The Force of Such Beauty

Description

“This is not your grandma’s fairy tale… Brilliant.” —The Washington Post

“The Force of Such Beauty grips with the strength of an Olympian and holds it with the endurance of a marathoner … [to] an ending that actually caught my breath, not once, but twice in quick succession.”—The Associated Press
 
One sunny afternoon in an idyllic kingdom by the sea, a princess named Caroline pretends to sleep. When her keepers strike up a card game, Caroline sneaks into her maid’s car, turns the key, and drives right out of the palace. Alone for the first time in years, she gets on the next flight—only to land in the waiting arms of her guards. As she’s forcibly escorted back to her marble prison, something in Caroline breaks for good. It’s not her first failed attempt, and it won’t be her last. Caroline suspects that she’ll never escape. But she might find a way to be free.
 
Barbara Bourland’s stunning third novel, a phantasmagorical fable of love and marriage, is her most ambitious and inventive book to date. Inspired by the alleged escape attempts of real-life princesses, The Force of Such Beauty is both the story of an idealistic young woman trapped by a corrupt promise, and a deeply moving reminder that power structures around the world ultimately rest on the subjugation of women’s bodies.
 
“A fascinating novel about bodies, the way we use them, and the way we break them. It’s one of several works to come out this year concerned with the appropriation of female beauty by powerful men, and examines a harsh choice in the lives of women dubbed desirable by the patriarchal state: do you participate, or do you say no?…Bourland is skilled at finding the noir in the everyday, and illustrating the mechanisms of control that keep us in our place.”—Crime Reads, Best Books of the Year (So Far)“It’s about time someone took the princess story that’s normalized to girls and autopsy it with absolute precision. The Force of Such Beauty opens on the night of Caroline’s second attempt at escaping Lucomo, the small European country in which she became a princess. But author Barbara Bourland quickly jumps back in time to reveal every excruciating and exhilarating detail that led to this moment….The Force of Such Beauty grips with the strength of an Olympian and holds it with the endurance of a marathoner. Bourland’s passionate storytelling transmogrifies into an insatiable urge to keep reading Caroline’s story even after its end — an ending that actually caught my breath, not once, but twice in quick succession.”
—Associated Press

“This is not your grandma’s fairy tale… Influenced by the struggles of real-life princesses, Bourland’s brilliant satire skewers the theatrics of power, excessive materialism and economic corruption.”—Washington Post

“Sharp, witty, and intellectually intense, Bourland’s prose is a force to be reckoned with.” —The Chicago Review of Books

“Falling in love with a prince is not a fairy tale, as the protagonist of this engrossing novel discovers. Caroline is a former Olympian-turned-princess of a small European country. Her role becomes more like a trap; her husband, more like a captor. Bourland said she was inspired by real-life royals when writing this novel set in pre-recession Europe.”—Today.com

“With trademark style and sophistication Bourland (I’ll Eat When I’m Dead, 2017; Fake Like Me, 2019) plays with the tropes of the princess tales, true and not, that we know as well as our own names as she giftedly conjures Caroline’s glittering, threatening worlds. Despite danger everywhere, Caroline is the captivating narrator of her own story: a domestic drama, sparkling fairy tale, cautionary tale, and suspenseful mystery all laced into one.” —Booklist (STARRED REVIEW)

“Rich in emotion and luscious descriptions, The Force of Such Beauty is a careful dismantling of royalty that leaves readers wondering if any fairy tale is worth our desire.” —BookPage

“An immersive depiction of the glittering surface and rotten core of royal living, painted in sumptuous and chilling detail.”—Kirkus

“Bourland offers a smart critique of a corrupt world’s disenchanting effects on a naive young woman. The result is satisfyingly dark and twisted.” —Publishers Weekly

“This is a fascinating novel about bodies, the way we use them, and the way we break them. It’s one of several works to come out this year concerned with the appropriation of female beauty by powerful men, and examines a harsh choice in the lives of women dubbed desirable by the patriarchal state: do you participate, or do you say no?…Barbara Bourland is skilled at finding the noir in the everyday, and illustrating the mechanisms of control that keep us in our place.” –Molly Odintz, Senior Editor for CrimeReads

“In THE FORCE OF SUCH BEAUTY, Barbara Bourland fractures the familiar tale of ‘happily ever after’ and reimagines it with spectacular style, vision, and substance. Her novel thoughtfully interrogates the trappings of marriage, status, womanhood, and power, while reading as vividly and compulsively as a thriller.” —Jung Yun, author of Shelter and O Beautiful

