Prologue

      The Giant Adult Sandbox from Hell

      I AM TOO old for this.

      Click.

      At 6:00 A.M., my clock radio turns on, and music blares from the speakers, shattering the blissful morning quiet, the latest Beyoncé song reminding me that the weekend is over. Waking up on Mondays is bad enough, but waking up on Monday when you have a really bad hangover, the kind of hangover that makes your toenails hurt, is damn near impossible. Half in a coma, I dig around under the mass of pillows crammed against the dark green wood of my headboard, searching for the radio’s remote control to snooze for another blessed ten (maybe twenty) minutes. Mercifully, my hand makes contact with the remote somewhere in the upper right-hand corner of my bed, and I wave it in the direction of the nightstand, silently begging for the room to fall silent. That is to say, as silent as a third-floor apartment in Manhattan can ever really be.

      A lot of people dream about waking up in New York City. Hell, Sinatra wrote an entire song about it. Unless of course you are trying to sleep, in which case New York is where very tired, cranky, hungover people go to die. If you’re like me and decided to drown your Sunday-night anxiety in a bottle and a half of pinot noir and a pack of Parliaments while watching Law and Order reruns until 1:00 A.M., New York City, at six in the morning, is undeniably, irrefutably hell on earth. I probably should have realized when I rented my shoebox-sized apartment in the West Village for $4,000 a month that having a third-floor window overlooking Greenwich Avenue with a direct line of sight to a firehouse did not bode well for REM sleep. Since I moved here the concept of sleeping late—of sleeping in general—is pretty much one I have long since forgotten.

      I begin to doze off again, when the damn radio clicks back on. Now the annoyingly perky DJ announces time, traffic, and weather. “Better get going people. It’s another hazy, hot, and humid day in the Big Apple.” Clearly, the DJ didn’t handle his Sunday-night blues the same way I did. Or maybe he just liked his job and didn’t find excessive Sunday-night boozing necessary. I hear that some people have it that lucky.

      I give myself “the pep talk,” the same speech I give myself every morning before heading to work at Cromwell Pierce, one of Wall Street’s biggest powerhouses. You can do it, Alex. You can handle it. You will not let him break you. Talking to myself has become a habit since I started working on Wall Street. If this pace keeps up, by the time I hit thirty I’ll be certifiably insane.

      Much to my horror, I realize the industrial-size bottle of Advil I’ve been working my way through over the last six months is in the bathroom and, since I’m pretty sure my head is about to explode, I have no choice but to get up. I swing my legs out of bed, my feet hitting the cool wood floor. In minutes, I’ll be shoving my battered toes into any number of pairs of four-inch heels that make my twenty-four-year-old knees feel like they belong to a sixty-year-old woman. I shuffle to the bathroom, flick the switch on the wall, and experience a full assault on my eyeballs courtesy of the fluorescent lightbulbs lining the top of the medicine cabinet. I groan as I try to shield my contracting pupils from the blinding light, blinking until the blue dots disappear and I can actually focus on my reflection in the mirror. Blindness would be a welcome reprieve. Surveying the damage after a night of heavy drinking was never this