The vanishing year A novel

Review by New York Times Review

IS THERE ANY excuse for a thriller to be well written? A good sentence and a good thriller exist at cross purposes - the sentence making us pause to think or notice, the thriller dissolving our awareness of anything but its narrative, the genre that most wants to make us forget we're reading. You can find plenty of terrible lines in "The Firm," but try to track down a boring one. There aren't any. The field's current standard-bearer, Lee Child, writes clean, hard and fast. (I once heard at third hand that he aims his prose at a reader of 10 years old, which is one of those things that should be true, whether it is or not.) There's something genuinely admirable about his style: He's prominent on his covers, square-jawed and bomber-jacketed, but once the action starts he vanishes, an invisible and discreet servant to his story, indulging in none of the clever asides or descriptions of weather that are so gratifying to a writer's ego. His books are a little silly, and completely addictive. The newest, NIGHT SCHOOL (Delacorte, $28.99), is the 21st that Child has written about Jack Reacher, a nomadic loner without worldly possessions - he's constantly buying new T-shirts - or a settled home. He's a laureled veteran, fast, strong, smart and enormous, 6-foot-5 and 250 pounds , (Eagle-eyed observers will note that these are not Tom Cruise's dimensions.) Above all he's an industrial weight delivery system for dramatic irony, which is what it's called when the reader has information a character doesn't; the quintessential Reacher scene involves a gang of five or six heavies approaching him with a menacing air. We know they're in trouble way before they do. "Night School" is the third prequel Child has written with Reacher still in the Army. Fresh off a successful mission, he's called into a secret meeting by the office of the national security adviser. A tantalizing scrap of intelligence has come into their possession, a phrase that can be plausibly linked to a terrorist cell: "The American wants a hundred million dollars." Reacher goes to Hamburg to investigate, and for 100 pages or so the book careens forward, drawing the death of a local prostitute and a group of German nationalists into its engaging search. There, however, it stumbles. Child gives away too much, too soon, a rare unforced error for this series, and more significantly Reacher seems strangely out of place in a military investigation. His defining characteristic is his itinerant vigilante solitude, and here, teamed up with elite agents from the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., handling matters with complicated geopolitical implications, he really feels like the character we know only when he takes a few minutes of me-time to rough up those nationalists. Reacher is a fantasy, of course. When he's battling a corrupt private military firm, the terse, forceful prose with which Child describes him serves to confirm Reacher's toughness and credibility. But when he's battling a jihadist group, that same tone seems (as Theodor Adorno observed that such bids for authenticity often do) like little more than a shrewder variety of fakeness, a subtler posturing. "Night School" is dedicated to "the men and women around the world who do this stuff for real." If only they existed. Standing in almost diametric contrast to the Reacher model is THE LONG ROOM (Tin House, paper, $15.95), the third novel by the gifted English writer Francesca Kay. It's the story of a British spy in London in 1981 - everyone is watching the Jeremy Irons "Brideshead Revisited" - and its narrative is halting, occasionally far-fetched and only intermittently engrossing, but its language is brilliant, a poet's language, luminous and watchful. Stephen, the protagonist of "The Long Room," catches an unexpected view of himself in a mirror and sees "a bare, forked animal," a startling and perfect fragment of defamiliarization plucked from Shakespeare. Later there's a blizzard, and Kay records that the snowfall is "untouched but for the tracery of a bird's claw prints." As Stephen leaves the long room where he works for British intelligence one night, and which gives the book its title, we see him "lightly touching each of the eight deserted desks as he goes past," which is just what I would do too. He's an unhappy fellow, Stephen: He expected Oxford to open new doors for him, but instead found that it only showed him the locked ones more closely. At least his boss, Rollo Buckingham (a name that makes him sound, perhaps a little too blatantly, like Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright's best chum from sixth form), has invited him to work on a sensitive internal investigation; the only difficulty is that Stephen has fallen in love with Helen, one of its subjects. "The Long Room" is uncannily reminiscent of "Jill," by Philip Larkin, about a provincial boy who goes up to Oxford with high hopes, only to be overwhelmed by loneliness and longing, a sense that life is something that goes on