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for a spoiled rich kid.
    But that’s not a big surprise. What does surprise me is his talent. I take a moment to photograph each picture. He did these drawings for himself, and they were clearly inspired by things, events, and people, which means this sketchbook is a journal of sorts. I just have to figure out what it’s really saying.
    I turn the page again. There’s a list of names:
    Ahmadi
    Akbari
    Najafi
    Narndar
    Talebi
    ???
    That’s it. Five names and some question marks. Probably just another form of doodling, but I take a snapshot of the list anyway before putting the book and the notebook back and opening another drawer. Perhaps I’ll find a flash drive or something—I have to find something really good, otherwise what exactly did I get out of the evening?
    On my knees, my hands sliding down his hard thighs as I pull off his jeans . . .
    Again I try to shake off the image, but it’s not so easy this time.
    Standing in front of me, naked. I push the jeans aside; something in the pocket hits the floor with a faint knock . . .
    Something in his pocket . . .
    Maybe?
    Possibly?
    I immediately turn and go back to the living room, find the jeans . . .
    . . . and his smartphone.
    I pick it up, activate it . . . and it’s not password protected.
    Such a small misstep on his part.
    And such a major victory for me.
    I flip to his text messages. There are a few from women, hopeful texts. You can hear the unwritten words: Will you save me, Lander? Will you share your life, your love, your checkbook?
    Looking at Lander’s responses, when he bothers to respond at all, the answer is always a resounding No .
    Then there are the texts from his brother. Those are friendly but impersonal. The ones from his father, Edmund Gable, are incredibly curt. He never asks Lander to meet him; instead he tells him to. There isn’t one text complimenting an achievement but many cataloging his mistakes. If Edmund loves his son, he doesn’t express it here.
    Oh, and look at all these texts from Lander’s BFF, Sean White.
    I study the name on the screen for a moment. It sounds so innocuous. A man with a name like Sean White could be a waiter, a lawyer, an actor, a janitor, anything. But of course he’s not just anything, he’s the head of security for HGVB Bank.
    He used to be a cop.
    • • •
    I remember the first time I saw Sean White, all those years ago. The night had been off-kilter from the get-go. A little before eight p.m., my mother had told me that we were going to meet Nick Foley in Brooklyn Heights.
    Nick had apparently texted my mother on that new, fancy phone he had just gotten her. He had asked us to come over, said he was going to take us out to a movie. It was the first time he had ever offered such a thing, and my mother was so excited. Her lover was acknowledging her. He had chosen her over his wife. At least that’s what she had told me this meant. She looked into my eyes and explained that love conquered all. She told me that our lives were about to change. No more run-down apartments with bars on the windows, no more Top Ramen dinners, no more worries about gang-ridden schools.
    “Nick is going to take care of us, mija ,” she said. “He’s going to love us.”
    It was confusing to hear. On the one hand I had desperately wanted my mother to be a real-life Cinderella . . . but then, Cinderella’s prince hadn’t been married to somebody else.
    We got in my mother’s run-down Toyota, and by eight thirty we were parked in front of Nick’s house. My mother told me to wait in the car.
    It felt . . . wrong. Even at ten I understood that my mother had committed a sin, and sins couldn’t be rewarded by riches. That wasn’t how fairy tales worked.
    So I sulked in the car as my mother went to the front door of Nick’s five-million-dollar Brooklyn Heights home. I plugged in to my portable CD player and turned up the volume to an eardrum-shattering level as my mother rang the doorbell and