I.

New York in 1925 was a city that had forgotten why it was celebrating. The war was over. The treaty was signed. But in the speakeasies along Park Avenue and the ballrooms of the Ritz, people were dancing with the kind of frantic energy that comes from knowing, on some level, that the music will stop eventually and you will be left standing alone in an empty room with a stranger's coat draped over your shoulders.

Dee Montgomery was twenty-three and working as a copy editor at a magazine that published articles about the new woman and short stories about women who looked like the new woman but were really just old women wearing shorter skirts. She had come to New York from Dayton, Ohio, with a suitcase full of books and a degree from a college that most people had never heard of and a belief that if she worked hard enough, the city would notice her.

She was right about the noticing. She was wrong about what it meant.

Julian Ashford III noticed her at a charity ball in November. He was twenty-nine, heir to a banking fortune, and possessed of the kind of beauty that comes from good genes and worse habits. He was standing by the bar, drinking something amber and expensive, when Dee walked past him in a dress that was too expensive for her salary and too bold for her reputation.

"Can I buy you a drink?" he said.

"I don't drink," she said.

"Then can I buy you a soda?"

She looked at him, really looked at him, and saw something beneath the polished surface — a loneliness that he had probably spent years learning to hide.

"Yes," she said. "I'd like a soda."

II.

They married in May. The wedding was at St. Patrick's, which was full of people who wore gloves and fans and looked at Dee's family — her aunt Marie, her father's brother's wife, people who had traveled from Ohio in clothes that were slightly out of style — and tried not to look at them.

Julian's mother, Mrs. Ashford, wore a expression of quiet suffering, like someone who had been told she had to sit next to a person who breathed too loudly at a very important dinner.

Dee was pregnant by September. She told Julian on a Sunday morning, in the kitchen of their apartment on East 71st Street, while she was making coffee in a pot that belonged to her mother and he was reading the Times like a man who believed that the newspaper could tell him what was going to happen next.

"I'm pregnant," she said.

He put down the paper and looked at her. His expression was neither happy nor sad. It was the expression of a man receiving information that he would process later, when he had time.

"How far along?"

"About eight weeks."

"Have you told your aunt?"

"She knows."

"Good." He picked up the paper again. "That's good."

She watched him read for a moment, then went back to the coffee. The coffee was bitter, and she liked it that way.

III.

The baby was born in January. A girl. Julian named her after himself — Julian Ashford Montgomery IV, though everyone called her Julie, which was the kind of irony that Dee found either charming or tragic depending on the day.

She was happy, in the way that pregnant women are happy — a happiness that is bright and sharp and tinged with the knowledge that it cannot last. She wrote letters to her aunt in Dayton. She read magazines. She looked at the baby and felt something that she could not name, something that was larger than love and smaller than fear.

In March, while Julian was at the office and Dee was alone in the apartment with Julie, she found the letter. It was in the back of a desk drawer she had never opened, folded inside a file of old bills and receipts, and it was addressed to her mother, who had been dead for three years.

It was from the Ashford Foundation. It was dated the month after her parents died. It was written in Julian's handwriting — she recognized the sharp, precise slant of his letters because she had seen it on wedding invitations and bank statements and the cards he signed on holidays he did not believe in.

Dee sat at the desk and read the letter four times. Each time, the words meant something different. On the fourth reading, she understood what they meant.

IV.

She went to Paris in April. She took Julie with her. She left a letter for Julian on the kitchen counter, next to the coffee pot that belonged to her mother.

"I went to Paris because I thought it was where people came to be free," she had written. "I didn't know that freedom was something you had to earn, not something you could be given. Thank you for the soda. Thank you for the ring. Thank you for the child. But most of all, thank you for making me understand that love is not a debt and debt is not a love. I am going to write now. I am going to write until I understand what I am writing about."

Julian read the letter and put it in his jacket pocket. He went to the office. He conducted a meeting about a real estate development in South Carolina. He came home at six. The apartment was quiet. Julie was crying. Mrs. Ashford had been called to help, and she was holding the baby with the kind of careful incompetence that comes from loving something you don't know how to touch.

Julian stood in the kitchen and looked at the coffee pot, and for the first time in his life, he wished he understood the difference between the things he owned and the things that owned him.

Outside, New York was still celebrating. The city had not forgotten why. But inside the apartment on East 71st Street, a man sat down at a desk that belonged to no one and wrote nothing at all.

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