elsewhere, in sparkling rooms he glimpses from the street. "Who told the long-limbed boys, the Greenwoods and the Bennet-Gilmours of this world, the Buckinghams, that asparagus is eaten with the fingers not a fork?" No nation has produced this kind of aching query with a hundredth of the frequency of England, whose great original sin is class, as America's is slavery. Stephen's ressentiment drives him to more and more desperate choices, less and less realistically, culminating in an absurd and anticlimactic trip across the country. But the grace of Kay's voice is hypnotizing, and there are moments when her empathy for Stephen makes them seem barely divisible. Spies and writers are both paid to notice, after all. If there's a golden mean between Child's crisp technique and Kay's melancholy, lovely one, the English novelist James Lasdun may have found it in his exceptionally entertaining new book, THE FALL GUY (Norton, $25.95). It's a cross of literary fiction, thriller and mystery; as David Shields has said, and as good writers realize quickly, "genre is a minimum-security prison." Maybe the title places it most accurately: Lasdun, after the pathogenic proliferation of Girls in crime fiction - gone ones, good ones, train ones, through glass ones - offers us two guys with enigmatic motives, in restrained competition over a woman to whom one of them is married. Which of them will be the fall guy? Their names are Charlie and Matthew, and they are cousins whose friendship dates to their London school days, though both now live in New York. Charlie is rich and married, Matthew poor and at loose ends, obsessively reading his dead father's copy of Pascal's "Pensées," trying to figure out where things went wrong, and so Charlie and his wife, Chloe, invite Matthew to stay for the summer in the guesthouse of their wooded mountainside retreat. From the start there's a febrile mood to this ad hoc household, languorous poolside mornings, friends coming over to drink a bit too much. Matthew has a secret feeling of closeness with Chloe, not even precisely sexual, which makes her sacred to him, "an idealized composite in whom daughter, sister, cousin, mother, mistress, friend and mystical other half were all miraculously commingled." When he discovers that she's being unfaithful, then, he's bereft. Does he confront her? Charlie? Both of them? There's something reptilian in Lasdun's gaze, a cold-blooded interest in furtiveness, in the lithe selfishness of the genteel. "The Fall Guy" reads like early Ian McEwan or late Patricia Highsmith, and while often novelists who write as finely as he does seem to feel above what Jonathan Franzen once called the "stoop work" of narrative, Lasdun is masterly in his story's construction. His clues never seem like clues until they bind tightly around one of the three leads. This is exactly what a literary thriller should be: intelligent, careful, swift, unsettling. Its author deserves to find more readers on these shores. Pascal, who acts as Greek chorus to "The Fall Guy," said that all of man's misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room , That might also be the motto of Cenzo, an Italian fisherman waiting out the last days of World War II in Martin Cruz Smith's novel THE GIRL FROM VENICE (Simon & Schuster, $27). "I've declared myself an official coward," Cenzo says. "I intend to outlive this war and the next." This seems like a sure sign that a lot of stuff is about to happen to him. It begins when he finds a girl floating in the water. Her name is Giulia, "imperious, with straight hair and a sharp chin," from a rich Venetian family and considerably less dead than Cenzo initially suspects. The Nazis are after her, and very reluctantly the fisherman finds himself conspiring in her concealment. He's been burned before: His dashing brother Giorgio, a famous actor with friends among the Fascists, stole Cenzo's wife, who was immediately killed, denying Cenzo even the right to hate her properly. Soon it becomes clear that to save Giulia, Cenzo may have to reconcile with his brother. "The Girl From Venice" is a classy, lightweight affair, agile in its handling of action, smooth in its writing, thoroughly professional. For a long time I couldn't decide whether it was a passable novel or a very, very bad one. I think, alas, that it's the latter. The problem is its bone-deep complacency. It's a book that has completely internalized the lessons of popular war fiction: Heroes are laconic and world-weary, women are redemptive, only nature is "real," a biplane is always close by to escape on. (There's an article to be written about the incalculable damage Hemingway has wrought on this genre.) Cenzo falls in love with Giulia, and before long she is "transformed into a fierce little sea nymph," words are "insufficient" to describe her. "You have no idea how beautiful you are," Cenzo says. There's more weight of thought in his feelings about fish than about his new lover, but otherwise they seem roughly equivalent: "Fish were mysterious, more a race than a species, and an