Chapter Nine

so much of the first two years of climbing the ladder in cable news was simply about surviving. The elimination burned slowly but consistently. I was the only person who remained from my class of interns. Most of the old assistants were gone, too. The ranks thinned as one moved up. There were fewer producers than assistants, and fewer senior producers than producers, and at the very top there were just two people: Rebecca, the star, and Eliza, the executive producer.

Climbing that ladder, I began to have a sense of my strengths and weaknesses. What I was good at: I was detail-oriented, thorough, consistent, reliable. My assignments got more interesting because I was trusted to carry them out. What I was okay at: I was still shy about networking and developing sources. It took a delicate touch, and more than anything, it took time. Jamie always reminded me of this. Trust was our currency with sources, and to gain that trust, you needed to put in the time. Weeks and months, not minutes and hours.

“It can’t feel transactional,” Jamie said once. “A source won’t just hand you a story. You can’t just call them when you need something. Like your Danner story”—Jamie was my sounding board on this, as on all things—“they’re nervous. They’re not ready to talk. But if you keep in touch, maybe someday they’ll get there.”

Trust was a thing we talked about a lot. It was a buzzword, part of the KCN brand, crucial to our relationship with our audience. At our biannual corporate town halls, the bosses talked about the importance of our mission. We were journalists. We had a role to play. In order to have a healthy democracy, one that shared objective truths, people like us were essential.

And this was what I feared I’d always be bad at: believing in that mission. It’s not that others were Pollyannas and I was a cynic. They were all cynics, but only to a point. Sure, the world could be an unjust and cruel place, but if you told the story, if you presented the facts, if you delivered the truth—that would help correct the balance. A fair outcome wasn’t guaranteed, but it was possible. There was still a fundamental optimism at work.

And how could I not agree with that? I was the case in point: a girl from a poor family, the first to go to college, now living in New York City and working as an associate producer at KCN, steadily climbing the ladder. No wonder the Bradleys loved me.

There were times I’d come close to believing it. If I played by the rules, if I did the right thing, if I put my trust in the mechanism of meritocracy and if I worked hard enough, I could do anything. This was America, after all.

But any trajectory can be interrupted. And my problem was Stella.

 

In June of that year, after dozens of shoddy pitches that gradually got stronger, my first story aired. The business beat had become my domain at Frontline, because it played to my strengths: I could spend hours combing through documents and financial statements, invigorated rather than bored by the dry facts at hand. When the story aired, I felt relieved: I could really do this, after all.

The next morning, Stella was in the kitchen, already showered and dressed and drinking a mug of coffee. The night before, when our group went to the bar and toasted me—Rebecca had also given me a special shout-out, after the broadcast—I’d been giddy with success, and Stella had been in a bad mood, sulking over her vodka soda. Now she held a yellow highlighter, which she ran over an article in the Wall Street Journal. Scattered across the counter were copies of the New York Times, the New York Post, and the FT.

“You’re up early,” I said. Pouring myself coffee, I thought, Stella knows how to use the coffee machine? “What are you doing? Is this for work?”

Stella nodded, staring at the paper. It seemed like an affect picked up from an old movie, this ink-and-paper highlighting in an age when everyone read the news online.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Is this an assignment?”

She looked up, annoyed. “Do you not think I’m capable of taking initiative?”

I held up my hands. “Sorry. I was just curious.”

“I’m trying to get better at this.” She sighed, capping the highlighter. “It’s like,” she said, “everyone just knows everything. In a meeting the other day, someone said—what was it—a tax holiday. And everyone in the room was like, ‘oh yes, of course, a tax holiday.’ What the fuck does that mean? Where do you even learn this stuff?”

She seemed genuinely irritated, which irritated me in turn. What I wanted to say was you learn this stuff by paying attention, Stella. You pay attention because you have to pay attention. The world isn’t going to unfurl itself for you. You have to pry it open. I wanted to say a tax holiday is a simple concept. The meaning is encoded in the phrase itself, and your ignorance is your own fault.

