The Apartment Read Free

got pregnant with Morgan’s brother, Oliver, and then with Morgan soon after. She had regretted giving up dancing all her life, developed a serious drinking problem, and basically drank herself to death when Morgan and her brother were in college, and their father had died in an accident soon after.
    Morgan had put herself through college and business school, and had only recently finished paying off her student loans. And she was convinced that sacrificing her career as a dancer, to get married and have kids, had ruined her mother’s life. She had no intention of letting that happen to her. Her parents’ violent fights and her mother drinking until she passed out, or being drunk when they got home from school, were all Morgan remembered of her childhood.
    Morgan’s brother, Oliver, was two years older, and had moved to New York from Boston after college too, and worked in PR. The firm he worked for specialized in sports teams, and his partner was Greg Trudeau, the famed ice hockey goalie from Montreal who was the star of the New York Rangers. Morgan loved going to games with Oliver to cheer for Greg. She’d taken her roommates a few times, and they’d all enjoyed it, and the two men were frequent visitors to the apartment, and were beloved by all.
    Sasha’s family situation was more complicated. Her parents had had a bitter divorce, from which their mother had never recovered, after Sasha graduated from college and Valentina was already working as a model in New York. Their father had fallen in love with a young model in one of the department stores he owned, and married her a year later, and had two daughters by his new wife, which enraged the twins’ mother even more, proving that hell hath no fury like a woman whose husband leaves her and marries a twenty-three-year-old model. But he seemed happy whenever the twins saw him, and he loved his three- and five-year-old daughters. Valentina had no interest in them and thought their father was ridiculous, but Sasha thought their half-sisters were sweet and had remained close to her father after the divorce.
    Their mother was a divorce lawyer in Atlanta, and was known to be a shark in the courtroom, particularly since her own divorce. Sasha went back to Atlanta as seldom as possible, and dreaded speaking to her mother on the phone, who still made vicious comments about Sasha’s father years after he remarried. Talking to her was exhausting.
    Abby’s parents were still married and got along, and their busy careers in television had kept them from being attentive to their daughter, but they were always supportive of Abby and her writing.
    The four women’s careers had gone forward at a steady pace in the five years they’d lived together, Claire at both shoe companies she’d worked for. She dreamed of working for a high-end shoe company one day, but she was making a decent salary, even if she wasn’t proud of the shoes she was designing.
    Morgan worked for George Lewis, one of the whizzes of Wall Street. At thirty-nine, George had built an empire for himself, in private investment management, and Morgan loved her work with him, consulting with clients on their investments and flying to exciting meetings in other cities on his plane. She admired her boss immensely and at thirty-three, she was meeting her goals.
    Sasha was doing her residency in obstetrics, and wanted to pursue a double specialty of high-risk pregnancies and infertility, so she had years ahead of her at the same frenetic pace. And she loved coming home to her roommates for conversation and comfort when she finally got off duty and came back to the apartment to sleep and unwind.
    The only one whose path had altered considerably was Abby, who had abandoned her novel halfway through it three years before, when she met and fell in love with Ivan Jones, an Off Off Broadway producer who had convinced her to write experimental plays for his theater. Her roommates, and parents, had preferred her fiction and