Deep down she knew her position with Dru hadn’t been sustainable. There were people who stayed on as lifelong assistants, but they worked for people who were kind and paid them enough to do crazy stuff like get married and have children of their own. Dru didn’t want Amanda to have a future. Dru didn’t even want Amanda to have friends, or the slightest shred of happiness. Still she never expected their end to go down the way it had. She never expected to quit in such a spectacularly stupid fashion. No, she’d been right to quit. The things Dru had said, the things Dru wanted from Sam and his family, there was no way Amanda could sit by and encourage that to happen. She sure as hell wasn’t going to hand her own boyfriend off to another woman like a used baseball glove.

The screwed-up things Dru had said to her about how ridiculous she was to think that Sam would really be with her, out in the open, loving—or at least liking—her for the world to see, had hurt. It hurt a lot. She knew then that while Dru was in part a result of shitty parenting, Dru was an adult now and Dru made a lot of adult decisions to treat others like shit. Sticking by her signaled that Amanda was willing to overlook her behavior. No, it was an affirmation that she supported her behavior. The way Dru spoke to her wasn’t shocking. It was textbook Dru Anastasia.

Over time she’d actually gotten worse. She’d been a brat when Amanda started working for her. She’d escalated to full on dickhead and Amanda couldn’t stick around and cheer her on. She tried to picture what it would be like to show up to work day after day with Dru knowing that she and Sam were an item. Dru would do her best to continue to torture her about the impossibility of them as a couple. The impossibility of Sam seeing her as not only an equal, but an object of his affection and desire.

She was right to quit, but maybe she should have given her two weeks’ notice. Maybe a month so she could at least start looking for another job. And at least part of Dru’s parting prophecy was true. She was out of work. And worse, she couldn’t get in touch with Sam. A fight with her former employer wasn’t reason enough to put in a 9-1-1 call to Bali, but still. She wanted to tell him what had happened. She wanted to let him know that Dru was now one of the handful of people who knew about them.