His only tell was that he was staring at me like I was the only person in the room. And this was when I still had some baby fat around my cheeks and stomach, when I’d watched hundreds of hours of makeup tutorials but always looked 20 percent worse because I could only afford the CVS versions, when I didn’t know who Sarah Jessica Parker or Andy Cohen were and didn’t have the wherewithal to fake it from the get-go.

I knew after our meeting at the bar that I was a magnet he couldn’t stay away from. It was love at first sight, or so it seemed to him and everyone around us. I’d played the part he needed me to play—the bad girl who looks like a good girl, the one who can make his friends jealous, who can have his kids but still get dirty with him after they’re in bed, who will fit in perfectly with his family but shit talk with him after they’re gone.

I knew everything about him already. Graham Walker, twenty-eight. Graduated from Yale with a BA in finance and then an MBA. He works at BlackRock, where he’d managed to move up a hundred times faster than anyone else who graduated with him. He seems like a smart guy, but there’s no way that kind of rise comes without Daddy’s help.

From what I could tell, he’s basically dated three women. First, Tori, a brunette with a nose ring he messed around with in college. She posted more pictures of the two of them than he did—most of them involved her sticking her tongue out at the camera while holding a beer at a party. Then there was Caroline, an intern who started his first few months of work—young, cute, perky. Then Meg, a bartender trying to be an actress who’d inherited a Lower East Side loft in her parents’ messy divorce.

What I gathered from all of his past relationships was that he needed one thing: spontaneity with the appearance of stability. He needed to feel like he was living out his best years while appearing like he had it all together. Someone who could have fun with him, while wearing the appropriate clothes to walk in and out of his expensive building. Someone who could fuck him in a bathroom and then fit right in with his friends and family.

He needed someone younger, someone he could get validation from teaching; but someone on his level in other ways. Someone in his class.

On one hand, Lena was probably Graham’s perfect girl. I just got there first. The student surpasses the teacher, as they say.