She walks briskly down the city sidewalk, her blond hair bouncing against her shoulders, her cheeks flushed, a gym bag looped over her forearm. When she reaches her apartment building, her hand dips into her purse and pulls out her keys. The street is loud and busy, with yellow cabs racing by, commuters returning from work, and shoppers entering the deli on the corner. But my eyes never stray from her.
She pauses in her entryway and briefly glances back over her shoulder. An electrical charge seems to pulse through me. I wonder if she feels my stare. Gaze detection, it's called—our ability to sense when someone is observing us. An entire system of the human brain is devoted to this genetic inheritance from our ancestors, who relied on the trait to avoid becoming an animal's prey. I've cultivated this defense in myself, the sensation of static rising over my skin as my head in- stinctively lifts to search out a pair of eyes. I've learned the danger of dismissing that warning.
But she simply turns in the opposite direction, then opens her door and disappears inside, never looking my way.
She is oblivious to what I have done to her. She is unaware of the damage I have wrought; the ruin I have set in motion.
To this beautiful young woman with the heart-shaped face and lush body—the woman my husband, Richard, left me for—I'm as invisible as the pigeon scavenging on the sidewalk next to me.
She has no idea what will happen to her if she continues like this. None at all. CHAPTER ONE
NELLIE COULDN'T SAY what woke her. But when she opened her eyes, a woman wearing her white, lacy wedding gown stood by the foot of her bed, looking down at her.
Nellie's throat closed around a scream, and she lunged for the base- ball bat leaning against her nightstand. Then her vision adjusted to the grainy dawn light and the pounding of her heart softened.
She let out a tight laugh as she realized she was safe. The illusion was merely her wedding dress, ensconced in plastic, hanging on the back of her closet door, where she'd placed it yesterday after picking it up from the bridal shop. The bodice and full skirt were stuffed with crumpled tissue to maintain the shape. Nellie collapsed back onto her pillow. When her breathing steadied, she checked the blocky blue num- bers on her nightstand clock. Too early, again.
She stretched her arms overhead and reached with her left hand to turn off the alarm before it could blare, the diamond engagement ring Richard had given her feeling heavy and foreign on her finger.
Even as a child, Nellie had never been able to fall asleep easily. Her mother didn't have the patience for drawn-out bedtime rituals, but her father would gently rub her back, spelling out sentences over the fab- ric of her nightgown. I love you or You're super special, he'd write, and she would try to guess the message. Other times he'd trace patterns, circles, stars, and triangles—at least until her parents divorced and he moved out when she was nine. Then she'd lie alone in her twin bed under her pink-and-purple-striped comforter and stare at the water stain that marred her ceiling.
When she finally dozed off, she usually slept hard for a good seven or eight hours—so deeply and dreamlessly that her mother sometimes had to physically shake her to awaken her.
But following an October night in her senior year of college, that suddenly changed.