invitation to another world." Of course women can be redemptive. But every gesture of midcentury Romanticism in "The Girl From Venice" is a received one, repackaged and presented as the most profound wisdom. These books come out fairly often - a panful of warm treacle called "Everyone Brave Is Forgiven," by Chris Cleave, is a recent example - and they make it seem as if popular novelists are just about done actually thinking through World War II, its terrible reality giving way to a comforting set of filmic clichés, sazeracs, desperate train journeys, narrow outwittings. It feels cheap. The Nazis were so cruel individually and in aggregate, so astonishingly malicious, that we owe them our best imaginations. A writer should have to earn them. Anything less is disrespectful to their victims. It says a lot about the present state of play in publishing that even Smith's book, about an Italian fisherman, has the word "girl" in the title, and at first THE VANISHING YEAR (Atria, paper, $16), by Kate Moretti, might appear to be another copycat. Its narrator is a pretty floral designer named Zoe, who's just been swept off her feet by a Wall Street tycoon. He doesn't know the dark secrets of her past, and she doesn't know the dark secrets of his. Send a check to Gillian Flynn. In fact, though, the antecedents of "The Vanishing Year" are far older and in a sense more innocent, less laceratingly modern, than Flynn's magnificent "Gone Girl." It's a tale of lost twins, amnesia, agoraphobia, adoption - most indebted, in other words, to melodramas like "Rebecca" and "Wuthering Heights" and "The Moonstone." (There's even a Mrs. Danvers clone.) The writing is lively and atrocious. Two instances of the word "harrumph" in a six-page span are at least one and probably two too many. "The picture slides from my mind, slippery as wet spaghetti," Zoe exclaims at one point, which is a simile with as much literary merit as wet spaghetti. But there can be a great deal of charm in this kind of looseness - "The Vanishing Year" is intimate, conversational company, and its plot is strong, its closing twists superb. In Zoe's past, we learn, she testified against a dangerous criminal, and before long her new world of fund-raisers and couture is punctured by an attempt on her life. Her husband, who should be her first refuge, grows only more controlling. Instead she turns to a journalist named Cash, who lives in an East Village studio and takes her to his mother's down-at-heels Queens neighborhood; as so often in tales like this one, status anxiety, the sense that rising in the world must inevitably invite punishment, lurks behind the histrionics. The most human and memorable scenes Moretti writes have little to do with these mysteries, however. They're the ones that recall Zoe's childhood adoration of her mother, a loving, fragile person, Sally Bowles in California. The depiction of their relationship seems to come from a different, more tender and less outlandish novel. It would be interesting if Moretti were to write it one day. From certain angles, LIVIA LONE (Thomas & Mercer, $24.95), by Barry Eisler, might seem just as cartoonish as "The Vanishing Year." It's about a Seattle cop named Livia, who knows jujitsu, zips around on a motorcycle and opens the book by murdering a rapist partially for her own sexual enjoyment. But Eisler has rooted her story in a scrupulously researched and harrowing account of child sex trafficking, and this gives Livia's unlikely later adventures credibility and resonance. The resulting hybrid makes for an absolutely first-rate thriller. "Livia Lone" is divided into chapters labeled "Then" and "Now." Those in the past are about Livia and her sister, Nason, whose parents sell them to a gang of Thai traffickers. The sexual assaults begin almost immediately; Livia volunteers herself, to protect her little sister. These sections are hard to read, but never gratuitous, and, like the whole book, feel emotionally true at each beat. "She knew she would die if she stopped eating. The thought was immediately appealing." She forces herself to carry on. Shipped to America, the sisters are separated, and the "Now" sections of Eisler's book revolve around Livia's attempts to track down Nason, as well as the men who initially abused them. These have more of the conventional contours of a thriller, verging at moments on the ridiculous, but even here the novel is careful to grant Livia the full complexity of her awful history, the murderousness, the helplessness, the sorrow and the self-loathing that underlie her adult strength. Eisler is an earnest author, kind of nerdy. He likes detail. Almost every thriller has a lead who's a master of jujitsu, but this one, in some of its finest scenes, actually traces Livia's slow acquisition of the art, the appeal of the power and surprising friendships it brings her. This is a nice change from the norm, and it's emblematic of Eisler's humane and grounded approach to writing a tall tale. His language is clear, unpretentious, a little clunky, a little hammy. Caught up in Livia's journey, you barely notice it's there. CHARLES FINCH is the author of "The Last Enchantments" and other novels. "The Inheritance," the latest installment of his Charles Lenox mystery series, will be published this week.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 20, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