“The Force of Such Beauty is a dazzling spiderweb, a richly imagined, chilling spin on the girl-meets-prince fairy tale that scrambles notions of power and femininity. With a sense of spellbound dread, we’re seduced along with its complicated heroine into a magnetic world of startling beauty and tragic costs.”—Lauren Acampora, author of The Paper Wasp

“A fierce spin on the fantasy of marriage that is pacey, propulsive and fun. Its dazzling, detailed and ultimately revolting catalogue of excess and materialism creates a compelling atmosphere of claustrophobia. I love how the fairy-tale setting cleverly draws one’s thoughts from the personal implications of a marriage to the wider world of commerce, status and power.”—Ros Anderson, author of The Hierarchies

“A wayward girl is made a princess, and then? Luxury turns to boredom, fascination to fear, fame to thralldom, and love to betrayal. Threads of beauty and dread follow our heroine’s descent into the gilded lunacy of a royal kingdom that requires a princess to be glamorous, grateful, and quiet. But Caro is no passive princess in a tower; she is smart, incisive, and achingly real. I couldn’t put this book down until its explosive, heartrending, thoroughly satisfying ending.”—Jennie Melamed, author of Gather the Daughters

“Barbara Bourland’s The Force of Such Beauty is like if My Year of Rest and Relaxation was about Grace Kelly.”—Molly Odintz, Senior Editor for CrimeReads

“Barbara Bourland’s riveting new novel, The Force of Such Beauty, opens with the breathless escape attempt of a modern-day princess named Caroline as she endeavors to leave her marble prison once and for all. In the pages that follow, Bourland traces the path that plunged Caroline into such visceral desperation, revealing how swiftly ‘happily ever after’ can morph into a cage. What unfurls is a darkly relevant depiction of the ways in which societal power structures hinge upon the subjugation of the female body. Caroline’s story submerges the reader in the depths of contemporary royal womanhood and only allows you to surface in those final pages as the tension builds relentlessly to a shocking conclusion….” —The Millions

“‘Happy ever after’ is not all that it’s cracked up to be. Barbara Bourland dismantles the conventional princess story in The Force of Such Beauty to explosively examine the real-life notions of fame, power, and womanhood.”—Veranda

“Caroline is a former marathon runner who meets Finn, price of a small European kingdom. Her fate is quickly sealed: The perfect couple marries, and Caroline learns to smile and wave, wear tiaras with ease, and produce children. But as time passes, she starts to question the life she just signed up for.” —NY Post

“…a smart, absorbing novel, with a heroine, Caroline, who’s naïve but strong-willed. A former Olympic-level marathon runner from South Africa, she’s seduced by her lavish life until the fantasy fractures and becomes a nightmare.” —AARP

“Barbara Bourland’s The Force of Such Beauty knocked me out….this one is so imaginative and beautiful and had me gasping at the end.” —Leslie Zemeckis, Montecito Journal

Praise for Barbara Bourland’s novels:

Fake Like Me

One of Cosmopolitan’s “Books You Need in Your Life This Summer”

“Bourland has an astonishing ability to write viscerally about art, culture, class, and landscape, for a work that’s bound to be one of the summer’s biggest crime/literary crossovers.”—LitHub

“Layered, complicated, big, bold, and disturbing, like the large-scale oil paintings that are the unnamed protagonist’s medium, Bourland has written a one-of-a-kind, modern-day künstlerroman that deserves a place among the genre’s all-time best.”—The Millions

“Barbara Bourland’s art-world thriller is both elegant and visceral… While not strictly noir, Fake Like Me is imbued with the intensity of artistic struggle in a manner that resonates with the high stakes and sharp precipices of classic crime writing.”—Crime Reads

In an art world where we’re all supposed to be cool and ironic and cynical, it feels good to love a book so fiercely and personally, the way our narrator loves her paintings.—BMore Art

“Fake Like Me is an impressively intelligent thriller … Expect insightful paragraphs about the creative process sprinkled among the propulsive mystery.”— Refinery29, Best Books of June 2019

“Meet ‘art satire thriller,’ your new favorite genre.”—HelloGiggles, 10 Best Books Of June 2019

“Whip-smart.”—Thrillist

“Fake Like Me roars with creative impulse… Part thriller, part performance art and wholly revolutionary, Fake Like Me confronts American art culture with female bravado.”—BookPage

