Anita ran a hand through her bob as though to pull out tangles, but there were none. “I was also mad because I thought my mother pushed me too hard when I was already running myself ragged. And then I thought she forgave you too fast, and that she was doing this thing my grandma did with her kids, like, favoring boys.”

The bartender shook out a new bowl of peanuts. I crammed some into my mouth. “You never told anyone?”

She chewed her bottom lip vigorously. I waited for a zipper of blood to appear on that plump mouth. “I don’t really like having to sit with myself. But I had to go to therapy eventually, and I talked around it there, got some emotional vocabulary, which isn’t a bad thing. And my ex knew the non-gold parts.”

“When did, ah, when did you break up?”

“Which time?” she laughed. “He moved out earlier this year. For good, finally. But we’d been on and off since college.”

“What’s his deal?” My curiosity about how Anita had spent the past ten-odd years overwhelmed the sense of violation that came with hearing about a guy who’d been in and out of her bed for half that decade. And anyway, I had come to understand, through those many beer-foamy make-outs, that telling a story of who you were before a particular moment is a romantic activity, because the moment of the telling, the moment of you two sitting with each other, is the endpoint to the narrative, and that makes you, the hearer, indispensable to the story.

“He’s older,” she said. “From this oligarch-rich family. They split their time between Delhi and London. The wealthy Indian-Indians at Stanford had none of the baggage of us ABCDs. They’re, frankly, bored of all our identity shit. You couldn’t call him fresh off the boat—he was fresh off a private jet, you know? Jimmy—that’s his name, Jimmy—just waltzed into Stanford and owned the place. Me along with it. He believed in me, you know? I was overwhelmed there—everyone was so smart—and he still looked at me and said I could be someone. He just handled life for me. He’d read my papers, fix my résumé, help me get job interviews—we actually worked at the same venture firm. And I knew I’d only been hired because of him. He gave me pictures of the world in a way my parents never could….”