Zoe Whittaker is a modern-day version of the second Mrs. de Winter. In this contemporary suspense thriller, however, the second wife has her own skeletons in the closet. As a destitute college dropout, Zoe was a drug-dealing addict who saw the light when she testified against a couple of sex traffickers. She changed her name, moved to New York, and never looked back. But now someone is trying to kill her, and it's unclear whether she should be running from her past or from her wealthy, controlling husband. Fans of S. J. Watson, Lisa Unger, and Sophie Hannah will enjoy this fast-paced psychological suspense novel.--Keefe, Karen Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Zoe Whittaker, the narrator of this convoluted novel of suspense from bestseller Moretti (While You Were Gone), used to be Hilary Lawlor, a student who dropped out of college in California and turned to drug dealing in 2009 after her adoptive mother's death. Her testimony helped destroy a notorious sex-trafficking ring, but she fled across the country and changed her name before the perpetrators' trial. By 2014, she's married to Henry Whittaker, a controlling Manhattan businessman. After a college roommate recognizes her at a charity function, Zoe is nearly struck by a hit-and-run driver, and her apartment is ransacked. She concludes that one of the traffickers has found her and is trying to kill her, but perhaps she's mistaken. Zoe's blend of disloyalty to friends and naive trust in men with obviously sinister motives renders her unsympathetic at times. An implausible plot and chronological inconsistencies may also trouble some readers, but Moretti maintains a fast pace and creates a chillingly satisfying villain in suave, manipulative Henry. Agent: Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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The Vanishing Year CHAPTER 1 APRIL 2014, NEW YORK CITY Lately, I've been dreaming about my mother. Not Evelyn, the only mother I've ever known, the woman who raised me and loved me and taught me to swim in the fresh water of Lake Chabot, bake a sticky sweet pecan pie, fly-fish. I've thought about Evelyn plenty in the five years since she died--I'd venture to say every day. My dreams lately are filled with the mother I've never met. I imagine her at sixteen years, leaving me in the care of the neonatal nurses. Did she kiss my forehead? Study her baby's small wrinkled fingers? Or did she just scurry out, as fast as she could, hugging the wall, ducking the shadows to avoid detection until she burst through the doors, into the night air, where she could breathe again? I could have been born in a bathroom stall at the junior prom or in the back of her parents' car. I prefer to imagine her as a scared young kid. The only thing I know about her at all is her name: Carolyn Seever, and that is likely a fake. My dreams are disjointed, filled with bright colors and blinking lights. Sometimes Carolyn is saving me from a faceless killer and sometimes she is the faceless killer, chasing me with knives up winding staircases that never seem to end. Even when I'm awake, chopping vegetables for a salad for lunch or taking notes for a board meeting, I'll drift off, lost in a daydream about what she might be doing right now or if we have the same dark, fickle hair or the same handwriting. Wonder what quirks, biologically, I've inherited from someone I've never met, and sometimes, I'll come to in the middle of the kitchen wielding a large butcher knife, the lettuce limping on the counter. I've killed quite a bit of time this way. I wonder if she'd be proud of the woman I've become. The benefit for CARE, Children's Association for Relief and Education, starts in an hour. I pace back and forth in the bedroom. I've never chaired before and I can't afford to be distracted, yet here I am, my brain run amok when I can least afford it. "Relax, Zoe, you've done a fabulous job, I'm sure. Like always." Henry approaches me from behind. His large hands dance over my clavicle as he fastens the clasp of a single strand of freshwater pearls around my neck. I close my eyes and relax back into his lean frame, all sinewy muscle despite his forty years. He kisses my bare right shoulder and runs a hand down my side. His palm is hot against the fitted silk of my gown and I turn to kiss him. I step back and admire his tuxedo. His slick, blond hair and angular jaw give him an air of power, or maybe it's just the way he appraises people, even me. He is studying me, his head cocked to the side. "What?" "I think the single diamond would look stunning with that dress," he suggests softly, and I pause. He crosses the bedroom and opens the safe, retrieving one of many velvet cases and I watch him