“Bourland expertly shines a light on the nature of female ambition and desire and the often dark heart of inspiration. Readers fascinated with the blood, sweat, and tears of creating art will be especially rewarded.”—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Menacing, swirling, hypnotic … A haunting, dizzying meditation on identity and the blurred lines between life and art.”—Kirkus (Starred Review)

“Bourland has an uncanny knack for spatial description and relates artwork and every last thing in Pine City—”half Dirty Dancing, half Twin Peaks“—with pristinely observed color and feeling. She also nails the creep factor, and her narrator’s high tolerance for it, with foreboding signs that the no-name painter isn’t totally welcome there, and that there’s more to Carey’s story. The deck stacked against her, the narrator tells the glitteringly compelling tale of her fevered summer and wisely reveals meaningful intersections of class, gender, and making art.”—Booklist (Starred Review)

“The creative process confronts reality in this compelling literary thriller centering on art, identity, and deception, as told in Bourland’s sharp prose. A must for those with an artistic bent, a sheer reading pleasure for all.”—Library Journal (Starred Review)

I’ll Eat When I’m Dead

“A smart, satirical take on fashion and media that will have readers snorting with laughter.”—The New York Post

“A whodunnit with a Devil Wears Prada twist…If you love UnReal, then this smart, sassy novel will be right up your alley.”—Refinery29

“A highly polished satire… Hilarious.”—Sunday Times

“Barbara Bourland’s snarky debut novel manages to tackle the politics of fashion magazines, the pitfalls and pratfalls being a social media influencer, and the true dangers of the pressures put on women for their appearances and the very real threats to their mental and physical health. And yet Bourland walks the line between serious and comedy so deftly that anyone who has read a women’s magazine or caught an episode of America’s Next Top Model will understand the jokes and the lessons without conflict.”—Fortune

“Delectable.”—People, May Picks

“The darker side of perfection is cast under the spotlight [in this] black comedy.”—Sunday Mirror
 
“A delicious, skewering look at high fashion and Instagram culture (Finnish bread restaurants anyone?) and a murder mystery that has more edge than Karl Lagerfeld ever dreamed of.“—Sarra Manning, Red Magazine
 
“Bourland fills her debut with terrific characters—Cat especially is wonderfully weird and well dimensioned—and a heaping helping of froth and gloss that will turn readers into industry insiders. Delightfully, playfully skewering the fashion and beauty industries, this is like The Devil Wears Prada with more feminism, plus murder.”—Booklist
 
“Death by beauty was never so much fun.”—KirkusBarbara Bourland is the author of two previous novels: I’ll Eat When I’m Dead and Fake Like Me, a 2020 Edgar nominee for Best Novel. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.Discussion Questions
 
Note: These discussion questions contain spoilers! We suggest you finish the book before you read through them.
 
1. Caroline’s body undergoes major transformations, from elite athlete to badly injured and frail to recovering to pregnancy and postpartum. Her facial reconstruction turns her into a woman so beautiful it’s “both terrifying and edifying.” When do you think she feels most at home in her body? When does she feel most powerful? How does her self-perception mirror or refute society’s expectations of women?
 
2. Caroline also endures many physical stressors and therapies. Some, like physical therapy to manage her pain, she welcomes. Others, like advanced fertility treatment and uncomfortable clothing, she resists. How does Caroline’s sense of agency influence her feelings about these restrictions and interventions?
 
3. Much of Caroline’s identity at the beginning of the novel rests on being “the fastest woman on earth.” When her record is broken, her spirit also takes a huge blow—even though, at that point, she is now one of the wealthiest, most well-known women on earth. How can people move forward when they lose part of their selfhood?
 
4. When Caroline first meets Finn, she insists running is “not about being better than other people,” but, later, her life as a princess elevates her to a higher social position than nearly everyone in Lucomo. When Caroline becomes royalty, which ideals does she abandon and which remain steadfast?
 
5. When reflecting on her time in Lisbon, Caroline notes, “It may seem small and inconsequential . . . but now I realize it was the only time in my life that ever truly belonged to me. Even though, or precisely because, I wasn’t anyone important.” Do you see any roads not taken for Caroline to create a different life for herself?
 
6. Do you believe Finn loves Caroline, or is she merely a pawn in his game? Could both be true?
 
7. Caroline always has a circle of friends—fellow runners, pals in Lisbon, ladies-in-waiting in Lucomo—but she is close to very few people. Is there anyone you think she should have trusted more? Which friends disappointed her and how?
 
8. Caroline feels responsible for failing to educate herself on the Lugesque economy and the nature of Finn’s dealings, and therefore remaining in the dark about them for so long. Do you agree with her assessment or do you see her as a victim?
 
