Perhaps it came down to training. Erin’s MFA in poetry had taught her to listen for the melody and where it broke, but Zanne had gravitated toward a PhD for the joys of making an argument. She cared about who was enfranchised and who was not, who was up and who was down. The Stablers were up. Wealthy and scandal-free, they were famously generous, frequently the first to donate to the disaster relief fund of the moment, and they’d provided a hefty chunk of the seed money to establish the Genders United legal fund.

Behind the scenes, their generosity wore thin. The world saw a Holly Stabler who was always smiling, always helpful, but what the staff saw was a woman whose sense of entitlement was casually awful. The way she gossiped with the new staffers about the old, pitting the women, especially, against each other. Or the way she talked to Letty and Flora as if they were children. Her disregard for the staffers’ personal time, the “absolute disasters” that so often erupted at 5:00 p.m. Zanne sometimes wondered if Holly had seismographic sensors for drifting attentions, alerting her to the moment her employees began to think of themselves for a change, that they might like to get to the gym that night or meet a friend for dinner or tuck their children into bed.

Zanne didn’t think she was capable of liking Holly, let alone loving her like Erin did. Ted skated by on Zanne’s low expectations for men in general, and she knew enough to despise this quality in herself, but it helped her cash her checks.

The truth was that, even before this job, Zanne had been good at compartmentalizing. It’s what allowed her to toggle between her different selves—Fineman/Klein, production assistant/model, addict/academic—and made it possible to walk away from those selves that no longer fit. Once she could admit to herself that the only reason she’d pursued a PhD was to be a living rebuke to her father, the classicist, and once that goal was no longer reachable, she left the program without a degree or a second thought.