deftly remove a thin, sparkling chain, return the box to the safe, and give the dial a clockwise spin. I love the curve of his neck as he examines the necklace, the small dip behind his ear and the slope of his hairline, his hair curled slightly at the nape, and I want to run my nails up the back of his scalp. I love the long lines of his body and I imagine his spine beneath the layers of thick fabric, all hard-edged dips and valleys. I love his almost invisible smirk, teasing me, as he motions me to spin around. I comply and in one swift motion he removes the pearls and clasps the solitaire. I turn and gaze into the mirror and a small part of me agrees: the solitaire looks fantastic. It is large, five carats, and it rests above the wide band of the strapless dress, the bottom of the teardrop hinting seductively at an ample swell of cleavage. As always, I am divided with Henry. I love his authority, the strength he has that his opinions are not merely suggestions. Or maybe it's just that he's so different from me: decisive, definitive. But I did love the pearls. "Seems indecent somehow for a benefit, doesn't it?" I am tracing the outline of the diamond, watching him in the mirror. His eyes flicker over my reflected body. "The size of the diamond," I clarify. He shakes his head slowly. "I don't think so. It's a benefit for children, yes, but only the wealthy attend these sorts of things. You know this. It's as much a display of the organizer as anything else. Everyone will be watching you." He rests his hands on my shoulders. "Stop! You're making me nervous." I am already on edge, my mind swimming with details. I've done a few of these kinds of events as a second chair but never as a chairperson. There will be a large crowd, all eyes on me, and my heart flutters against my rib cage at the thought. I've been in Henry's world more than a year now and the need to prove myself seems never-abating. This will be the first time I've taken any of the spotlight for myself. My debutante ball, if you will. And yet, I'm completely foolish. I'm risking everything for a slice of validation. These are things I can't say to Henry, or to anyone. His palms are cool and heavy. We stand this way for an indefinite amount of time, our eyes connected in the mirror. As usual, I can't tell what he's thinking. I have no idea if he is happy or pleased, or what he feels beyond anything he says. His eyes are veiled and closed, his mouth bowed down in a slight frown. He kisses my neck and I close my eyes. "You are beautiful," he whispers, and for a moment, his cheekbones soften, his eyes widen slightly, the tautness of his mouth, his chin, seems to loosen. His face opens up to me and I can read him. I wonder how many other women say this, that their husbands befuddle them? Most of the time, Henry is a closed book, his face a smooth plane, his bedroom face similar to his boardroom face, and I'm left to puzzle him out, to tease the meaning from carefully guarded responses. But right now, he looks at me expectantly. "I was thinking about Carolyn." I wince, knowing this isn't the right time. I want to pull the words back. He gives me a small smile. "We can talk later. Let's just have a nice time, please?" He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his cell phone. He strides out of the room and my back is cold, missing the heat of him. My shoulders feel lighter, and when I glance back to the mirror, my mouth is open as if to call him back. It's not that he objects to my finding Carolyn necessarily, he's just impatient with the recent obsession. He doesn't think these things ever end well, and he is the kind of man who respects the current "state of affairs"--he may have used those words. He can't understand the need. You have me, he says when I bring it up. You have us, our life, the way it is now. She rejected you. I think he takes it personally. We have been married nearly a year and have the rest of our lives to "complicate things." I think about couples who giggle and share their pasts, their childhood memories and lost loves. Henry thinks all these conversations are unnecessary, trivial. He is the kind of person whose life travels a straight path, his head filled with to-do lists and goals. Meandering is for slackers and dreamers. And certainly, mulling over the what-has-been is a fruitless effort; you can't change the past. I admitted once to having a journal in college, a place to keep scraps of poetry, quotes I'd picked up along the way, slices of life. Henry cocked his head, his eyebrows furrowed, the whole idea unfathomable. And yet, here I am. This house. This man. This life. It's mine, despite the insecurities that seem to follow me around like a stray cat. I stare at my reflection. A thin, pink scar zigzags horizontally across the top of my right wrist, as I touch the diamond at my throat, the setting big as a strawberry. His sure footsteps beat against the teak floor of the apartment and his deep baritone echoes as he calls for the car. Time to leave. •  •  • I've always been attracted to elegance and I blame Evelyn's fascination with money. It's so easy to be consumed by it when you have none. But unlike Evelyn, I don't look for the glossy, airbrushed facade of celebrity, the flash of comfortable entitlement. I prefer the tiny details: clean lines and sleek design. I care about whether California rolls are passé, or if the gift bags properly reflect a theme. I love when bright spiky dahlias are arranged with classic white lilies, a contrast of classic and fun, and the resulting graceful style elicits a quiet gasp of "You know, I rarely notice the centerpieces, but this is exquisite." I muse over minutia, the table linen color--will it match the butter yellow stamen that shoots from the center of the lily?