9. How is the extreme opulence of Lucomo’s royalty contrasted with the general public’s much more difficult financial situations, especially as the story inches closer and closer to the financial crash of 2008? Were you, like Caroline, blinded by the “force of such beauty” that the royal family constantly displays or did you see some of the darker consequences coming?
 
10. Near the end of the novel, Caroline muses, “As long as I didn’t try to reconcile anything, as long as I accepted that my husband was a bad person, my children were going to grow up to be bad people, and I was the crown jewel for doing my part for the legitimacy of other bad people . . . it was fine and dandy.” Do you have hope for Jane/Jeanne and Henry/Henri in the aftermath of the story, or are they doomed to continue the practices of the Lugesque monarchy?
 
11. Does this story make you reconsider the “happily ever after” princess fairy tale that so many young girls are told? Do you think any real-life royals go through the ordeals and loss of autonomy that Caro experienced?
 
 
Author Letter
 
Dear Reader,
     When I got married nearly ten years ago, I was genuinely surprised by the princess-ness of it all; how blatant, how embarrassingly forthright the sales pitch when clerks at the dress store referred to it unironically as “your day,” or suggested that I try on tiaras, as though it was the only day that would ever belong to me.
      A sales pitch—and a frame that remains impossible to step outside of. No matter who we are to each other, my husband and I are still characterized by others as inside a story that makes him the hero and me the grateful beauty. For the past decade, everyone in our lives—colleagues, friends, family—have, subtly but meaningfully, contextualized my decisions through his (but never his through mine). My choice of job, house, or what kind of book to write are reflected back to me through the prism of his achievements; my independence apparently obliterated by a role that is historically subservient, reproductive, and secondbest. I’m still shocked when people openly probe my childlessness as though it is not a wound, then turn to ask him about his work. I didn’t understand that my worth would be measured so openly, or found so wanting.
     Yet, I’d been warned. My first toy was a baby doll, followed by dollhouses, mini brooms, and plastic kitchens. All the while, streaming through the ether, on televisions and in picture books, a series of neutered corporate fairy tales taught me that a woman’s greatest goal in life is to be chosen by the most important and eligible man in the land. The world had told me explicitly that I had one purpose, but I believed that it didn’t apply. The need to see myself as exceptional has been a profound driver of my choices, one that motivated me through all of my achievements. But when it comes to the word “wife,” there are no exceptions; apparently, not even for me.
     Once I realized that, it was impossible not to reflect the world back to itself; to dig out my most powerful conditioning and build something with its dust. I asked myself why I believed that I could choose which rules applied to me and which did not; indeed, what I thought the role of a wife would get me; and what everyone, including me, stood to gain from this status quo. I began to write my own warning—my very own fairy tale, The Force of Such Beauty: the story of a woman who believes herself to be an exception to the rule.
Set in Lucomo, an imagined sovereign state that is, like Monaco, Singapore, or even the city of Amsterdam, an economic node that fosters the gross imbalances of global wealth. The novel holds a magic mirror to the modern-day princess story. A young woman named Caroline loses herself: given the gift of beauty, she meets a handsome prince, moves to a castle, and wears a crown. And then she opens her eyes and discovers that castles, designed to be impenetrable, are prisons; and princesses, bound to lives that prioritize only their reproductive labor, are their most glorious prisoners.
     Caroline, a retired Olympic marathon runner, isn’t like my previous characters; she isn’t particularly wordy or educated. She’s bodily, loving, and strong; she’s an egoist, a naïf; and, occasionally, a villain and a fool. As an athlete, Caroline embodies a certain vision of independence, ambition, and drive; as a princess, she embodies another, a falsehood that is sold to women from the day we are born. Her story is a cathartic exercise in the recklessness of trust, the hedonism of greed, and the tragic fantasy that safety can be given to us by men. She shows us what life is really like for a princess—the woman who gets to be measured against the most powerful man in her world. Stepping into her glass slippers is a reminder that, inevitably, those shoes will shatter, and the shards will cut every tendon in your foot.
 
Barbara Bourland
 
 
Reading List
 
I read a great many things while writing The Force of Such Beauty, the shiniest of which were dozens of biographies of royal women, such as Grace Kelly, Princess Diana, Elisabeth of Bavaria; or heiresses like Millicent Rogers and Liliane Bettencourt. Yet I find myself unable to recommend them to the lay reader. Many of the stories I read about women of wealth, no matter how kind the intention, seemed to find their narrative path using a bone-deep misogyny that impaled the individual and released the state. I point this out because I would hope that for those interested in the princess bargain beyond this novel, that the empathy and care you’ve felt for Caroline will inform your lens as a reader going forward.
 
