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PART 1 The champagne was a 2009 vintage. I had spent forty minutes choosing it, because that was what I did — I spent forty minutes choosing things that would take other people forty seconds to appreciate, because the selecting was part of the role and the role was the point. Senator’s wife. Future senator’s…

PART 1: THE MARRIAGE NO ONE WITNESSED The man who offered to buy Sera Vance’s future did it at seven in the morning, in the fluorescent quiet of a hospital family consultation room, while her brother was ninety minutes into a surgery that cost more than she would earn in the next four years combined….

PART 1 The law office smelled of cigar smoke and polished leather and the specific kind of professional distance that men used when they were doing something they preferred not to examine closely. I had been in this building once before, when my parents filed papers for the bakery’s business license six years ago. My…

PART 1: THE PRICE OF SURVIVAL The first time Nadia Marsh heard the name Damien Varro, she was standing barefoot in a hospital corridor at eleven-thirty at night, holding a folder of treatment estimates and trying very hard not to cry in front of the billing coordinator. The estimates were for her mother. Stage III…

PART 1 The server’s uniform was a black dress and black flats and invisibility. That was the thing they told you at orientation — the clients weren’t supposed to see you. You were there to maintain the ambient quality of a rich person’s evening: the full glass appearing before they noticed it was empty, the…

PART 1: THE ART OF DISAPPEARING INTO YOUR OWN LIFE Mara Sullivan discovered that she was invisible on a Tuesday in November, at a table for twelve at her sister’s engagement dinner, when the waiter took orders from everyone at the table and skipped her entirely. Not rudely. Not with intention. He simply looked from…

PART 1 The rain came in from the west, which was not the usual direction, and arrived as if it had a point to make. It pressed against the windows of the Whitmore Hotel with the patient, heavy intensity of something that had been building for a long time. Inside the seventh-floor conference room, the…

PART 1: THE COST OF BEING DELIVERED Isadora Ferrante learned the price of her obedience the morning of her wedding. It was not a number. It was a memory. She was twenty-two years old, standing in the white marble bathroom of her childhood bedroom, looking at herself in the mirror while her mother pinned the…

PART 1: THE PATIENT WHO DIDN’T NEED HER Nora Callahan found out she had the job and the eviction notice on the same morning. Both arrived by email, which was how life delivered its most important news now — no ceremony, no warning, just a subject line and a number that either saved you or…

PART 1: THE GIRL WHO WASN’T SUPPOSED TO MATTER The first time Elara Ward understood her place in the Hartwell household, she was eleven years old and bleeding from a cut on her palm from a broken dish. She had dropped it. An accident. The kind small children have when they are tired and frightened…