Instead, I smiled and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll pick it up over time.”

Stella’s initiative wouldn’t last. I was certain of that. It was a reaction to that brief moment when everyone was looking at me, not her. Her earnest newspaper-reading, the newly alert way she answered the phone, the speediness with which she ran scripts to the control room: it was a performance for my benefit, wasn’t it? Sometimes our relationship felt like one long game in which we were constantly keeping score. This was just another way for Stella to rack up a few points. She could be the eager-to-please intern that I had once been, too.

But I was wrong. Stella was putting on a performance, but it wasn’t for me.

The story of our friendship was always the story of opposites. Yin and yang in every regard. The pretty one and the plain one; the rich girl and the poor girl; the social butterfly and the bookish nerd. For every possible measurement, we stood at far ends of the spectrum. And there was one particular metric that clocked a vast gulf between us, that, for years, had allowed us to exist in harmony.

Ambition.

Every decision I made was designed to distance me from my origins. Stella, on the other hand, always knew that she belonged. When you already have everything you could ever want, what good is ambition? Stella never had to think about how to dress, what to say, where to put her hands, whether to laugh or smile, whether to act smart or play dumb. It came naturally, like breathing. It was like that famous line. A fish, asked how the water is, responds, “This is water?” That was life, to Stella. A medium one could move through without even considering what the medium was, or how that medium might feel to other people.

Until, that is, she got to KCN.

This is life? I could see the dismay on Stella’s face, during her early months of work. This is life? This uncontainable and roiling thing, chock-full of complicated ideas and obscure terms? Conflict, avarice, war, incompetence: when you paid enough attention, life had a way of showing its ugly chaos. For the first time, Stella didn’t understand what she was supposed to do.

And now what did Stella want? She wanted the thing she had once possessed, which had been wrenched away from her. That sweet, velvety sense of belonging.

The rich girl and the poor girl, the pretty girl and the plain girl. If we were characters in a story, Stella was the one you always wanted to be. The girl who is quick to laugh, good at making friends, charming to strangers, comfortable in her own skin; the girl whose beauty is equated with virtue. Her heart open and capacious, not curdled by desperate ambition.

Real trust, Jamie said, can’t be transactional. And what is ambition if not a constant transaction? Hard work—days, weeks, months—in exchange for more money, more power, more influence. I wanted to succeed, and that was my problem: people could see that desire. They could smell it. How can you trust someone who reeks of ambition?

Stella’s newly polished performance at KCN worked. The bosses noticed. It all happened within the span of a few weeks. She was promoted to assistant. She was invited to more meetings. People trusted her. Why? They knew she was rich, that she didn’t need this job. So she was doing it out of pure love for the work. Wasn’t that admirable?

I’d had more than a year’s head start on Stella. But by that summer, she was closing the gap between us, and her shadow was looming over me again.

 

Stella was a distractible driver, checking her phone and texting as we lurched through Friday afternoon traffic on I-95. It was a long drive to the house in Maine, where we were spending the week with her family. When we arrived after midnight, the house was mostly dark, but the porch light was on. The front door opened and a woman stepped out.

“Nana?” Stella squinted. “Oh, Nana, you didn’t have to stay up for us.”

“Don’t be silly, my dear,” her grandmother said. She was a petite woman, dressed in slacks and a cardigan and a string of pearls, her silver hair neatly bobbed. I shivered, still in the cotton dress I’d worn to work that day. It was August, but it felt more like fall.

“Nice to see you again, Violet.” Mrs. Bradley smelled like lily of the valley as she brushed a dry cheek against mine. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”

Inside, the house was as I remembered it: grand but relaxed, with dark wood floors and white walls. There were family photos everywhere, Oliver and Stella in Kodachrome, ancestors in faded sepia. The property was set far down the driveway, at the tip of a peninsula, surrounded by water on three sides, the neighbors invisible. The house sat atop a prow of land, the lawn sloping down toward the rocky beach. As we passed through the wide living room into the kitchen, the windows were open to the night air and the roar of the ocean.

