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them—it was best not to even try. I went to a gay bar one night, to test the waters, but I sat there at the bar in a state of anxiety that grew by the minute until after an hour I couldn’t stand it anymore and ran out, never to return.
    Sometimes, on those rare free weekends, I would write something—nothing much, an observation piece about my neighborhood, or something random about living in New York. I never dared show her any of these little vignettes—I certainly didn’t have the nerve to broach the subject of my writing to her. The depth of talent she worked with—Pulitzer Prize winners, best sellers, critics’ darlings—was certainly not something I could truly dare to aspire to. Being published in the magazine where I worked was an impossible dream—she had her pick of the best in the world.
    There were times when I was so tired and exhausted that all I wanted to do was lie down on the floor, curl up into a ball and sob, and thought about quitting, getting on a bus to somewhere, anywhere , as long as it was far away from Valerie Franklin. But where would I go? How would I pay my rent?
    And who would hire the idiot who walked away from a job at one of the top magazines in the world?
    Valerie didn’t take vacations the way most people thought of them. To her, a vacation simply meant working from another location that was neither her office nor her town house. She took a vacation every three months without fail, but remained in constant touch with the office, since she “couldn’t trust anyone to not run the magazine into the ground in a week.” I went with her on those “vacations”—to make sure things ran smoothly, to make sure that she was in constant touch with the magazine. I went with her to London, Toronto, and Acapulco—all without managing to see anything or do anything I’d always dreamed of doing if I ever had the chance to visit any of those cities. Valerie didn’t believe in doing touristy things, of course—she was on the lookout for the next big artist, fashion trend, play, or restaurant.
    That was why I was sitting in a little café on Ocean Drive in Miami’s South Beach with her that particular morning in mid-May.
    She was watching people—the way she always did when she was in a public place—while I was going over her schedule for the day on my smartphone. She whistled quietly and put her coffee cup down, sliding her enormous designer sunglasses down her nose and peering over them. “Why, I believe that’s Carlo Romaniello! What is he doing in Miami?”
    The name sounded vaguely familiar to me, and I followed her glance across the street to a well-built man trudging through the sand between the dunes away from the beach. He was wearing sandals, a pair of khaki shorts, a short-sleeved shirt with most of the buttons undone, and sunglasses. His dark hair was mussed, and he wasn’t looking in our direction.
    â€œCarlo, darling!” She stood up as she shouted, waving her hand frantically to get his attention.
    In the year I’d worked for her, I’d never seen her act this way. Carlo Romaniello looked over with a frown that gradually gave way to a smile. He returned her wave and started walking toward us.
    She looked at me like I was an imbecile yet again. “He still hasn’t gotten over his husband’s death,” she hissed at me through her smile. “Such a tragedy. Timothy was so gorgeous. Of course, it’s barely been a year.”
    And in that moment I remembered exactly who Carlo Romaniello was. I turned to look again. I had never met the man, but I’d read about him and seen his picture in our magazine as well as in the society pages in the newspapers. He was extremely wealthy—the money came from something inane, a particular joint that a toilet couldn’t operate without, something like that—and as money is wont to do, just kept growing and