There it was. First, a column in the Post about how I’d missed the funeral. Then, three days later, the story I knew someone would find eventually. It was in the Daily News, illustrated with my mug shot, from when I was twenty-three, and another picture of me as a teenager, at a party, in a Flashdance-style sweatshirt, ripped at the shoulder. “Runaway Bride Was Bigamist.”

“Here we go,” I muttered, and clicked on the link. India Bishop, the new wife-turned-widow of recently deceased financier Marcus Croft, who raised eyebrows across the city after she was a no-show at her husband’s funeral on Friday, changed her name when she moved to Hollywood as a teenager. No surprise: it’s a move many young aspiring actresses make. But when Bishop filled out the paperwork that would legally turn her from Samantha Marie Stavros to India Bishop, she never mentioned that she’d been married as a teenager, and that she’d never obtained a divorce. Bishop, 43 (not the 38 she’s been claiming), a public-relations executive, was wed in 1985 to David Carter, a substitute drama teacher at New London High School in New London, Connecticut, who was more than fifteen years’ Bishop’s senior at the time. “It was a major scandal,” said Andrea LeBlanc, a classmate of Bishop’s. “We all figured she was pregnant, but, if she was, she wasn’t showing by graduation. . and, by August, she was gone.”

Bishop left New London and moved to Hollywood, where she worked odd jobs and was eventually arrested in a round-up of women who were working as waitresses at a party and charged with prostitution (she was eventually released, and the charges were dropped). Two years later, she was hired at JMS Public Relations under her new name.

I gripped the edges of the table, my stomach clenching, thinking that if there was any consolation to be found, it was that Marcus had died before he’d found out the truth — that I’d filed papers, but David, it seemed, had never signed them and, even decades after the fact, I had still been married to David Carter when Marcus and I had said our vows. I forced my eyes back to the screen, scanning to the bottom to read the story’s final line. Reached in his New London home, David Carter declined to comment.

I bent my head, imagining the story being zapped around the city, landing with a cheery little chirp in the inboxes of everyone I knew. I pictured Bettina’s smirk. Then I forced myself to look at my inbox. There were dozens of e-mails from Annie — the last one, under “subject,” read PLEASE CALL ME! I’M WORRIED! Another few dozen from Leslie at the clinic, saying basically the same thing. Bettina had written: Where Are You? More spam, more reporters; a note from my saleslady at Saks, who, apparently unaware of the changes in my life, wrote to say that the new Jimmy Choo open-toed leather lace-up booties had arrived and were available in dark brown and black, and she would hold a pair in both colors until she heard from me. Finally there was one more e-mail from Bettina. Nothing in the subject line, just a picture of a baby with dark eyes and a jaunty pink beret over her head. “It’s a girl,” she’d written. Nothing more.

I logged out, picked up my bag, and walked into the sunshine. Hey, lady, hey, lady, the men on the square crooned. Back at my casita, I shucked off my swimsuit and stood under the water from the outdoor shower until it went from tepid to cold. I didn’t bother drying off. I lay naked underneath the single sheet, with mosquitoes whining against the netting, until the sun went down, and slept until almost noon the next day. . and when I woke up, I knew where to go, and what to do when I got there.


BETTINA

By July, things had calmed down enough that I felt able to leave the apartment for a while. Annie was staying two days and one night each week, Tia was on duty every night Monday through Friday, and Jules, who I thought I’d never see again after our uncomfortable introduction, had surprised me by calling the week after we’d met and volunteering to babysit. “I don’t know much about kids,” she said, looking as terrified as I must have been the first time I gave her Rory to hold.

“It’s not hard,” I’d said. She’d handled the baby like she was made of glass, exclaiming over her every sigh and coo. The first Sunday I’d stayed with her. The second time I’d left her with bottles of breast milk and my cell-phone number and gotten on the subway to spend an evening with Darren for the first time since Rory’s arrival. Unbeknownst to him, I had an agenda: I wanted to get drunk, and then, as my old roommate would have put it, I wanted to get laid. I wanted to behave like a regular twenty-four-year-old, a woman with no vision past her own eyelashes, no plans beyond the next day, and no responsibilities beyond her own job.

