It’s crushing that most of the caption is in Korean. I some-how sense the words before they fully register. When I arrive at the caption, I close my eyes. In an image farther down, Rae is wearing a white blouse and a black cap and gown. A photo of her taking a photo in a mirror with a film camera. It’s the typical, enigmatic hot-girl dross on her main feed, scones cut out onto a marble surface dusted with flour, her in a party dress in a field. I lean back in my wicker café chair and resume lurking her profile, which I can do in plain sight because I have a privacy shield. I watch Rae, with a small scowl nestled above her nose, purposely apply a filter on her Instagram Story. A fact he glosses over when he calls himself a native New Yorker.

He does this without acknowledging that for him, moving home would be a few stops upstate on Metro-North, to a town called Tuxedo. “Can you imagine failing at New York so publicly that you have to ‘move home’?” He does twitchy little scare quotes around the last bit.

I draw in a deep breath of caramelized onion. Jeremy’s the only one eating a full-on meal here at Léon. “Mortifying.” He shudders, blotting his slick mouth with a black cloth napkin. Then again, someone once described Jeremy’s energy to me as human cocaine, and they were definitely right. Jeremy says I’m obsessed with other women. “I got them here,” she tells me in faultless English. She smiles with such indulgent kindness I feel worse. “I like your boots,” I tell her, needing her to know that I know, and immediately hating myself for it. Her boots are Ann Demeulemeester, the ones with hundreds of yards of lace, and her ragged men’s jacket, Comme. Her name is Rae and when she offers her cold, large hand, I instinctively search her face for any hint of cosmetic surgery. She has shimmering lavender hair and wide-set, vacant eyes. He whose arm is clamped around the back of the café chair that belongs to another girl. Choi comes a funny and emotional story about two estranged sisters and how far they’ll go to save one of their lives – even if it means swapping identities.ĭepending on where I focus and how much pressure I apply to the back of my throat, I can just about blot him out. From New York Times bestselling author Mary H.K.

Yolk mary choi