It was inherently elegant in a way that made Anne and Thomas’s home in Rye look overdone. Anne, I had gathered, didn’t particularly enjoy spending time with her mother-in-law. Stella’s parents had their own beach house in Watch Hill, but the Bradley grandparents insisted that each branch of the family spend at least a week at the Maine compound, adhering to strict rituals of tennis matches and cocktail hours and dinner parties. The elder Mrs. Bradley was a far better Wasp than Anne would ever be, and this made Anne insecure.

“Did my parents already go to bed?” Stella asked.

“They were tired,” Mrs. Bradley said, placing a loaf of bread on the kitchen counter. “Did you eat? You look thin, Stella. Your mother doesn’t feed you enough.”

“My mother doesn’t feed me at all.” Stella laughed. “That’s Violet’s job now.”

“Oh?” Mrs. Bradley said, pulling a serrated bread knife from the knife block.

“Violet’s a great cook,” Stella said. “Among her many talents.”

“She is?” Mrs. Bradley said, with a faint smile that suggested of course she is, just look at her. “Well, Violet. You must cook for us sometime.”

After Mrs. Bradley had fixed us chicken salad sandwiches (awfully dry, without mayonnaise or mustard) and said good night, Stella opened the refrigerator. “Aha,” she said, holding up two bottles of beer. “Let’s go eat outside.”

As we left behind the radius of light that spilled from the living room windows onto the lawn, the night was dark and clear. The grass, when we sat down on it, was parched and spiky. Mrs. Bradley had said it was one of the driest summers on record.

“God,” Stella said, leaning back on her elbows and kicking off her sandals. “Aren’t you so fucking happy to be away from that office?”

“I suppose,” I said.

Stella laughed. “I suppose,” she said, in a singsongy voice.

“What?”

“You’re so serious. Loosen up, Vi, we’re on vacation.”

Stella pulled a joint from her pocket. As she sparked the lighter and raised a questioning eyebrow at me, I shook my head.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“Miss Goody Two-Shoes,” she said. “Here, take it.”

“No, really.” I pushed her hand away. “It’ll just put me to sleep.”

She shrugged and took a long inhale. “Your loss, loser.”

My phone buzzed against my leg: an e-mail from a senior producer, about a segment I’d been working on. I was typing a response when Stella reached over and grabbed the phone, tossing it on the grass between us.

“Hey!” I said. “That was work.”

“No phones at meals. Nana’s house, Nana’s rules.”

“Does your dad know about this rule? I bet you ten dollars we come down for breakfast tomorrow and he’s already glued to it.”

“Rude, Violet.”

“I bet you a hundred dollars.”

“Look,” she said, pulling out her own phone and dropping it next to mine. “Even though you’re being very snarky—here. A show of good faith.”

“Fine,” I said.

“Fine,” she said. After a second, she started giggling.

“How high are you?” I said.

“I got it from some skeeze at the gas station,” Stella said. “It’s probably laced.”

We lay on our backs for what felt like a long time. In Maine there was no light pollution, and the sky was bright with stars, so regular and dense that it looked like a dark colander studded with thousands of holes. There was silence, except for the roar of the ocean and the occasional rasp of Stella’s lighter.

My phone vibrated again. I couldn’t resist, and sat up to see what it was. The screen was alight with a text message from Jamie. I was reaching for it when Stella grabbed it first. That’s when I realized it wasn’t my phone—it was hers.

She curled over the phone, her body angled away from me.

“Jamie’s texting you?” I said.

“He’s funny,” she said. The light from the screen illuminated her smile.

“What is it?”

But she was standing up, sliding her feet back into her sandals. She bit her lip, then pushed a button and held the phone up to her ear. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she called back over her shoulder. “Take the guest room at the end of the hall.”

