The salon was held in a townhouse on East Sixty-Sixth Street, and Tommy O'Sullivan had been practicing the accent for two years. It lived in his throat like a second tongue, which is to say it sometimes felt natural and sometimes felt like something he had swallowed whole and was now trying to cough up through his vocal cords.

Julian, said Eleanor Van Der Meer, pouring champagne into a crystal flute that cost more than Tommy's entire block in Brooklyn. You have been terribly quiet. What is on your mind?

Tommy looked up from the glass in his hand. He was standing near a painting of a woman in a white dress that he was fairly certain was not a Morett and was probably a Huntington. The room smelled like gardenias and old money, which to Tommy was the same thing.

I was thinking, he said, letting the Ashworth vowels settle properly on his palate, that champagne tastes exactly the same whether you are drinking it from a flute or a mason jar.

Eleanor laughed. It was a real laugh, the kind that came from somewhere below the ribs. That is either the most honest thing I have heard all evening or the most pretentious. I cannot decide which.

Let me know when you decide, Tommy said. I will have an answer ready.

He had come to this salon through a combination of luck, deception, and a Yale diploma he had purchased from a funeral director's nephew for two thousand dollars in cash. The diploma belonged to Julian Ashworth III, a young man from a distinguished Boston Brahmin family who had drowned in a boating accident in Newport the previous summer. Tommy had met the nephew at a pawn shop on Fulton Street where he was selling a watch he did not own. The conversation had gone in a direction neither of them had expected, and now Tommy was here.

Tommy O'Sullivan was twenty-six years old. When he was seven, polio had taken the strength from his left leg. He could walk, but with a slight limp that no amount of exercise or willpower could correct. In Brooklyn, a limp made you someone people moved around. In the world Eleanor inhabited, a limp made you someone who did not exist at all.

Eleanor's salon was a gathering of writers, artists, and people who pretended to be writers and artists. They spoke about Proust and Picasso and whether the new exhibit at the Met was conversant with the tradition of Impressionism. Tommy nodded and made the appropriate noises and occasionally dropped a name he had read in a library book. He was good at this. He had been good at it from childhood. Brooklyn had taught him that survival required performance, and performance required belief.

Over the next three weeks, Tommy became a fixture at the salon. He learned which wines Eleanor preferred, which poets she secretly admired, which conversations made her light up. He learned to laugh at the right moments, to nod at the right times, to look thoughtful when someone mentioned modern art.

And he learned, slowly and against his will, to fall in love with Eleanor Van Der Meer.

It happened the way these things do: in small moments that accumulate into something you cannot unfeel. The way she bit her lip when she was reading something she liked. The way she defended a struggling poet against a well-dressed critic who had confused cynicism with intelligence. The way she looked at the city skyline from her apartment window on the Upper East Side and said, quietly, I wonder if anyone out there knows I exist.

Tommy knew. He knew and he was the most unreal person she had ever met.

The crisis came on a rain-soaked November evening. A woman arrived at the salon claiming to be Julian Ashworth's fiancee. Her name was Vivienne Cross and she wore pearls and carried herself with the brittle confidence of someone who had spent years perfecting the art of taking what belonged to other people.

She had documents. She had letters from Julian's mother. She had a jewelry box with an engagement ring that bore the Ashworth family crest. She had witnesses: a society photographer, a maid from the Ashworth estate, a vicar who had baptized her and Julian both.

Eleanor stood between the two versions of Julian: the one on paper, who existed in ledgers and letters and family records, and the one sitting across from her, sweating, trying to convince her that he was real even though he was built on a lie.

Tommy, Eleanor said. She had never used his real name before. She pulled him aside into the study, closed the door, and turned on the desk lamp. Who are you?

He could have lied. He had lied his entire life. He could have improvised, conjured up a backstory as elaborate and convincing as the last one. But the weight of it, the two years of practice, of performance, of pretending to be someone else, had settled on his chest like a stone.

I am Tommy O'Sullivan, he said. I am from Brooklyn. I had polio when I was seven. I can walk, but I limp. I bought a Yale diploma from a funeral director's nephew for two thousand dollars. My real name is Thomas. Nobody calls me Thomas. Everyone calls me Tommy. I practice the accent in front of a mirror every morning for twenty minutes before I leave my tenement on Fulton Street. I recite poetry I do not understand and I nod at things I do not get and I drink champagne from crystal glasses and I pretend that I was born to this world when I was born to a world that does not want me.

He stopped. The room was quiet except for the rain against the window.

Eleanor listened. She said nothing for a long time. Then she said: I knew.

Tommy stared at her.

Not everything, she said. Not the name, not the diploma. But the person underneath. Julian Ashworth did not laugh that way. Julian Ashworth did not stare at the skyline the way you do, like you are trying to memorize a place you are not allowed to visit. Julian Ashworth was not hungry. You are.

She came closer. She took his hand, the left hand, the one that trembled slightly when he was nervous. I just wanted to hear you say it.

The Ashworth family found out through Vivienne Cross, who, it turned out, had no connection to the Ashworths whatsoever and had forged every single document in her possession. The family disowned her. Eleanor's family forbade her from seeing Tommy again.

They met one last time at a jazz club in Harlem, a basement room on West 133rd Street where the air was thick with smoke and the music came from three men who played like their lives depended on it. Tommy played piano. He had taught himself from a book he had bought at a newsstand on Atlantic Avenue. His hands were clumsy but his heart was not, and the music that came out was something raw and true that no Ashworth had ever produced in their lives.

Eleanor sat in the corner booth with a glass of champagne that was probably more expensive than Tommy's monthly rent. She watched him play and cried silently into her glass.

Afterward, they walked out into the Harlem night. The streetlights made halos in the fog. Tommy turned toward Brooklyn. Eleanor turned toward the East Side. They did not hug. They did not kiss. They simply looked at each other one last time, and then Tommy walked away.

He walked back to Brooklyn alone, the jazz fading behind him, the limp less pronounced than it had been when he arrived. He did not know why. He did not ask. He walked, and for the first time in his life, the walk felt like it belonged to him.