I can, however, recommend a select few:
1. Craig Brown’s playful and creative Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret
2. Caroline Weber’s thoughtful and informative Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution
3. Nancy Mitford’s classic biography of Madame de Pompadour
4. Carole Seymour-Jones’s Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, which interrogates the anachronistic label of madness.
5. I also found myself returning again and again to Heroines by Kate Zambreno, which is a book I love for its refusals: both to accept history as it has been provided and to conform to history as it is supposed to be written.
 
I tried on a few athletes’ biographies as well; Andre Agassi’s Open is excellent and very worthy of any reader’s time. Beyond that, a narrowed scope of financial nonfiction, focusing on sovereign debt and the rise of economic nodes, such as Matthew Lynn’s Bust: Greece, the Euro and the Sovereign Debt Crisis, Yanis Varoufakis’s And the Weak Suffer What They Must, were excellent. As well as Matt Levine’s “Money Stuff” newsletter from Bloomberg (don’t sleep on Bloomberg Businessweek, it’s a genuinely good magazine, like if The Economist was illustrated by Maurizio Cattelan). I also really enjoyed Secrets of the Seven Smallest States of Europe by Thomas Eccardt for its principality trivia, and I would recommend it to any traveler headed to Luxembourg, San Marino, Andorra, Malta, Liechtenstein, Vatican City, or Monaco.THE LAST TIME they caught me at the airport, I panicked.
 
The decision I’d made an hour earlier, to drive straight there like any regular woman and buy a ticket, was more than reckless; it was unequivocally selfish. In my defense it happened in a moment so opportune that I can still taste it on the sides of my tongue. How was I supposed to resist?
 
The service were drinking, their collars loose, cigarettes and playing cards between their fingers. I knew where Marie kept the keys to her rusted Peugeot. She was vacuuming upstairs. Everybody thought I was passed out for the night. It was so easy. Really—I almost did it just to see if I could. Is that a good enough explanation? As I was tying my scarf, a gift from his mother, the one with the interlocking Fs, over my prickling scalp—and the plastic of my sunglasses was cold against the tops of my ears—t he hem of my car coat scratched my legs—sweat dripped into my underwear—it was a moment of, there’s no other word for it, possession. I was possessed. I was Sleeping Beauty moving toward the spinning wheel, eyes dilated, holding my breath; I was Linda Blair in a nightgown screaming on the M Street steps. I was every woman who had ever seen a way out, and I grabbed at the moment so desperately that I left my children behind.
 
I wedged a manila folder into the bottom of my handbag and made it through four courtyards to Marie’s car, parked on gravel, near the stables. I shifted it into gear, feet working the pedals from memory, left hand skimming the door until I found the plastic handle, rolling the window down. I pulled out of the inner driveway, punched in the code at the iron gate—it was agony, watching it open, so slowly, on its own time, doing what its motor always did—and with an inch to spare, I ripped out onto the road, barreling hard on first gear until the engine whined. I found the sweet spot in the clutch and shifted again. The little Peugeot jerked into second, and then third.
 
A grin stretched across my face.
 
Fifteen minutes later I was on the coast road, cutting a diesel streak to the commercial airport. Or rather, I hoped I was, because I hadn’t driven a car in years. It was west, I thought, and so I drove west. When I spotted a sign reading Aeroporto, I jerked the wheel and followed it.
 
It took forty‑five minutes to get there. I kept the window down the whole time.
 
Wind blew against my veneers; wet beads of mascara dripped into the hollows below my eyes. My bare legs splayed out beneath my coat. The four remaining hairs on my knee, the ones that refused to submit to the laser, were long, from weeks of growth. I yanked one out—I remember that. But mostly I remember the air: sputtering diesel; the sweet‑ sour scent of Marie’s car from her gardenia perfume and menthol cigarettes, fat Italian ones that she hoarded (how long had it been since I had discovered the smell of something as personal as someone’s else’s uncleaned house or car? years! years!); and the damp, salty smack of the ocean.
 
I don’t recall much else, besides a vague awareness of the fact that as I drove the sun went down and the headlights had to be turned on. I don’t know if there was traffic; I don’t think there was. I simply drove along the road with everyone else, another animal in the pack, heading northwest. And then I was turning into the parking lot, taking a ticket; pulling onto the ramp; nosing the dirty bumper into a space. I do remember wanting the parking job to look really nice and even. I didn’t want Marie to be worried about her car, or to feel mistreated.
 
