“How much more honest can I be, Gaby? You read what I wrote. Okay? I get it. This job is slimy sometimes. I wish it wasn’t. I wish I worked for Oprah, and I could meditate on my lunch hour and take meetings under an oak tree. But I can’t. I work here, and working here saved my life. Maybe you can’t understand that, how a job—even a dumb one that you’re good at, that people need you to be good at, and will pay you very well to be good at—can save your life. Maybe you haven’t needed saving like I have. Lucky you.”

A car came around the bend in the road. It was Holly’s.

“Oh, thank God,” Zanne said under her breath.

Holly was at the wheel, but a man Zanne had never seen before was in the passenger seat. She stopped at the gate and the man got out. He was bald and thick with muscle laid over fat, dressed in a black T-shirt, jeans, and boots. Holly drove through the gate, and a silver sedan that had been behind her slowed to a crawl and stopped in the middle of the road. The driver wore a crumpled brown suit and looked like he smoked about two packs a day. Mark hopped out of the back and the bald guy got in the front seat. Then the sedan drove away.

“Fuuuuck,” Zanne said. Mark actually did it—he activated the extraction plan. Zanne had officially lost control of the situation and she’d been outflanked. Mark gave her a quick wave and then sprinted up the driveway after Holly.

Gaby sucked her teeth. She kicked a fig into the road. “This job is fucking with you. The money they dangle over you. He’s never going to listen—not to you and definitely not to someone like me. People like him keep people like us around to prove to everyone else they’re good. You know, Look at all the opportunities he’s providing. But it’s not an opportunity if you’re wearing shackles.”

“Right. The golden handcuffs.”

“No, shackles. I mean, maybe for you they’re golden handcuffs, and even for me, with my white father and my parents’ money, my education. But you think Flora and Letty feel free? Tiptoeing around that house in spotless pink uniforms? You have to stop cleaning up his messes. You have to start living your own life.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do! With you!”

Gaby shook her head. “Don’t you see? Don’t you realize that you’re the work wife?”

Zanne snorted. “I’m not attracted to Ted.”

“Not sexually. But for some reason, you care what he thinks. Right now, in the middle of whatever this disappointing thing is you just learned about him, you still want to protect him. No wonder he made you chief.”