In those days she had been one of only a handful of women who held positions higher than assistant at the company, and it was quickly made clear that she was never going to be one of the boys. The men talked over her in meetings, claimed her ideas as their own, and when they bothered to ask her to join them for drinks or lunch, “kidded” about which one of them she was going to sleep with. When, after many such incidents, she indicated, finally, that she was tired of being harassed, they accused her of not being able to take a joke. She suspected she earned less than they did, but if they ever talked about their salaries, it must have been during their frequent golf outings—to which she was never invited, even though she had taken golf lessons for that very purpose. She wanted out nearly as soon as she got in, and thus she worked on building her own business—Pop!—nights and weekends, preparing for the day when she earned enough money with her own ingenuity that she didn’t have to put up with their sexist palaver.

She’d met Grant when the owner of Pop—no exclamation mark—a small, Wichita-based company, threatened to sue her. The man claimed that her popcorn business threatened his business selling custom-designed items—T-shirts, baseball caps, and the like—for fathers and grandfathers (Pop Pop was a subsidiary). Grant solved the problem with a well-crafted letter on his firm’s letterhead.

Maybe if he’d been a little less handsome she would have had the good sense to keep the relationship strictly business, but he was cute and affable. She wasn’t meeting anyone except the jerks at the office, so why not? He was so different from her other boyfriends. She’d had two: Geoffrey, a fellow athlete and merit scholar, whom she’d dated from the day they met in AP English junior year of high school until they graduated from UVA, and Daniel, a brilliant fellow Kellogg student whom she’d been with from the first day of graduate school until they accepted jobs in different cities. He’d wanted them to stay together, to have a long-distance relationship, but she said no. It seemed silly to her. So inefficient.

After she and Grant started dating, she got him to take up running and join a gym, and to stop partying with his old high school friends, who’d graduated but hadn’t moved on. She showed him how to style his hair with gel instead of a blow dryer, and went with him to buy a wardrobe that was more Brooks Brothers and less JCPenney. He was her Eliza Doolittle. All signs pointed to his continuing to develop as the years went by, gradually shedding his second-rate ways entirely.