Long Island Compromise

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

the Fletchers’ neighbors, under the subterfuge of concern, could finally let their anxieties about their own finances and their own success and their own futures and their own legacies surface right in front of each other, and the ugliest part of themselves found them whispering, late at night, across the pillow to their spouses, not where was Carl Fletcher, or are we in danger, or has the world changed, but: Why not us? Why aren’t we rich enough to be kidnapped?

She knew by then that whereas she had long considered that her life was divided between before and after her marriage to Carl—between girlhood and womanhood, between poverty and wealth—now she knew that the divide had only begun on their wedding day. The divide was actually this vast thing that included their wedding and their children and ended at this moment, with her in a waiting room and her husband two hallways away from her, her future unknown, and that it started right now, the real division of her life: before the kidnapping and after it.