--the wine, the main course--lamb is such an acquired taste. Designing, whether it be a floral arrangement or decor for a benefit, is where I feel at home. It's where I feel like me, whoever I am at the moment. It's been the only constant. The New York Public Library steps are lit with hundreds of flameless candles that flicker by design, with no regard to the wind. The white marble of Astor Hall is awash with deep blue lighting. Large light installations reminiscent of bare, budding trees are intermingled with six-foot-tall columns wound with bursting white and green lilies. White lights twinkle on almost every flat surface. The tables are spotlighted in soft blue and green lights. It's an enchanted forest, complete with hanging crystal butterflies. Metamorphosis. How apt. Henry places his hand on the small of my back and leans down to my ear. "Zoe, this looks incredible." His breath smells sweet like spun sugar. "You were right, is that what you're looking for?" I tease. Henry had suggested the NYPL for the venue in the first place. The rotunda looks better than I could have imagined, better than my silly sketches. I turn in place, absorbing the details, the elegance I desire so much--the six-person tables, perfect for intimate conversation, the crystal centerpieces that mimic the trees, white reaching branches thrust toward the ceiling, balancing a smattering of glass-winged butterflies. Each table is adorned with greens, small woody bundles nestled inside frosted mason jars, and blooming baby lilies. The overall effect is of being thrust into an enchanted forest, minus the wood sprites. Everything glittery, white and green, glass sparkling. I think to call Lydia, the flowers look amazing. La Fleur d'Elise did the event, as a favor to me, although my conversations with Lydia had been all business. A familiar pang of loss hits me. The walls are tastefully hung with information on CARE, black-and-white photos of past events, less elegant but more real, as the wealthy often claim to want to be real, a concept that has always made me laugh. People claim to want authenticity, another word that is bandied about at these events, yet men like Norman Krable, on the short list of the richest men of New York, are never seen on the new playgrounds or at any orphan shelter, outside of the ribbon cutting. I try very hard not to let this bother me. But yet, the black and whites hang, real and authentic, with wide-open smiles of parentless children, black and white, Asian and Indian, Portuguese and Spanish. Children who don't understand racism or hate, only the cool rejection of a foster family's dismissal. Some of them I know by name, but not all, and at that juncture I have to wonder if I'm any better than the Norman Krables of the world. "Zoe, I think everything has come together beautifully." Francesca Martin is walking briskly toward me, her heels clipping against the marble floor. "One thing, we had chosen white linens, but here, look." She leads me to a table in the corner and the white is stark, blinding and rough, in the blue lighting. The table next to it absorbs the blue effortlessly, the lights softened somehow by the linen, but I can't make out the color. "It's a lavender linen. I know!--" she holds up her hand and shakes her head. "Lavender is outdated, believe me I know. It's like three springs ago, and I honestly have no idea if it's ever coming back, but I think with the blue lighting the white is just too much! You can't even tell it's lavender. It's so offset by the green and blue." "It's so late for a last-minute change." I'm skeptical, but Francesca isn't the event coordinator at NYPL without reason. Her instincts are sharp, impeccable. I agree and one of Francesca's hired hands changes linens. The brightness of the room softens to a deep, rich glow. The benefit is a relatively small one--only two hundred people. It's not a formal sit-down dinner, but a simple cocktail hour with a rotating array of hors d'oeuvres all chosen to reflect the enchanted forest theme of the party: wild mushroom ragout, spring pea puree on crostini, diver scallops with foie gras butter, bison tartare. The standing tables in the corner hold silver trays, lined with Stilton pastries and raspberry chutney, strawberry ricotta tartlets with apple blossom honey. My mouth waters, but my stomach flips in nervous