“I ask myself that question a lot. Once everything happened, it was like a deluge of malice. I hadn’t experienced that before.” My tongue feels heavy in my mouth, the spritz and glass of wine already dulling my senses, any inhibitions that I would have had even in a typical drunken scenario slackened by the bizarreness of the situation. “I’m a woman, I guess. Isn’t that enough? I’m a bitch and I’m a woman. Or I’m a bitch because I’m a woman. Odilie, she seemed so wholesome. They needed me to be her foil, I guess. There wasn’t too much to use against me from my adulthood. I’m a hard worker. I stayed mostly behind the scenes at Magdelena, which of course didn’t stop people from saying that I was a nightmare to work with. It’s not like I’m famously a villain in any kind of a public sector. But I guess more people than I realized had a vendetta against me in high school, harbored resentments. Old classmates reached back to my childhood, to my earlier days, when I was a bit of a classic mean girl. And then other people whom I’d presumably rubbed the wrong way as an adult piled on.” I shrug, as if saying all this aloud nonchalantly was routine for me. The day, its meaning, is growing hazy around the edges. Page and her familiar face bobbing along with the rest of it, a landscape of a dream whose peripheries I know, but whose subject is still a mystery, forcing me to fumble through it until I jerk awake.

The waiter comes and brings our drinks. I twist my lime into the red juice.

“It’s odd that they didn’t do the same with Odilie. But I guess it wasn’t needed, right? She was pregnant and then dead. She was already a martyr,” Page says. There’s the slightest tinge to her voice, a hardness that I can’t quite place, that maybe my filmy mind is creating out of nothing. “You know his lawyers are still obstructing anyone from doing an investigative documentary or a podcast.” She knocks back her drink with the ease that she drank the others, the ice clinking against her glass as she sets it back down on the table. “What was he like? In the brief period you knew him?”