Page 31 of The Note

Are you really acting like I’m threatening you right now? You’re gonna panic like that?He stepped toward her. She had replayed it so many times in her head. She was sure of it. He definitely moved in her direction. That was the only reason she would have reached for her phone.

STOP! I’M CALLING THE POLICE.

Okay, of course you are. You know how that ends for me? Are you serious?She began to scream that awful scream—the one that got snipped and clipped and replayed and memed.

It wasn’t until May saw the video that she realized the voice she had heard behind her asshe tried to put distance between herself and Darren Foster, the words she still had nightmares about—Go back to you where you came from, Chink bitch—didn’t belong to Foster. That vile command had come out of the maskless mouth of a white man with his knees spread wide on the bench beneath the poster reminding passengers that masks were still required within the transit system.

But the video made it clear that May leapt to the conclusion that Foster was the culprit. She became yet another woman to weaponize her power as a woman to sic the police on an African American man. She had issued a statement of apology that theTimespublished, and had tried to reach Foster personally to explain, but the video was more powerful than any words she could offer. The fact remained that May was the one lecturing strangers about masks and then screaming like a murder victim when no one was actually hurting her. And she had topped it all off by writing an op-ed claiming to have been the victim of a hate crime.

The hashtag #AsianDAKaren was a top Twitter trend for nearly a week.

May knew the video must have reached a tipping point in the zeitgeist when even her tech-phobic mother found out about it thanks to some blabbermouth at her church. The frequency of her alreadyfrequent phone calls tripled overnight. She said she was “worried” about May to the point where May had to talk her out of flying to New York, but more than anything, she seemed disappointed.

It’s just not like you to be like that.

You need to explain to everyone you weren’t yourself.

What got into you?As if an invasive entity had taken over her brain, voice, and body, because it was so unthinkable that May might lose her temper, or make a mistake, or lash out in a moment of rage.

Josh was more supportive. He made it possible for her to hunker down in the privacy of their apartment, handling the dog walks, running all their errands, and becoming her conduit to the outside world. He even offered to max out his credit cards to hire a publicity consultant specializing in crisis management.

And the retweets continued. She became the latest example of what she learned the internet called a Milkshake Duck—a person lauded online for some admirable characteristic who turns out to be horrible in real life. The guy with the hilarious Twitter thread about a piece of shrimp in his cereal gets called out for being an abuser. The “hot cop” who went viral while helping storm victims resigns when his anti-Semitic Facebook posts are discovered. The camper who jumped into therapids to rescue a drowning dog is revealed to be a deadbeat dad.

The idea behind the meme is that the whole internet might fall in love with something fabulous like an adorable baby duck who loves to drink milkshakes, but then once the milkshake-loving duck comes under scrutiny, it turns out the duck’s just another piece of crap.

May thought of the meme itself as a duck/rabbit, that famously ambiguous image that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein used it to describe two kinds of “seeing.” From one perspective, the Milkshake Duck was a misanthropic trope: Don’t meet your heroes, as they say. Even the delightful duck might be awful, because you can’t vouch for anyone in this world.

But from May’s perspective, it could also be seen as an observation about the current culture, fueled by social media. Put yourself out there on the internet, and the mob will find a reason to take you down, even if you’re just a sweet baby duck trying to eat some ice cream.

May’s phone had rung in her hand almost immediately after she hit the final button to confirm that, yes, she really did want to delete her Twitter account. She was terrified it would be the dean of the law school, calling to revoke her job offer. Instead, it was Lauren, who gave her exactlywhat she needed at that moment, asking if she was okay, promising her it would be all right. She, too, knew what it was like to be judged and vilified by total strangers.

Those strangers don’t know your truth. Only you do.

Unlike her mom and Josh, Lauren didn’t judge, and she didn’t try to solve May’s problems. She was the one to convince May that Twitter wasn’t the real world, going so far as to send her the statistics to back it up. May didn’t need her 780 SAT math score to realize that only a fraction of the population had heard anything about either her op-ed or the unwanted attention that had fallen upon her in the aftermath.

And then Lauren had reached out to Kelsey, and May had both of them to remind her that life does move on. By the time the law school semester started, even her students didn’t seem to care that the brand-new professor was the same woman some of them must have heard about over the summer. From what May could tell, they had their hands full adjusting to classes after two years of virtual education and were only interested in material that would be on their final, although they did seem fascinated whenever she shared an edgy story from trial practice. If she had to guess, they didn’t expect anything about Professor Hanover to be edgy.

The entire subway incident, all things considered, was behind her. But it wouldn’t remain that way—not if it all happened again, this time because she couldn’t leave a man alone for stealing a parking spot.

18

Carter Decker wasn’t sure he wanted to trust the instincts of some Manhattan DA investigator he didn’t know from Adam.

According to the investigator he’d just spoken to, Hanover was a busybody by nature. In his words, “like a dog with a bone when she can’t get an answer about something nagging her.” Maybe that’s exactly the kind of person who might go looking for a missing person on her own, just because he may or may not have been one half of a couple she saw bickering on the street, but the whole thing felt off to Carter.

He’d seen the video when he initially googledher. It was the first hit in the search results, before her bio on the Fordham Law School website, before the op-ed that she had published about the subway incident. The woman seemed very tightly wound, but he couldn’t see any connection to David Smith’s disappearance, if he was even willing to call it that yet. The fact that Smith’s cell phone last pinged on Saturday definitely had him worried, but he could also imagine a guy overloaded with work calls and a prying mother letting his battery go conveniently dead for a few days.

His thoughts were interrupted by the buzz of his own phone. Another 401 area code. He was beginning to think that David Smith’s mother had sent his number to the entire state of Rhode Island. “Decker.”

The caller said his name was Simon Bowlby, asked if Decker was the detective working on the David Smith case, and then explained that an attorney named Anthony Walker had suggested he call about his friend David. “I haven’t talked to Dave since Thursday night. We got beers after work and watched the Red Sox game. He was planning to leave the next morning for the Hamptons with Christine.”

He finally had a name for the plus-one. Walker had confirmed that Smith’s phone was company-issued but was still working on getting the call records. “You have a last name for Christine? A contact number?”

“No. I’ve only met her a few times when we’ve hung out in groups. She’s in marketing or something like that. Pretty sure she went to Colby, but I don’t know how I know that. Oh, she was wearing a Colby baseball cap at the brewery and I asked her. So yeah, Colby.”

“So is she Dave’s girlfriend or what?” Carter asked.

“I mean, sort of? Like he sees her pretty regularly, but it’s not exclusive.”

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