Darren lived in Chelsea, in a building with an elevator but no doorman and disconcertingly narrow hallways. His apartment had, as I could have predicted, a flat-screen TV as its main piece of furniture, but other than that, it was surprisingly un-repulsive. There was an indigo-and-orange vintage poster for Orangina on the kitchen wall and a big leather couch in the living/dining room. There was no space for a kitchen table, but Darren had lined up three wood-and-metal stools in front of the narrow breakfast bar. When I arrived, he was unpacking a bag full of Chinese take-out boxes. There was fried rice and egg rolls, chicken lo mein and spicy prawns. I filled my plate, and we sat together on the couch.

“So?” asked Darren. “How’s motherhood?” He was barefoot in his chinos, wearing a T-shirt advertising some band I’d never heard of, and his horrible glasses. He needed a haircut. . but, to me, he’d never looked cuter.

“It’s interesting,” I said carefully. I understood the problem, the situation I was in. When Darren and I had started spending time together, I was single and unencumbered. Now I had a baby. The fact that the baby was not technically mine did not, in the end, matter much. I was a woman with a child, and that did not make me more desirable than I’d been when we’d met.

“Any word from India?” he asked.

I shook my head. The truth was, I wasn’t looking for my disappearing stepmother too hard. With Annie and Jules and Tia in and out of the apartment, with the baby doing baby-like things that are probably boring to everyone in the world except for the people to whom the baby belongs—She smiled! She almost rolled over! She’s holding up her head! — I felt interested, engaged, needed in a way I didn’t think I’d never been needed in my life, and if, sometimes, I was so tired it was all I could do to keep from dozing off in the tub, if I missed my colleagues at Kohler’s, if I missed my freedom, it seemed a reasonable trade-off for a life I liked much better than the one I’d had. I had a tribe, a crew, friends in Annie and Tia and Jules. The baby, too, had grown on me. I’d even started posting cute pictures on my Facebook page.

“So what do you think will happen?” Darren asked.

“I don’t know.” In truth, I thought that what would happen had happened already: Rory had been born, I’d brought her home, and now I would raise her. But, for Darren’s sake, I was willing to play along with the idea that things could still change. “I could put her up for adoption. I could sell her on eBay. Billionaire’s baby. I bet I could get a nice price.”

“I don’t think,” Darren said, “that eBay’s allowed to traffic in actual people.”

I looked at him hopefully. “Craigslist?”

He shook his head. I pushed a single sesame noodle around the edge of my plate, where it had already completed half a dozen laps, like it was training for a noodle marathon. Since my father’s death, I’d lost eleven pounds. I was a grown-up, I told myself to shake off the memories of my dad. I was a grown woman with a college degree and a job I could return to, a baby I was caring for, maybe even a boyfriend, and so what if my life wasn’t perfect? Whose life was? Lots of people missed their parents, plenty of people had it worse. Jules had told me only the barest contours of her story, and that was plenty for me to be horrified. Still, I couldn’t keep from imagining it: my dad, walking through my bedroom door the way he had when I was little and had bad dreams. He’d bring me a glass of water, escort me to and from the bathroom, then sit with me, watching over me, my canopied bed creaking under his weight, until I fell asleep again.

“I can’t figure out why they picked me,” I said. “Why me, and not Trey and Marissa?” They had a baby, they had baby stuff, they had a nanny already, not to mention an apartment that was big enough to accommodate another. My father had bought them the place as a wedding gift.

“Maybe your father thought they had their hands full,” Darren offered. I nodded, wondering if that was it, or if maybe he thought that a new baby wouldn’t be as well loved as Trey and Marissa’s own daughter. “Or maybe India was the one who picked you.”

I winced. “Doubt it. We didn’t get along.”

He used his chopsticks to help himself to more prawns. “Yes, I sensed that when you came to have her investigated.”

My cheeks flushed. “I wasn’t wrong about India.”

“You weren’t wrong about her past,” Darren said. “I just wonder if maybe she’d changed. Anyhow,” he said hastily as I opened my mouth to tell him that, clearly, India hadn’t changed a bit, that she was a user and a gold digger who’d killed my father and abandoned her child and more or less ruined my life. “Is the food okay? You’re not eating.”

I popped a snow pea in my mouth. “It’s fine.”

“If you want my opinion, I think India made the right choice with you.”