“What about you?” I said.

She was already halfway back to the house. “Hey!” she said, her voice clear and sweet. Then she was laughing. “Yeah, I know. I know.”

Her voice faded into the distance. A knot formed in my stomach. Jamie and Stella were texting each other? They were calling each other? After midnight on a Friday? I had always assumed that Jamie disliked Stella, that their friendship only existed because they had me in common. But lately I’d been working harder than ever, determined to stay at least a step ahead of Stella in the KCN hierarchy. I’d been spending less time with both of them.

I started to gather the dishes. Stella had left behind her beer bottle, her plate with her half-eaten sandwich. Her joint, too. It was smoldering where she’d dropped it, the grass around it starting to smoke. The orange glow of the ember was like a firefly trapped in the darkness, a dangerous remnant of Stella’s routine carelessness.

For a second, I thought about leaving it there. Maybe the flame would catch, ripping across the bone-dry lawn toward the Bradley compound. A horrible, magnificent inferno. A lesson to her. If I kept cleaning up her mistakes, Stella would never learn.

  

The days in Maine felt expansive. I’d wake without an alarm, the guest bedroom flooded with sunlight. Stella aside, the Bradley clan were chipper morning people, eating breakfast on the porch and chatting while they read the Wall Street Journal. Breakfast, like every meal, was a civilized affair. A glass bowl of fruit salad, a silver pot of coffee, scones and muffins baked that morning by Louisa, their efficient housekeeper.

Stella would wander downstairs in late morning. We’d go for a swim off the end of the dock, or we’d play tennis on the Bradley’s court, or we’d take the boat to the next town over. Occasionally we ran into someone Stella knew, locals Stella had befriended in previous summers. “Tenth grade,” she said, waving as she reversed the engine and we pulled away from the gas station dock. The manager of the marina waved back, beaming at her. “I blew him in the back of his car.”

“Really?” I said. He was scruffy and potbellied, and definitively not her type.

She put on her sunglasses. “He sold me coke. It was a fun summer.”

In the afternoons, we’d return to the house for a late lunch and then fall asleep reading on the shady porch, the thrillers and spy novels that lined the Bradleys’ bookshelves. As the day faded, we’d go for another swim. Mrs. Bradley had us gather for cocktails at 6:30 p.m. precisely. We had to be showered and dressed. The housekeeper would have dinner waiting for us afterward.

The first time Stella had invited me to her house, Thanksgiving of freshman year, I was convinced I’d never fit in. Pop culture had taught me how easily the poor girl embarrasses herself in the company of the wealthy. But this, it turned out, was a myth propagated by the wealthy themselves. Rich people love their shibboleths. They love to act like their language is impossible to learn. The truth was that anyone with halfway decent powers of observation could pick it up in five minutes.

This was how I purchased my way into Stella’s family: with good manners. To keep a toehold in this world required careful behavior. The worst thing I could do was to flout the rules. Old money hates, hates the nouveau riche because the nouveau riche haven’t bothered learning the rules. They’re having too much fun getting drunk and riding Jet Skis. They’ve got their money, which is more important than social acceptance. Anyway, if you give it a few generations, their money will look like anyone else’s.

It wasn’t so bad, really. The Bradleys were boring and uptight, attached to ritual and manner, but at least they were predictable. Not like my own parents, with their constant eruptions of anger. Here, as long as you followed the rules, you were okay. As long as the conversation was polite, it didn’t matter what was being said. Of course, this led to a lot of boring conversation, a lot of dull iterations of the name game. You know how old houses always look good? Whether mansion or tenement or saltbox, if it was built more than a century ago, it has a certain air of elegance. But when you think about the small rooms, the outdated layouts, the bad electrical wiring, you realize you’d never actually want to live there.

That was like the world of the rich. From far away, it looks enchanting. Up close, you realize the elegance is just a product of stasis. It’s easy to be tricked into thinking something is beautiful.

