The Never List

New York Post , that he was guilty. The more she began to see Wall Street as an insiders’ club, with its own code of ethics that was very different from what Christine would have ever imagined, had she ever bothered to imagine it before. And what’s more, it was dawning on her slowly that her father’s illegal activities were par for the course for him and his business associates. And every time he saw her eyes open wide with that realization, he’d tell her to relax, that this is just the way business is done.
    But Christine couldn’t accept that. Standing on her balcony at night overlooking the placid interior courtyard of their building, she’d cry quietly to herself, understanding that the comfortable lifestyle she’d always taken for granted was built on fraud and dishonesty. She couldn’t look at their beautifully appointed apartment, their luxury SUV, or her closet full of designer clothes without thinking about the dirty money that had bought them.
    At brunch on Sundays at the Cosmopolitan Club, she sat with her mother in the crowded sunken ballroom, with its sparkling chandeliers, glistening silver service, and clinking crystal. Wearing the pale blue sweater set that matched her eyes, she gazed out at the elegant diners around her, all of them, she knew, listed members of the Social Register. Now she bristled at the way their practiced fingers effortlessly balanced the finest of china teacups and their frosted pink lips poised to form polite, tepid conversation. They presented themselves as so entitled, as if all this luxury were their natural right, but she wondered if they’d all gotten there the same way.
    Nevertheless, she had her pride. Each weekday she’d set out for Brearley with her head held high, not saying a word to anyone about her suspicions. She looked straight ahead, unblinking, when she walked past the reporters massed outside their building each morning. But in secret she’d lock herself in her room after school and read the damning newspaper articles they wrote, her eyes burning with tears as she saw the truth printed there in black and white for the world to see.
    In the end, as Christine would have anticipated had she had an inkling of how money really worked, her father made it through the experience relatively unscathed. His company paid a hefty fine to the SEC, and his high-priced lawyers managed to find a lower-level employee to serve as a scapegoat, thereby keeping him out of jail. The press coverage eventually died down, and her parents’ lives returned to normal, everything snapping automatically back into place. This sort of thing happened often enough in their social circles to be considered a minor nuisance, part of the game of business. A blip. An annoyance. A harmless setback.
    But by then it was too late. Christine knew the truth, and she couldn’t move past it.
    After struggling for weeks with the moral implications of her situation,she made a decision. She had less than a year left at home, and after that she would turn her back on this privileged life. She would start from scratch and make her own way in the world. She would never touch her trust fund or take a dime of her eventual inheritance. She’d pack up all her sweater sets and become someone new.
    Christine was proud of her resolution and would lie awake in bed at night thinking what it would mean for her. She knew it would be hard. Painfully hard. She knew that she was giving up a lifetime of comfort in exchange for hard work and uncertainty. But it felt good.
    She decided to make it a smooth transition, for her parents’ sake. She maintained the facade of the perfect daughter right up until it was time to leave for college, living exactly as she had before, joining the Junior League, attending the Gold and Silver Ball, standing at her parents’ side demurely, shaking hands when asked, saying please and thank you, and smiling at appropriate intervals.
    They never noticed the change brewing inside her.
    When it came time for college, her parents naturally expected Christine to continue the family tradition and go to Yale. But even Yale felt tainted to her. Instead, Christine was determined to make her move. She closed her eyes and drew a line on a map far in the other direction from New York City. She landed on Oregon. It seemed about right to Christine—as far as possible from Park Avenue as she could get without landing in the Pacific Ocean.
    Her mother was horrified that her daughter would be at