And Hannah—Hannah who always said she would do something worthwhile and did—who moved from her management training job at the age of twenty-nine and is now senior advisor in a large global charity earning a salary twice that of Cate’s own. She didn’t sell out. She sold in. And it turned out her stock was high.

Cate, who has prided herself on living simply, finds she wants things. She wants a home of her own, a functioning relationship, a child, or at least the possibility of one, money for decent clothes, a panty drawer that is not a frantic tangle of odd socks and old department store briefs. Her wants proliferate, metastasize inside her.

The other two rooms in the shared house are occupied by people she does not really know. The house feels shabby—the salmon color of the kitchen, the terrible cheap carpet on the floor. The kitchen is no longer a place to gather. She makes her food and scuttles out again, eats it in her room, at her desk.

Cate tries to speak to Lissa about it, to spin it into humor somehow, but Lissa is preoccupied, on an upward swing. For Lissa there is hope on the horizon. Last week her agent called her with news of an audition. A feature film. A young indie director. A lead role. The director had seen her in a short film she made for no money last summer as a favor to a friend and called about her availability.

Lissa has read the script and it is extraordinary: fierce and brave and raw.

Somewhere, she knows, this one is for her.

Declan is away, and so Lissa practices her speech for Cate, while Cate sits on the battered old sofa in the living room, listening, prompting her when she stumbles, which she rarely does. She is good, thinks Cate, she deserves this. Her career will finally ignite, and she too will move up and away.

Lissa gives up drinking for the week before the audition, makes sure she drinks plenty of water, sleeps as much as she can. She takes herself off to yoga classes and returns radiant. The day of the meeting arrives. The director seems as excited to meet her as she is to meet him. He tells her he loved her in the short. She already knows one of the speeches by heart, and she delivers it on camera without looking at her script.

“Wow,” he says. “That was awesome.”

She does another speech, equally well. When she gets up to leave, the director envelops her in a hug. “See you soon,” he says, and she swims through air.

A day passes. Another. And another. Lissa checks her phone constantly. She checks that it is on. She turns it on and off. Cate watches her face cloud and darken, elation turn to doubt. By the Wednesday she is quiet, by Thursday belligerent.

“It’s gone to someone else,” she says.