THE BILLIONAIRE AND HIS SIDE CHICK EXPOSED

The photo was taken at 7:42 on a Tuesday morning, and by noon it had been shared four hundred thousand times. Layla was acutely aware of the time, thanks to the timestamp displayed in the corner of the screen. She had stared at it for so long that the numbers began to lose their significance. In the image, she was captured in the moment of stepping out of Gavin's building on East 74th Street, wearing yesterday's dress and carrying her heels in one hand. Her hair was a disaster. Her face had the soft, stupid look of a woman who thought no one was watching. Someone had been watching. By one o'clock, Gavin's wife had released a statement, three careful sentences about privacy and family and healing, and Layla's name was in the second one. By two, HR had called, and the woman who had once sent her a fruit basket when her mother was in the hospital read a script in a voice like a locked door. By three, someone had found her address. By four, someone had found her sister's. She did not call Gavin. She had rehearsed the call so many times over four years, the one where she finally said I can't do this anymore, that it felt used up. Besides, he called her, twice, and both times she watched the phone ring on the kitchen counter until it stopped. The third time it was a text. Let me handle it. Don't say anything. That's when she began to pack her things. It wasn't a grand or emotional choice; it was more like realizing she was already at the threshold, ready to leave. She took her nice coat to a consignment shop on Bleecker and got ninety dollars for it. The watch Gavin had gifted her for her thirtieth birthday ended up in the hands of a stranger in the Diamond District, a man who didn’t even glance her way. She reassured herself that the watch had never kept accurate time anyway, which was true. Gavin collected items for her in the same hasty manner as a man buying drinks at a bar: swiftly, so that no one would notice the conversation had fizzled out. The cheapest flight left at 9:50 that night, with a layover in Reykjavik she would not remember. She had a cousin in Paris, Noor, who had once said come whenever, seriously, in the tone people use when they are certain you never will. Somewhere over the Atlantic, her phone died. She didn't charge it in Iceland. She told herself it was an accident, and she was almost sure that was a lie. Noor's building was in the 11th, a narrow door between a phone repair shop and a place selling vaguely sad kebabs. Layla stood in front of it at 4:40 in the morning with one suitcase, one backpack, and forty-one euros she had gotten from the airport exchange at an insulting rate. She pressed the buzzer. She pressed it again. A window opened above her. A man in a towel leaned out and said something in French, then something in a different language, then, finally, in English: "Noor? No. Noor is gone. Three months. I rent from a man who rent from her." "Do you have a number for her?" He considered this for a long time. "Non," he said, and closed the window. Layla sat down on her suitcase. She tried her phone, remembered it was dead, and put it back in her coat. The cold in Paris was not dramatic, it was damp, the kind that finds the gap between your scarf and your collar and moves in. She thought about the word doxxed. She thought about how it sounded like a sneeze. She lasted about twenty minutes on the suitcase. Then she got up, dragged it two streets over because the wheel kept catching, and followed the only light on the block. The bakery was called Fontaine. The sign was hand-painted, and the paint was flaking off the F. Inside, it smelled like burnt sugar and wet wool, and a man with flour up to his elbows was yelling at a tray of croissants. "Non," he told them. "Non, non, non." She had not planned to walk in. She had planned to stand outside, near the warmth coming off the glass. But the bell over the door rang, because of course it did, and the man turned around. He was tall and unshaven, with the look of somebody who had been awake since the previous afternoon and had opinions about it. He looked at her suitcase. Then he looked at her face. He didn't ask why she looked like that, and she would remember that later, more than almost anything else. "Can you count?" he said in English. "Yes." "Can you get up early?" "I haven't slept since Tuesday." He nodded, as if this were a reasonable answer, and pulled an apron off a hook. It was enormous and smelled like butter. She put it on over her coat. "Adrien," he said, pointing at himself. Then at the tray of ruined croissants: "Disaster." "Layla." "Okay, Layla." He handed her a wooden paddle and a stack of paper bags. "The customers are going to be rude. It is not personal. It is Paris." Behind her, in the pocket of her coat, a dead phone held four years of a life she had abandoned, and for the first time in twenty-four hours it couldn't buzz at her. She stood at the counter and waited for the first rude person of her new life to come through the door. She almost looked forward to it.