  

Toward the end of that week, Stella and Oliver and I took the boat out after lunch. It was a perfect day: the sky bright blue, the air hot, the sea glassy and calm. Hundreds of yards offshore, Stella cut the engine. We bobbed in silence for a while. I closed my eyes. This sense of peace, this calm solitude amid pristine wilderness—I’d admit, the wealthy did this well.

I heard Stella laugh. “What?” I said, opening my eyes.

“This freak,” she said, pointing at Oliver, who had just taken off his T-shirt. “Jesus, Oliver, do you ever go outside?”

“You are pretty pale,” I said. His bright white skin made him look like some nineteenth-century German aristocrat down from his schloss. Possibly tubercular, probably just delicate.

“You’re supposed to be the nice one, Violet,” Oliver said. He placed his sunglasses atop his carefully folded T-shirt. “Anyone else coming in?”

“I just ate,” Stella said. She lay on the bow of the boat in her bikini, her stomach taut and hip bones protruding, her slender legs crossed like drinking straws.

Oliver climbed onto the edge of the boat. “Violet?”

“Sure,” I said. When I jumped in, the water was so cold that it made my breath catch.

Oliver lay on his back, moving his hands just enough to stay afloat. “My grandmother taught me to swim. In the summers, when I was little,” he said.

“Don’t bore our guest,” Stella called from the boat.

“Don’t eavesdrop,” Oliver called back. He flipped over and faced me. We were both treading water, eggbeater-style. “She taught me and Stella. She drilled us when we got older. She’d ride next to us in the boat and time us on a stopwatch.”

“I can picture it,” I said.

“Nana doesn’t fuck around.” Oliver smiled. He took a precise satisfaction in swearing. Then his smile disappeared. “Actually, it’s a sad story.”

“What happened?”

“When she was a little girl, her older brother drowned. He took the boat out, the weather turned, and he capsized. He wasn’t very far offshore when it happened. If he’d been a stronger swimmer, he might have made it back. His body washed up the next day. She was five years old, I think. It’s one of her first memories.”

“That’s awful.”

“Sad, isn’t it? That’s been her obsession ever since.”

Oliver flipped onto his back. I joined him, spreading my limbs like a starfish. With my ears filled with water and my eyes looking only at the sky, I felt hyperaware of how far out we were, how deep the water was beneath me. Hundreds of cubic meters of water separated me from the ocean floor, but if I went motionless, the water meant nothing. Dead weight, sinking right to the bottom.

When we climbed back aboard, Stella was lying on her stomach, paging through a gossip magazine. “Why are you reading that trash?” Oliver asked as he toweled off.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard, Oliver, but I’m a journalist. I need to keep up.”

He rolled his eyes. “Violet, I thought you’d be a better influence on her.”

“Get fucked, Ollie,” Stella said lightly, using the nickname he hated.

“Don’t worry,” Oliver said to me. “This is just her thing. Whenever she fought with our mother, she’d go out in this boat and sulk for hours. Bobbing around and stewing.”

“I can hear you,” Stella said.

“It’s Pavlovian. This boat brings out the bratty teenager.”

“Or maybe it’s because you won’t stop giving her a hard time,” I said.

Oliver looked surprised. I shrugged. “It’s vacation. You’re being kind of harsh.”

Stella clambered over the windshield onto the deck of the boat. She smacked her brother on the arm. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s for being a paternalistic asshole.”

“Ow,” Oliver said whiningly.

“You should listen to Violet,” Stella said. “She’s smart. If she says there’s something wrong with you, there’s something wrong with you.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Oliver muttered, pulling his T-shirt back on.

Later, as the sun was sinking and the air was growing cooler, Stella drove us back in. She’d had her boating license since she was little, and she handled the boat deftly, much better than she did the car. She steered with one hand, her blond hair streaming in the wind. Oliver and I were sitting on the bench seat in the back.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” he said. “I didn’t mean to start a fight.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“No, it was rude. You shouldn’t have to sit through our bickering. But I guess we both revert to childhood when we’re together. I guess it’s inevitable.”