protest. "Simply stunning, darling." Henry hovers next to the three-piece orchestra, a flute of champagne in each hand. He hands one to me and gives me one of his rare but dazzling smiles. Proud. At this moment, he is proud. The evening turns with unstoppable speed. I am shuttled from one table to the next, a conveyor belt for mingling. I stay mostly quiet, nod and smile. I recognize a few people but Henry knows everyone, his arm snaked protectively around my waist. It's my event, yet somehow, Henry still runs the show. I'm appraised always, the unasked question why hovering on everyone's lips. With every charm, every joke, every time the crowd rumbles with laughter at my husband, the women, especially the women, look at me, heads slightly cocked, a small flick of their eyes. Barely noticeable. Why you? The question is never verbalized. Now that I've assimilated, the men are more accepting. Tonight, they're stunning in dark tuxedos, their faces clean-shaven and shiny; their dates, breathtaking in long draping gowns, their designers referred to only as Carolina, Vera, Donna, and Oscar. My own strapless gown, blue and adorned with white crystals, was bought off the rack at Bergdorf's. I swing wildly between my independence and my desire to be preened by Henry. His power and his money and his affection. He pretends not to notice, and I pretend I'm not in over my head here in this world. At the moment, we both find this silent agreement charming. A reporter from the New York Post circulates, as I've invited him but requested that he not make a nuisance of himself. His ticket was a gift, much to the protest of the board of CARE, but in return I've asked for a front-page spread in the society pages. I am hoping for above the fold. I'm told that it will depend on Norman Krable's appearance. The reporter, whose name I've forgotten, has strict instructions: Photograph the event. The guests. The decor. Do not, under any circumstances, photograph me. He laughed at that, mistakenly believing my adamancy derived from a woman's insecurity and I waved off his protests with a light flick of my hand. He spends the evening quietly snapping photographs, and I can't be certain, but I feel as though the camera is frequently aimed at me. I skim the shadows, avoid the spotlight, but too often, I catch the reporter's eye. He seems to be one of these men who wants to rescue a woman, a she-doesn't-know-she's-beautiful man, like he could be the one to show me. The whole idea is silly. Skirting the spotlight has become a way of life, and not all that long ago, a necessity. Maybe even still a necessity, but I avoid thinking about it. Past donors and board members rotate on the podium. I've talked my cochair into being the MC. Public speaking is not my thing. The closing speaker is Amanda Natese, a twenty-­year-old culinary student who was raised primarily on the money provided by CARE. She is a success story, we hope a harbinger of things to come. We'd like more stories like hers. When Amanda was eighteen she aged out of the system and was handed $4,000, courtesy of CARE. She's worked nights as a dishwasher and apprentice in various chain restaurants, and recently she enrolled in culinary school. Her speech is met with a standing ovation. The reporter is snapping madly. It doesn't hurt that Amanda is a stunning six-foot-tall black woman born with a grace the system was unable to take from her. I greet her offstage, in the darkened wing, and give her a hug. Up close she is teary, and I feel the edge seep away. This matters. I repeat it like a mantra, it's the best I can do. I seek Henry. In public, I always seek Henry. I can't help it. He is only moderately tall, but his glossy hair is a beacon. In a crowd, he is charming, erudite. His comments are thoughtful and he is well versed in current events and politics. His opinions are generally heavily considered and almost never debated. Something about the tone of his voice, floating above the din of the crowd. I find him in a circle, men nodding along with him as he waxes about tax benefits. A redhead leans toward him, whispering in his ear, and he laughs. When he sees me, he reaches back, pulls me into the circle against his side, between him and the redhead, and she gives me a sly smile. There's that why. She relocates to his left, continues to lean toward him. She whispers clever commentary out of the side of her mouth, words I can't make out, bits of gossip I don't understand. She and Henry know the same people. I absently tend to a wayward strand of lights. Eventually, she wanders away. Norman Krable shows up late, a blonde on his arm who is not Mrs. Krable, and the crowd buzzes with the slight whiff of scandal. As I catch the Post reporter's eye, he gives me a small wink. Above the fold, it's all I'm asking for here. He nods once, the blonde cementing the spot, and I sigh with relief. The charity has never been featured in the Society section, but my goal this year was to bring it up to the celebrity level. Not for the glitz and the glamour of it, that's more of a liability than