Mia paced around the bus shelter, trying to come up with some sort of action that could adequately convey how sorry she was for what she had done, for the person she used to be. Then it hit her that Amber also knew. Amber, who had just invited her into her office and asked her a bunch of questions about online advertising and had acted as if Mia was doing her a big favor. Amber, who would now always see the girl her employee, Lou, had described to her instead of the woman Mia was now.

Mia had felt so good after her first week in the Pink Bean. A few days later, there was nothing left of that ecstatic feeling that comes with finding a job that really suits you and working with the kind of people who make you feel like you’ve found a new home as well as a place of work.

And it was all her own damn fault. Nothing would be the same again now. Maybe she should quit and start over somewhere else. Or get the plans for the Newtown branch rolling as quickly as possible. Only Amber knew—and Lou, of course. Would that be a tenable situation? There was only one way to find out. By going to the Pink Bean every morning and facing the music. After all, that’s what she had made Lou live through every morning when they were seventeen.

Mia inhaled deeply. If the slabs of the sidewalk would be so kind as to open up right then and swallow her whole, Mia would gladly sink under the ground and never set foot above again. She was guilty. She had done all the things Lou had said she’d done. She was a bully. Had been a bully. But the adage once a bully, always a bully didn’t hold up. Not for her. Mia flinched whenever someone raised their voice impertinently at someone else. She always spoke up if she noticed someone was being treated unfairly, because she couldn’t bear someone lording power they didn’t have over another person. She couldn’t stand inequality—one of the reasons she loved the Pink Bean so much—and disagreed with everything her father had taught her when she was a child. Not that she saw her father anymore. That chapter of her life had been closed a long time ago.