I tucked her keys into the visor and headed for the terminal, passing through the airlock of automatic doors into the cold embrace of the airport. It was the physical embodiment of white noise, a place designed to move you along. In bejeweled lilac mules, I fell into step behind a family. My coat was a blue cotton rimmed with white piping, lined in pine‑colored silk. The scarf was still knotted very tightly around my head, though my wig was falling off in the back. My sunglasses, cream with olive lenses, took up half my face. Naturally, no one else was dressed like this. They had on zip‑away cargo pants and money belts and leggings.
 
I made it halfway to the counter before they shouted my name.
 
“Caroline!” a girl’s voice sang. Phone out, eyes wide. “Caroline!” Me. My name.
 
Other people turned. I saw it forming on their lips. My name, my name, my name.
 
With that, my caper was over. The world went from black and white—an adventure of my own making—right back to smooth‑motion, full‑color, high‑definition hell.
 
I died inside.
 
Caroline, Caroline.
 
The sound of my name, my name.
 
I turned right and walked my corpse to the nearest desk. Stared blankly at the logo, a tinny noise ringing in my ears, like there had been an explosion—and there had, I had died, it was the sound of my death—while the desk agent, a polite young woman with thick eyeliner and a patterned hijab, stared back at me.
 
“Your Serene Highness,” she said, “it is a pleasure to serve you today.”
 
She did not look me up and down as I would have done if our roles were reversed. Now I realized she must have spotted me long before we spoke, when people called my name as I loped across the cold tile floors, tan legs stretching for miles beneath the short coat, a head taller than everyone else. I opened my mouth to reply and paused instead to breathe. The desk agent said nothing. In this moment, I was supposed to say something, obviously. To explain why I was there, make a plan, move forward. On the departure board Riyadh was the only word I saw.
 
“Riyadh?” I said, almost a question, asking her permission: Can I go there, now?
 
“That flight departs in seventy‑five minutes. It’s possible. I will try?” I nodded. “One first‑class ticket to Riyadh, please,” I said, hiding my shaking hands by rooting around in my bag for my credit card and old South African passport. I noticed, as I handed it to her, that the passport would expire in three weeks.
 
To her eternal credit, she didn’t question the dates and began typing furiously, polished nails pummeling the plastic keyboard in front of her. Etihad, read the sign behind her.
 
In retrospect, it wasn’t a terrible idea. Saudi Arabia, like everybody else, invested in our real estate; Finn was away with our airplane. Taking a trip to Riyadh on the national airline of the UAE could be a political act, if you squinted. And if I could get on a flight—any flight—I could make it to London, where Zola might help me.
 
I kept looking around, thinking the service would emerge from the cracks in the walls. They’d corral me like a bull, spear me with knives wrapped in ribbons as I roared in pain. And like a bullfight, everyone would watch and nobody would do a thing about it.
 
Days before our wedding, they caught me here. I didn’t see it coming that time. I thought I could go home. But they cornered me, swallowed me up. It wasn’t a scene. Things were different then; easy to destroy the security footage, pay off the gate agents. Sure, there was a nasty rumor, but nobody had proof and that was all that mattered.
 
Today, the service were nowhere to be seen.
 
“Mmm,” the desk agent uttered, peering at the screen. “You are confirmed on Flight Fifty‑Six. The plane will have a layover in Doha and continue on to Riyadh. It will be most convenient. You do not need to exit the airplane at the layover. I have a very nice suite for you.” I thought she might pick up the phone, but no. She looked at me with expectant satisfaction; she had done something for me, and I was supposed to say yes.
 
Yes. I nodded and said thank you. I think I did, anyway. If I didn’t: Thank you. Thank you, wherever you are. You were the first person to help me in so long.
 
She swiped my card; I signed the slip. She did not ask about baggage—another polite gift. The ticket stuttered out of the printer and she handed it to me. I took off my sunglasses and stared up at the security camera. Hello, I mouthed, knowing it would be watched, again and again. Goodbye.
 
Off I went through security, hands shaking, waiting with every step to be taken aside—but nobody stopped me. Alone for the first time in years, I walked to the gate. After my ticket was scanned, I walked directly onto the plane and was cocooned in a private room. A butler wearing white gloves brought a glass of champagne. He offered to take my coat. As I wasn’t wearing anything beneath it, I shook my head. He opened a compartment and pointed to a pair of silk pajamas folded inside. I nodded, thanked him, and curled up into a ball.
 
