“Elena! Are you still there?! Please!” she begged, openly weeping. “They’re going to arrest me! They’re talking about the maritime police! My friends left me! You can’t leave me stranded on an island in the Indian Ocean! I’ll die in a foreign jail!”
I sat back in my ergonomic leather chair. I looked at the sleek, beautiful architectural models surrounding me in my office—structures built on solid foundations, resistant to storms. Beatrice had built her life on a foundation of lies, and the hurricane had finally arrived.
“Remember what you told me at our rehearsal dinner, Beatrice?” I asked, my voice terrifyingly calm. “You told me that no matter how much money I made building office blocks, I would always just be a tradeswoman with dirt under my fingernails. You said I lacked the elite pedigree to truly understand luxury.”
“I was wrong! I’m sorry! I’m an old, foolish woman!” she wailed, clutching the iPad like a life preserver.
“You were right about one thing,” I corrected her, my eyes narrowing. “I do understand trade. I understand transactions. And right now, Beatrice, you have absolutely nothing of value to trade me for your freedom. Call your genius son. Tell him to sell a sculpture to bail you out.”
“He can’t! You know he can’t!”
“Then I suggest you learn how to make yourself useful to the Maldivian penal system,” I said. “I hear the laundry duty is grueling.”
“Mrs. Sterling,” the manager’s voice barked, stepping into the frame behind her, accompanied by a burly security guard in a crisp white uniform. “The five minutes are up. You will need to pack your belongings and accompany security to the holding office to await the police transport boat.”
“No! Elena, please—”
I reached out and tapped the red button.
The screen went black. The beautiful, chaotic noise of her ruin was instantly severed, replaced by the hushed, engineered silence of my drafting room. The quarantine was complete.
The fallout over the next two months was a spectacular, self-inflicted masterpiece of ruin.
New York’s insular art and social circles thrive on gossip, and the story of Beatrice Sterling’s abandonment by her friends and subsequent arrest in the Maldives spread like a virulent plague. Her three former companions, desperate to distance themselves from a criminal investigation, told everyone who would listen about Beatrice sobbing in a luxury villa as the island security hauled her away.