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Informationen zum Autor Vanessa Lawrence is a writer, editor, and native New Yorker. For nearly two decades she covered the arts, fashion, beauty, design, and New York society as a staff writer for publications including Women’s Wear Daily and W Magazine . She has a BA in history from Yale University and an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Ellipses is her debut novel. Klappentext Biracial and bisexual, Lily learns to navigate high society parties, microaggressions at work and her relationship with her girlfriend after accepting a ride home from a fashion world business titan who can advance her career and love life. Leseprobe Prologue REPUTATIONS CAN BE a nightmare to maintain. New York’s inhabitants should know. For decades, they had lived in a city that supposedly never slept, an expectation that requires perpetual exhaustion. Not every neighborhood complied in upholding this image. On a Wednesday night just past two a.m., the Upper West Side residents along a stretch of Amsterdam Avenue were all deep into their Ambien dreams. A plant shop and a Thai joint and a liquor store were unlit. The bright pink neon sign for a dive bar was the only marker of the city’s wired status. Though no traditionalist, Lily was as wide awake as she had ever been. She stood across from a church on Amsterdam Avenue and stared resolutely at her phone’s screen. She willed the rideshare car she had requested to move a little bit faster. Lily hadn’t planned to leave the apart- ment at this hour; she should have been in bed like her fellow Upper West Siders. Tomorrow was an important day. But an overwhelming restlessness had built in the pit of her stomach for weeks, months; if she was honest, for over a year. This desire— this need— had compelled her out of her pajamas and into a pair of jeans, a camisole, dirty white sneakers, and a hooded parka to shield her from the November cold. This need had wrested control of her fingers, tapped out the address into the rideshare phone app. And it had instructed her to slip down the many flights of stairs to her building’s front door. Never before had Lily been so excited to dress for an evening out. This was the night that would mark Lily’s future days as indelibly After. Hours earlier, Lily had sat, cocooned in a blanket in the armpit of her sofa, and contemplated her notepad, cluttered with story pitches, display- copy ideas, and content rubrics. Her pen had hovered over the page, waiting for another spark. Her eyes had drifted over to her laptop screen, to the pages and pages of text she had dreamed up from the raw material of her imagination. This was where her mind yearned to be. Lily had shoved the pen and notepad aside and drawn her laptop in closer. Its keys had click- clacked with the vigor of her efforts. She had unwrapped herself from the confines of her blanket and tossed that out of the way, too. For months, Lily had subjugated her instincts to B’s directives. Lily had shushed her intrinsic reticence, the better to manifest B’s signature self- assertion. She had done all that B had commanded. In the process, Lily had watched the pointer of her inner compass spin frantically, as though possessed, until it threatened to snap off in the whirling vortex of B’s special storm. After so many sacrifices in the name of s elf- actualization, Lily had finally reached a decision. Her next chapter was six miles of dark streets away. She knew the exact words that would usher in the life that was hers to make. Lily’s fingers had flown across her keyboard. The page count on the document had grown and grown. With each additional paragraph, Lily’s posture had lengthened. A brisk energy had coursed through her arms and legs. When she had determined that she was finished, via an inner mechanism whose logic made sense only to her, she had closed her laptop and bounded toward her closet. Outside, t...
