Then I gave myself a pep talk. Mrs. Casco taught me how to do that, too, way back in middle school; it was her advice for every new challenge I might face: Tell yourself you can do this, because you can. Tell yourself you’re the best, because you are. Tell yourself you own the room, because you will. Mrs. Casco thought I could do anything, and back then I thought so, too.

I stopped answering her emails four years ago.

But I gave myself the pep talk now. It was my pre-interview mantra: You’re still a star; you can do this; they’d be lucky to get you. I didn’t believe a word of it, but it was like “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.” The cadence alone had some effect, and when the doors opened on the thirtieth floor, I stepped off with a purposeful stride.

Another Christmas tree stood in the reception area of CDMI, this one decorated with a double helix of faux white doves. The white dove was the corporate logo of CDMI, and it appeared liberally on labels in fine clothes and emblems on sportswear. There were more white doves, real ones this time, in a glass-walled aviary behind the reception desk. They perched on the branches of make-believe trees and looked as bored as the young woman behind the marble-and-onyx desk. She was flanked by two female mannequins, one dressed all in white, the other in black. The receptionist was dressed like the mannequins, too, in black and white. She was Korean, I thought, and could have been a walking—sitting—advertisement for K-Beauty. Or maybe she was Japanese. Whichever, she could have been a model for one of CDMI’s premier labels. She was willow-thin, with full red lips and skin like glass.

The call to schedule today’s interview had come from somebody’s assistant, and I’d been too startled to get her name. So when I arrived at the reception desk, I asked for the same young lawyer who’d interviewed me last month. “I’m here to see Seth Salway?”

The receptionist’s long black lashes curled up like an Akita’s tail. They blinked. “I’m afraid Mr. Salway is no longer with us,” she said sadly.

I blinked, too. No longer with us? This was fate’s cruel joke on me, to kill off my only hope at landing a job. Or was it the company’s cruel joke? Maybe this interview wasn’t a smokescreen; it was a prank. “Oh,” I said. “Well, I’m Shay Lambert—”

“Oh, Ms. Lambert.” She perked up. “Of course. Please have a seat. Someone will be right with you.”

I stanched the flow of relief before it could spread through my whole body. I mustn’t let my hopes rise. I strode past the white leather banquettes to the windows and pretended to admire the view. The city was out that way, somewhere behind the wall of fog. Once it was the only place I considered working—Wall Street, the center of the legal universe—and I wouldn’t work for anything less than a mega-firm with branch offices throughout the country and a few international offices to boot. Now here I was, desperate for a job in the suburbs, for a position in a corporate law department I would have sneered at before.