Page 143 of Boardroom Mask

And then I’m alone. More alone than I’ve been since my father carried my mother’s poisoned corpse out of our home for the last time.

I stand in the kitchen, staring at the sudsy puddle spreading on the floor from beneath the sponge. It reminds me of the blood seeping out of the hitter I killed to keep Jillian safe.

I almost can’t believe this is happening. She wrote it. She wrote the article. She looked me in the eye on the way home from Coney Island and said,Okay, I’ll kill it—and then she published it anyway.

I told her I loved her.

And she fucking stabbed me in the throat.

Did she love me back? She said the words; that much is certain. But people say all kinds of things when they’re naked and warm, being held by someone who would do terrible things on their behalf. So did she ever love me? Or was I just the story?

Every conversation replays at once. All her many questions. I thought she was curious because she cared, because she wanted to understand me.

But maybe she was just doing her job.

Maybe I was the source she was fucking and nothing more.

I look down at the thing that the maid threw at me on her way out. It’s an envelope. Small, aqua-colored, and slightly crumpled. The maid’s words come back to me—found this under the couch—and a dim memory surfaces through the rage: the night I flipped the marble coffee table and Jillian’s stolen mail went everywhere. I recovered all of it except one piece.

This piece.

The one with the handwritten return address from Montclair, New Jersey.

I’d set it aside that night because I wanted to savor it. Then the table tumbled over and the vodka shattered and the envelope disappeared and I forgot about it entirely, because everything after that night was Jillian, Jillian, Jillian.

My thumb runs along the sealed flap. I tear it open.

Inside is a single sheet of cream-colored stationery with a letterhead printed in navy blue:Briarwood FamilyServices, Montclair, NJ.Below the letterhead, a date from three and a half weeks ago, and then:

Dear Ms. Pierce,

We are writing to inform you that the adoptive family of your biological daughter (Case File #JRP-0619-A) has expressed interest in initiating contact. Per the terms of your original adoption agreement, this letter serves as formal notification that the adoptive parents have filed an Authorization to Share form with our office, consenting to the release of identifying information to the birth mother.

Should you wish to proceed with contact, please reach out to our family reunification coordinator, Liana Lynch, at the number below. There is no obligation and no timeline. This is entirely at your discretion.

With warmth and care,

Adriana Fleming

Director of Post-Placement Services

Briarwood Family Services

I read it so many times and yet it still doesn’t make sense. Until, like an optical illusion snapping into place, suddenly, itallmakes sense.

Jillian has a daughter.

Jillian has adaughter, and she gave her up for adoption, and she never told me.

That explains so much. The playground. Jillian standing at the chain-link fence in the cold, watching other people’s childrenuntil the park emptied and the streetlights came on. Crying. Dragging the back of her hand across her eyes and walking away alone.

The Coney Island gondola. The little girl in the red jacket with the balloon. The way Jillian’s entire body locked up when I said,You’d be a good mother.She turned away from me so fast and so completely that I thought I’d said something stupid without knowing what.

She had a child. She carried a child and delivered a child and handed that child to strangers and walked away and never said a single word about it.

As I stand there, dumbstruck, I feel our love has become like a little red balloon of its own. It’s out of my hands now, and out of hers, too. The difference is that shechosethat. She let it go. She opened up her fingers and it took off, flying higher and higher.

Going.