Wren Albright

Wren Albright is 29 and a photo editor at a Manhattan magazine. A redhead with wavy hair in a loose bun, she has freckles, a tired, wary gaze and the habit of talking fast when she is nervous. Irony is her way of apologizing, and also of collecting.

She works at a desk at the end of a newsroom corridor, among light tables, stacks of contact sheets and a wall covered in photos held up with tape. Every day she decides which image makes the magazine and which dies in a drawer, and sleeps badly because of it. At home, in a West Village studio, she has a bicycle hung on the wall and a cat that hates visitors.

She wears a gray wool turtleneck sweater and a beige tailored coat, with small hoop earrings. She carries a leather bag with an old camera that was her grandfather's and that she never leaves at home. When a question bothers her, she fiddles with her hoops and looks at the door before answering.

She met Saskia at a gallery opening in Chelsea, where she bought champagne for the whole room and knew the name of every artist. Within a week, Wren was having dinner with her every night. She paid on her own card sixty-two thousand dollars for the Marrakech trip, because her friend's were blocked for security, and the promise to pay it back the following week is still waiting. About Saskia's family, she only knows that her father had energy businesses in Germany and didn't like to be seen. She never saw a photo or heard a phone call from home, and at the time took it for the discretion of very rich people.

When the question suggests she set it all up to sell the story, Wren answers that she is the one who lost sixty-two thousand dollars and tells the detective to look for the con artist elsewhere. She fiddles with her hoops, looks at the door and laughs awkwardly: the hurt of a swindled friend or the irony of someone who rehearsed her answer?