anything to me, but for the fact I am deeply attached to the cause of helping adopted and orphaned children. Then again, I am one. "Silly man," Henry murmurs from behind me. Henry knows Norman and he's always been fairly vocal about his impatience with adulterers. It's easy for Henry to chide, as his wife is not yet thirty years old. I remind him of this, as a private joke, and he tells me what he always tells me. I will love you when you're ninety. The buzz dies down, and later I hear that Norman's blonde is lovely to look at but dumb as a stone. Henry almost laughs at this, but not quite, the soft laugh lines around his mouth deepen and he gives a muffled harrumph. The evening is ending, the number of guests leaving tipsy and laughing is a sign of success, I think. I have spoken with 90 percent of the people there and I am worn. Tired. I lean against Henry's shoulder. "I'm sorry, we've been watching you all night and I have to ask," says a voice from behind me. I turn and stare. The woman continues as though my face has not drained of all color. "But you're Hilary Lawlor, aren't you? You are! We'd know you anywhere." The woman is round and soft and friendly and her husband is almost a mirror image of her--two Weebles standing side by side. I concentrate on breathing, but I'd know them anywhere, their happy laughter, their identical snub noses--hers freckled, his not. Her round bright blue eyes, framed with black spidery lashes. She's gained about twenty pounds in the past five years and, not surprisingly, so has her husband. I am hot and cold at once; my head is buzzing. I'm overly aware of Henry's arm brushing mine, and I sense him straighten up, take interest. "I'm sorry, you must have the wrong person. My name is Zoe Whittaker." I turn and grasp Henry's arm, too hard. Henry says nothing but wrinkles his brow, my back turned to the couple. In five years, this has happened only one other time. One other incident of being discovered, of being found out, and it amounted to nothing. I saw an old college professor in a restaurant and tried to duck out before she could recognize me. I saw the dawning comprehension in her eyes, a slight turn of her head, her mouth opening to speak. I paid the bill and left. It amounted to nothing, as I am sure this will, too. Yet I find that I can't catch my breath. "Hilary, I can't believe this. Do you know everyone thinks you're dead!" Her voice is shrill and she's excited, inching around to face me again. I realize she's not going to let it go. Who would? I stare at a large, pink cubic zirconia pendant wobbling in her ample cleavage, a bead of sweat glistens there. She's about to hug me, I can tell. I want to tell her, Hilary is dead, you see? But I can't. I open and close my mouth and then, because I don't know what else to do, I cover my lips with my hand and murmur to Henry, "I've had too much champagne, I think. I feel sick." Quickly, he grabs my elbow and leads me outside. The air is crisp, the way an April night should be, and the wind slaps my cheeks, bringing some of the blood back. I don't know when Henry called the car, but it idles out front and we rush into it, a tumble of silk swooshing against the leather seats. After we pile in, he pinches my chin, turns my head to him. Studies me. I involuntarily jerk my head away. He asks, "Are you okay? Are you going to faint?" I shake my head no. We are quiet while I put the pieces together and I realize it's a bit amazing it's only happened twice. I mean, I went to college in California but it's not the other side of the world. This is New York, the city of millions of transplants a year. I take deep calming breaths and hope that tonight she will not call her girlfriends, her old sorority sisters: You will not believe who I saw tonight! No one will believe her. It's too crazy. "That was the oddest thing," Henry says, looking out the window, his fingers absently tracing circles on the back of my hand. "They thought you were someone else, Hannah something?" "I know. I have no idea who she was." I laugh but it sounds forced. "I must have drunk a ton of champagne." "But did you know them?" Henry watches me now, his eyes narrowed. It's not like Henry to press an issue. He's generally too dismissive for that. His sharp, eagle eyes are fastened now on the idea, a field mouse in his sights. I pause, weighing my options. I stare out the window at the receding steps of the library and I can see them at the top, watching us, their mouths agape and the man shaking his head, pointing with a thick index finger at the car as it pulls away. They must have followed us out. I have no options, I still protect my secret as though my life depends on it. "No, I didn't." But I'm lying. Molly McKay was my roommate in college. Five years ago, in the throes of finals week, I left our small one-bedroom apartment on Williard Street in the middle of the night and never came back. Excerpted from The Vanishing Year by Kate Moretti All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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