She sighed. “Lily, this is how I spend most of my time. I know you are just buying time before you start your career over and move back to the city, but me? This is all I have. If I have to spend forty hours a week in this godforsaken shithole, then I sure as hell need something to show for it. I need to have a little pride. I don’t know about you, but I feel like if I don’t make something of myself, I’m going to get obliterated. I’ll end up like my mother. Popping out a bunch of kids, making peanut butter sandwiches all day, up to my eyeballs in laundry. With no idea who I am anymore. People are always saying you have your whole life ahead of you, but that’s not true. If you’re a woman, you need to set yourself up. You need to make your path before you get steamrolled by everything everyone expects you to do. Kids, house, all that shit.” Her face was steely, but her voice had gone high and thin.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know what you mean.” I felt it, too, a pressure bearing down on my shoulders. Every day that I wasn’t doing something to build up my life was a day I felt hammered a little closer to the ground—smaller, more invisible, easier to step over and ignore. I had never heard Emily sound so upset. I thought of the day she left her student loan balance up by mistake, how that debt must be hanging over her head all the time. Emily, trapped here, when she deserved so much better, so much more—it wasn’t just me who thought a part of myself would die if I didn’t get out. “Want me to do a lap and see if I can find Luis?” I asked, chastened.

“Please. And here.” She pressed the scissors into my hands. “Make sure the orchids in the ladies’ lounge look okay.”

I started my walk to the back of the spa. “No brown edges!” she called after me.

Luis wasn’t in the back hallway or in any of the empty treatment rooms. I called the men’s locker room attendant, who said he hadn’t seen Luis for three or four hours, when he’d brought in the fresh towels from the laundry delivery service. I started on the orchids. It seemed like such a waste, with everything else going on. Clara, the missing women, those paintings without a painter. Those ridiculous, tiny scissors, doing a job that would never make any difference in the world.