Martin Rice asked if she had a business plan. He wanted to see numbers, which Marianne didn’t think to bring—in fact she didn’t even have them, had never had them, though she didn’t tell him that. Instead she told him that Frances was getting older, and what would happen if she fell, and he looked confused again, frowning at his notebook for a long time while she went on about retirement communities and assisted living and skilled nursing. Why didn’t she have those numbers?

“If you weren’t serious about it, why did you serve as the school’s director?”

That was the time, Marianne later realized, when she could have lied. Could have embossed, embroidered, embellished, burnished, polished, smoothed. In her growing anger—at Eric, at Mark, at Regina and everyone at GWGW—it didn’t even occur to her. She opened her mouth and told him about not having full-time work, about coming down here, reading applications on the beach. She talked about the terrible vampire stories and ridiculous memoirs, the endlessness of it all, how she’d wanted time to work on her own book.

“Your book,” Martin Rice repeated. He looked back at her bio. “Poetry? What’s it called?”

“‘The Ugly Bear List,’” she said, again without thinking. “This was my chance to finish it—and also get some inspiration.” She told him about the book’s concept, the shit list that changes you, the bears in your mind, and how she started the book around the time of the Tea Party’s insurgency, but had stalled out in her anger and helplessness. Her realization that no one and nothing ever gets off the list, that it just gets longer and longer until you realize you’ve spent half your life and brainpower simply keeping track of things you don’t trust, things you fear, things you hate. “I thought, maybe this will help me understand them. But then, they were actually really different than I imagined—all these complicated and smart and interesting people. I realized, the real ugly bear list was made up of people like Regina Somers and Tad Tucker. The manipulators, the profiteers.”

He nodded and took indecipherable notes. She kept talking, trying to make him understand.

“Are you a Christian, Marianne?”

“No,” she said.

“Are you a Buddhist?”

She shook her head.

“Would you describe yourself as spiritual but not religious?”

“I’m not that either. Whatever that is.”

He frowned at his notebook. “Do you believe in God, or any other higher power?”

“No. I do not.”

“Then why start a faith-based writing school?”

She said something incoherent about the power of writing to heal, to help, to make things better in your life.

“Do you believe that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“Why then?”

“Why?” she repeated.

“Why are you talking to me? You know you’ll probably be fired.”