Six hours later, Doha. Another hour, in the air again. Soon we landed in Riyadh. By then the pajamas were beneath my coat, covering my legs. The cashmere blanket from my chair was wrapped around my head, doubled and pinned in place with safety pins from the travel kit. The butler’s white gloves covered my bleeding cuticles.
 
The round door of the 747 popped open with a depressurizing sigh, and as was customary, I was the first to exit the plane. Three steps into the Jetway and I found myself in the waiting arms of the service. Of course. I knew they would be there. When had they left me alone, ever? Never. They would never. Roland took my passport from my hand, and then my purse, with its folder of purloined paperwork. He held my arm as I walked up the Jetway. Otto and Dix—t hey were always together and looked so haunted, so Germanic—flanked us from the rear. I followed Roland automatically.
 
It was a relief, in a way. Before that day, I hadn’t been alone in public for seven years. The service were as normal as being dressed. I was, at my core, truly convinced that I’d be harmed if they left my s ide—security will do that to a person, persuade you of their necessity. Especially if you cannot be incognito, which I was clearly incapable of being. I still cannot believe I went to the airport in underpants and a cotton car coat and a goddamned silk scarf with my husband’s family name on it. It was so foolish.
I am such a fool.
 
***
 
Seventy‑two hours later, toting a new suitcase stuffed with overpriced luxury goods, a syringe of Ativan coursing through my veins, I returned to the marble prison that held my children, my husband, and me—and then I cried for two days. Jane and Henry (Jeanne and Henri to everyone else) came to my bedside. Their seashell fingernails pressed into my arms, their plump fists wrapped around hanks of my hair, but I did not look up or stop crying. I pushed them away. Go to nanny Lola, I told them. Maman is having a bad day. Maman is sick. You mustn’t see Maman like this.
 
They went. They always did what they were told.
 
I was ashamed, and I was heartbroken.
 
It was the closest I’d come to freedom since before we were married.
 
The mere proximity to the knife‑edge atoms of independence sliced open my scars, remaking me into a seeping wound.
 
I lay in bed for two days. I grew infected with sorrow and regret and hatred.
 
For two days my children cried, and I did not go to them. I was destroyed. I was destruction itself, a specter of their mother, a rotten wraith left in her place.
 
Yet, I was— finally— on my way to becoming something else.
 
***
 
Three mornings after my botched escape, the curtains were drawn. I opened my eyes to the sea, winking and foaming like it always did, under a bright blue sky and a thoughtless yellow sun. Puffy clouds floated across the horizon like nothing was wrong. I yanked the curtains shut.
 
I started the bath, turning the gold taps to scalding, easing under the shower’s thundering spray. I stayed there, water drumming on my skull until scrubby nubs of dead skin began to flake off, a snake shedding herself. I wrapped myself in yards of towels, then coated every inch of reddened skin in coconut oil, scooping it from a porcelain bowl. I removed the chipped polish from my nails with a linen napkin. Wasteful, of course, but I hated how cotton crumbled in acetone, found it viscerally disgusting. I was accommodated in so many ways, you see; I was precious, I was to be accommodated. When my nails were clean, the stained napkin went into the trash; when my skin was dry to the touch, I abandoned the towels in a heap on the floor. I strolled naked to the red lacquered room where they kept my clothes.
 
It was more holding area than closet. Thousands of dresses passed through there, encased in thick plastic, to be worn exactly once before being shipped to the archive with a sheaf of notes about what my body had done and said and who it had stood next to while wearing that dress. A pretense at accountability. The clothing that stuck around was more day‑ to‑ day but still absurdly impractical, appropriate only for a life of luxury in this seaside nation. I tucked a white shirt into seer‑ sucker shorts, laced up white cotton tennis shoes. Then I drew a net skullcap over the damp remains of my thinning hair and looked for a wig.
 
I chose a blond ponytail with heavy bangs. I ran a brush through the ends, my other hand gripping its foam skull, and walked to the window. I pictured myself opening the casement and falling out of it—past the blue cliffs and into the sea, the ponytail still clutched in my fingers. I saw the golden locks washing ashore, tangled, the lacy scalp catching on a rock, coated in blood.
 
Then I remembered my children.
 
The foam neck broke in half. I looked down to find it was my own hands that had strangled it into cracking. My own hands that chose everything.
 
