There was a part of Alice that had worried the roundtable would be—what? An ambush, a hostile conversation: who are you / how dare you / what do you think you’re doing? Which was delusional, she knew, and yet she couldn’t imagine why else she’d been invited. All week she’d fretted over the event, how to prepare, what to say. The stress of it all compounded the morning of by Tara, who enforced a much-hated “open calendars” policy among her staff and had thus spotted the roundtable on Alice’s schedule:
“How’d you get on the list?” Tara asked, appearing right as Alice was about to depart for a breakfast croissant, sorely needed for her nerves. “I thought the roundtables were paused.”
“Yeah.” Alice cast around in case Sam or even Larry might be able to help. “Uh. I don’t know.”
Tara crouched so they were eye level, a hand on Alice’s chair. “Did you email anybody? Talk to someone in her office? Nicole, maybe?”
“Who’s Nicole?”
“Julia’s assistant,” Tara said, with sudden disgust. She stood and waved as if shaking off something dirty. Her dress was witchy, with sleeves that widened at the end; as she moved, the fabric brushed Alice’s hair.
Hours later, sitting in the Bowhead Whale, Alice would flash back to this moment. Tara’s face before her, the mix of longing and displeasure. Understanding it more.
Because she’d discovered that she quite liked Julia Lerner.
She was charming, and smart, and self-deprecating, the latter of which Alice was usually suspicious of, in particular from the beautiful and successful—but Julia appeared truly humble, had told an embarrassing story about botching a presentation to the board, after which she’d not been invited back for a year. And then focused on each of them in the room, asking follow-ups to their comments. The sheer execution of it all! To sustain that interest level, that energy! Julia made you feel special, seen—by the end Alice could even understand how she might have been selected for the roundtable, given Julia’s careful explanation of how they’d each been specifically screened, the invites going only to those with “unmet potential.”
And really, didn’t Alice have quite a lot of unmet potential?
Returning to her desk, Alice had an impulse to walk into Tara’s office and gloat, which was so outside of her normal behavior that she knew she had to remove herself from the area. She took her laptop and bag to the “contemplation space” on the other side of the floor. Finding a table at which she was halfway obscured by a lemon tree, she sat and half closed her eyes, reliving the last hour.
At first, as Alice had listened to Julia, she’d been almost depressed. Why even try, when someone else was always going to be better? Why stop buying lattes if you knew you’d never be rich? And in fact another participant, a twitchy product manager named Bea Schumann whom Alice thought Larry might also diagnose as having difficulty with social interactions, had asked something similar:
“What if you’ve got, uh, certain dreams but know you won’t ever reach them? Not all of us can be COO or CEO. It’s statistically impossible. So then what do you do?”
Julia had begun as expected. You are special, you can do anything, a life is very long. As with the rest of her answers, her words were both predictable and fortifying, like a romantic comedy: you left feeling hopeful, but without any practical knowledge that could be applied to your own life. At the end of her response, however, Julia’s face took on a pained urgency and she added: “When I was younger, I used to think about how happy I’d be if only certain things in my life could be different. And then one day I simply decided to change them myself. You’ve all got some issue nagging at you. The only reason you haven’t done anything is because you’re scared or lazy or think it isn’t worth the time. But who else is going to care as much? Nobody, that’s the truth.”
Julia was right, Alice knew. No one was coming to rescue her from anything. She had to do it herself. And in that moment Alice felt so inspired that she went into her backpack and retrieved the conversations between Logan and Chloe and mapped the route to his home.
It took Alice twenty minutes to drive to Willow Glen. She worried she’d be noticed, but the street bustled with a constant stream of gardeners and cleaners and nannies. Across from Logan’s house, a white van was departing, and Alice took its spot.
Freshman year at MIT, Alice had been paired in the housing lottery with a girl named Tanya Jenkins. Tanya was one of those girls with naturally dark hair who refused to bear it—Alice would later learn she had her blond retouched every three weeks, charging $200 to her parents’ credit card at a salon in Back Bay. Tanya often explained to Alice why her taste in everything from clothing to flowers was wrong. “That’s a McMansion,” she said once, when Alice pointed to a house listing in a broker’s window.
“A McMansion?” Alice repeated. They were on Newbury Street, having just finished lunch before going shopping. Alice had splurged, ordering the spaghetti carbonara and then finishing it all, since she already knew she wasn’t going to buy any clothes.
“Yeah. It’s like, a house that pretends to be fancy, but really isn’t.”
“How do you know it’s pretending?”
Tanya flitted a hand. “Something to do with construction quality.”
Alice wasn’t sure if Logan’s house was a McMansion. But it was the sort of place that as a child she would have found tremendously impressive, which boded poorly for it on the Tanya Jenkins taste meter: It was Spanish style, with multiple roof shapes, and loomed over the houses to the left and right like a bully edging out others for space. The lawn was square and well watered, the mailbox faux stone.
Alice stared at the house number: 424.
She’d told Jimmy once, about what had happened. It had been an impulse, on one of the rare nights they didn’t watch TV but sat on the couch and talked. Jimmy spent the first hour speaking nearly exclusively, outlining the next five years of his start-up—and then, perhaps realizing he’d monopolized the conversation, he pressed Alice to speak. Worried her own issues might sound petty, or boring, Alice suddenly reached for an old memory. As she described the boys entering the cleaners, threatening her mother, and then her own discovery of June with blood on her face on the floor, she could see Jimmy’s expression creep from indifference to mild interest to distaste—
“What?” Alice finally asked.
He hesitated. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Tell me.”
Jimmy opened his mouth and closed it. Opened it again. “I thought you were going to say she was raped or something.”
“Raped? Is that the only way it can be awful?”
“It is awful,” he agreed. “It is horrible.” But she could see in his face that he thought it wasn’t enough; that it wasn’t unlucky enough, or grim enough, to have been given such weight in her head.
On Alice’s lap lay an envelope addressed to Carolyn Schiller, into which Alice had neatly slotted the conversations between Logan and Chloe Kirkpatrick back at Tangerine. Alice sat for another minute, pressing the envelope flat between her palms. Then she opened her car door, walked to the Schillers’ mailbox, and set the envelope inside.