Lucy slid her hands forward, wedging them between those of her mom. Only their hands were together, but she hadn’t felt this close to her mom in years.

“I didn’t think much about being one of only a handful of women doing what I was doing when I started out,” Abigail said. “I was young and smart and too headstrong not to just dive in and do the work. Back then, the company needed to survive before it could even hope to thrive. It needed great programmers, period. And I was great. I was a rising star. I mean, why else was someone at my level being brought to company dinners and investor meetings?”

“The double X factor,” Lucy said softly.

Her mom’s brow creased before she began nodding. “Right. Me and my C cup were proof that the company wasn’t a boys’ club. But it was, just like all the others. The first time an investor’s hand mistook my leg for his, I told my boss. He said the right thing—how sorry he was—and then casually added how everyone at the company did things they didn’t want to do for the greater good. If the company succeeded, we all succeeded.”

“Mom, I’m—”

Abigail squeezed Lucy’s hands between hers and kept talking. “I stayed silent after that, smiling while getting their coffee and taking their lunch orders, but I was no longer playing their game. I was playing my own. Because every meeting where I was the token female was a meeting I was able to attend that my colleagues weren’t. I learned things that would have taken me years. And so I kept on playing, tagging along to the strip club buffet lunches so as not to miss out on discussions of whose product line was the next to be funded. Not participating in late nights of drinking had career ramifications, but sitting at the bar had personal ones.” Abigail, who had been speaking at a rapid clip, slowed, her voice now almost hushed. “One night, things got out of hand with a senior male programmer and a younger woman. Fortunately I was there with another female colleague, and we stopped it. The young woman wanted to report the incident, and we agreed to go to HR together the next day. But I was held up by an emergency meeting. By the time I was out, word of a firing was spreading. Not the male employee, the young woman. The colleague that backed her up resigned a few days later after receiving a negative performance review.”

“And you?” Lucy asked, knowing the answer.

“The only change I effected was extracting myself from the scene.” She lowered her head, resting her eyes on their entwined hands. “I’m not proud of myself. Of some of the choices I made—for both of us . . . I was hard on you, I know I was.”

“Right back at ya.”