I pinned the wig in place. Blinked mascara, dusted a garish swirl of blush over sunken cheekbones, then opened the door and stepped out into the hall.
 
The service waited there for me, but they are shadows; they have no depth, I don’t acknowledge them. I swept down the hallway, gliding across the silk carpets, past the floor‑ to‑ ceiling windows dating from 1355 and their heavy draperies, past paintings of other dead women and children, turning to the right and the left and then up some stairs to the playroom where my Jane and Henry spent their days.
 
The playroom had everything. There was a dollhouse version of the Talon, the prison we lived in, constructed out of the very same marbles, silks, now‑ extinct woods, and so on, with lifelike figurines of the families who’d lived there, including us. There was a zoo‑ quality habitat for a family of bunnies. There were two iguanas, both named Jerome. There was a wall of bookshelves with every children’s series on the market—Five Children and It and Narnia and Redwall and Boxcar Children and Ramona and Fudge and Harry Potter and so on—and a textured globe, mountains raised in relief and rivers glassed in with blue water, that spanned three feet across, dotted with tiny flags to mark the places that Jane and Henry wanted to go. There was a miniature drum kit and a babies’ baby grand piano, and a costume corner where the children could “shop” for Jane‑ and Henry‑ sized commissions from the costumers for the West End production of Wicked.
 
The playroom had absolutely everything, but at the moment, it didn’t have my children. I texted the nanny: Where are they? She did not reply. I texted Marie, the housekeeper whose car I’d stolen. She did not reply, either. I wondered if she had been fired. I returned to the hallway and asked the service about my children.
 
“They are not here, signora,” said Otto uncomfortably.
 
“Where did they go?”
 
“They are with signore,” he replied. “You must contact him.”
 
It was no use fighting with Otto. He was made of stone. I pulled out my phone and called Finn, who answered with a chilly “Pronto.”
 
“Where are my children?” I asked, trying to sound reasonable, and failing.
 
“We took a trip,” he said simply, choosing not to tell me where. “They’ll be with my mother until you are well again.” He paused, let out a long sigh. “You upset them very much. Henri especially.”
 
I felt pure shame, a hot burst of it, exactly as he intended. “There’s really no reason to take the children,” I said, but it wasn’t convincing. “Everything is perfectly fine.”
 
“You’re so selfish,” he whispered. I closed my eyes. “How could you leave them? To go to Saudi Arabia, of all places?”
 
Because I feel that much hate, I did not say. “What difference does it make?”
 
“Why do you talk like that?” he asked, painfully—a rhetorical question I refused to answer.
 
“You’re so comfortable with the conclusion that our life doesn’t belong to us,” I muttered, the words thick, my tongue numb. Dr. Sun had told us that it was possible to transition into a near vegetative state as a result of depression. Watch her speech patterns, she’d said to my husband, like I wasn’t in the room. Make sure she is awake at least twelve hours a day. Measure her cognitive abilities at least once a week. You don’t want her to atrophy.
 
Atrophy.
 
My favorite word: the destruction of a trophy.
 
“You don’t get to resent this life,” he sighed. “This is how it has always been. It is a gift.”
 
I tried pleading. “Please don’t take my children.”
 
“We’re giving you time to get well,” he told me.
 
“I am well. I’m fine,” I said, but it didn’t sound right. I wasn’t fine and we both knew it.
 
“I love you, Caro.” It was the first time he’d said he loved me in months—no, years. “I’ll be home tomorrow. I’ll spend tonight with them.”
 
“I love you, too,” I replied automatically, and then I hung up.
 
A moment later he sent me a text: Please eat some lunch.
 
I don’t doubt for a moment that Finn once loved me very much. I’d loved him, too—and I loved my children. I think about the days after Henry stopped crying, when we lay in bed with him and read aloud, Jane sleeping between us in her blue jumper. We drank black coffee and listened to the birds. The room smelled like baby shampoo and sweat, like sour milk and coffee. Is there a greater love available to us? Does God give us more?
 
The problem is not how much I loved them.
 
The problem is that I loved them at all.
 
There were days when I, too, thought all of this was a gift. When he gave me a yellow diamond ring and sailed me into this port; when I crossed a green velvet carpet toward a decrepit priest, ready to wrap us in the bounding lines of matrimony; when he locked a collar of pearls around my neck, led me down a balustrade like a dog on a leash, and we waved to ten thousand people; even when he shut the door on me for the first time; still, throughout all of it, this had looked like a gift. This life had looked so special. I would have done anything to keep it.
 
Now?
 
Now I would do anything—anything—to leave.US