
She’d confronted Avery about it back in New York. “I’m not going anywhere,” she’d declared. “And if you tell anyone what you know about me, I’ll tell what I know about you. You can take me down, but you’d better believe you’re going down with me.” Avery had just looked at Calliope with weary red-rimmed eyes, as if she weren’t even seeing her: as if Calliope were as insubstantial as a ghost.
Calliope hadn’t realized back then what she was signing on for, staying in New York and playing out this con. She should have paid more attention to her mom’s narrative. Elise always tailored their backstory for whomever she was trying to target—and for intense, soft-spoken Nadav, the quiet cybernetics engineer, Elise had gone all out. She presented herself and Calliope as a pair of sweet, serious, bleeding-heart philanthropists who had traveled the world for years, volunteering for various causes.
Calliope got to stay in New York and live a stable, “normal” life for the first time in years. But it came with a tremendous price tag: She couldn’t be herself.
Although, was anyone really themselves in New York? Wasn’t this the city full of people from nowhere, people who remade themselves the moment they arrived? Calliope glanced down at the twin rivers, flowing around Manhattan like the cold River Lethe—as if the moment you crossed them, your entire past became irrelevant, and you were reborn as someone new.
That was what she loved about New York. That feeling of utter aliveness, a rush and flow of ruthless, furious energy. That New York belief that this was the center of the world, and god help you if you were anywhere else.
She glanced in resignation at her costume—she refused to think of it as her outfit, because it was nothing she would have chosen for herself—a tailored knee-length dress and low kitten heels. Her rich brown hair was pulled into a low ponytail, showing off a pair of modest aquamarine earrings. The whole thing was ladylike and elegant, and excruciatingly dull.
She had tried at first to push the limits of Nadav’s tolerance. After all, he was engaged to her mom, not to Calliope. Why should he care if she wore tight dresses and stayed out late? He’d seen her at the Under the Sea ball and the Dubai party. Surely he knew that Elise’s daughter wasn’t as well-behaved as Elise was—or rather, as she was pretending to be.
Yet Nadav had quickly made it clear that he expected Calliope to follow the same rules as Livya. Everything about him was direct and uncompromising. He seemed to view the entire world like a computer problem, in stark black and white. Unlike Calliope and her mom, who operated in shades of gray.
For months, Calliope had thrown herself headfirst into this part. She’d kept her head down, actually studied at school, obeyed curfew. But it had been a long time, much longer than she’d ever kept up any con, and Calliope was starting to chafe beneath her constraints. She felt as if she were losing herself in this never-ending performance—drowning in it, even.
She leaned her elbows onto the railing. The wind teased at her hair, tugged at the fabric of her dress. A shard of doubt had wiggled into her mind, and she couldn’t seem to dislodge it. Was staying in New York truly worth all this?
The sun had lowered in the distance, a furious golden blaze above the dragon-back skyline of Jersey. But the city showed no signs of slowing down. Autocars moved in coordinated strands along the West Side Highway. Motes of the setting sun danced over the Hudson, glazing it a fine warm bronze. Down in the river, an old ship had been repurposed into a bar, where New Yorkers stubbornly clutched their beers as the waves buffeted them. Calliope had a sudden, fervent urge to be down there among them, caught up in the laughter and the rocking of the boat—instead of standing up here like a quiet, breathing statue.
“I was thinking the guests could do cocktail hour out here, while we’re finishing our photos,” Nadav was saying. The corners of his mouth almost, but not quite, turned up in a smile.
Elise clapped her hands girlishly. “I love it!” she exclaimed. “Of course, it won’t work if we end up with a rain day, but—”
“I’ve already filed our weather request with the Metropolitan Weather Bureau,” Nadav cut in eagerly. “It should be a perfect evening, just like this one.” He threw his arm out as if offering the sunset as a present, which Calliope supposed was exactly what he was doing.
She should have known that you could purchase good weather on your wedding day, she thought wryly. Everything in New York was for sale, in the end.
Elise held up a hand in protest. “You shouldn’t have! I can’t imagine how much that must have cost—you have to cancel it and donate that money instead. . . .”
“Absolutely not,” Nadav countered, leaning in to kiss Calliope’s mom. “For once, everything is going to be about you.”
Calliope just barely refrained from rolling her eyes. As if everything wasn’t always about Elise and what she wanted. Nadav had no idea that he was falling for one of the world’s most basic manipulation tricks: reverse psychology. With certain people, the more you begged them not to spend money on you, the more determined they became to do exactly that.
The museum’s event planner ducked out onto the terrace to inform them that the appetizer tasting was ready. As they began to file through the doors, Calliope cast a lingering look over her shoulder, at the great wide expanse of sky. Then she turned to walk with dutiful, mechanical steps back inside.