“I’m an only child.” I shrugged. “What do I know?”

“I worry that you have this distorted view of me. Stella probably says otherwise, but I’m actually a nice guy.”

Oliver looked genuinely distressed, and I felt bad. He was oddly old-fashioned, but he also had an endearing sincerity—the opposite of Stella’s cool sophistication.

“I know that!” I said, touching his hand. “Of course I know that.”

The waves had picked up, and occasionally Stella hit them at the wrong angle, bouncing the boat violently. She whooped with delight.

“Slow down!” Oliver shouted at her. “This is way too fast.”

“Can’t hear you!” Stella shouted back.

Oliver edged forward to where Stella held the wheel. He said something inaudible, and she rolled her eyes, but the boat slowed down slightly. As Oliver made his way back to the bench seat, Stella shouted, “Sorry my brother’s such a pussy, Violet.”

“She’s insane,” he said. “I have to remind her that not all of us have a death wish.”

“She’s too confident for her own good.” I thought of the smoldering joint the other night. “Maybe you should let it happen. One bad accident and she’ll be scared straight.”

“And get another lecture from Anne and Thomas about how I failed to take care of my little sister?” He laughed bitterly. “No, thank you. They still think it’s my fault that she disappeared at Christmas two years ago.”

“How was that your fault?” I said, surprised Oliver was bringing this up. Like anything unpleasant, that episode had become taboo in the Bradley family. Maybe it was the setting. When she ran away that Christmas, Stella had come here, to the house in Maine. She was right under her family’s nose the entire time. It was too easy to fool them. Later she told me that she returned to the city mostly because she’d gotten so bored.

Oliver frowned. “Who knows? Stella can do no wrong.” His tone was acidic, and his stare contained real contempt. “That’s the way it’s always been.”

Anne was waiting as we pulled up to the dock. She wore a bright Lilly Pulitzer sheath and held her hand over her eyes, shading them from the sun. “You’ll never guess who I ran into,” she said, as Stella knotted the rope around the cleat. Stella was surprisingly dexterous with the anchors and ropes and engine. In another life she could have been a mechanical engineer. Or maybe this was just how you turned out when you grew up around fancy boats.

“Who?” Oliver said.

“Ginny. Ginny Grass! I bumped into her at the market. Isn’t that a funny coincidence?”

“Not really,” Stella said. “She lives down the road.”

“Well, she’s coming for dinner tomorrow night. Won’t that be nice?” Anne said. “Violet. You must know Ginny, too, of course?”

“Of course,” I said. When Ginny passed through the newsroom, the most she’d give me was a bland smile. I was too many rungs down the totem pole to matter.

“I’m starving,” Stella said.

“Cocktails in fifteen minutes,” Anne said, starting back up the lawn to the house. “Hurry, please. Your grandmother doesn’t like wet bathing suits.”

  

There was a corner of the porch that Grandmother Bradley liked in the evening: on the western side of the house, looking over the inlet that separated the peninsula from Maine proper, the sky and the water flamed with a blood orange sunset. There were Adirondack chairs, a wooden table with fixings for cocktails, and a silver bowl filled with nuts. The bowl, Mrs. Bradley had explained, was a family heirloom. It dated back to the nineteenth century. When Mrs. Bradley refilled the bowl, she did so with a Costco-sized, generic-branded plastic container of mixed nuts. I’m not sure whether anyone else found this as funny as I did.

That night, Mr. Bradley was mixing a pitcher of martinis, and Mrs. Bradley was supervising. She took a sip. “Too much vermouth,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“There you are,” Mrs. Bradley said sharply to Anne, when she breezed in. “Anne, I wish you had consulted me before inviting Ginny Grass to dinner.”

“What do you mean?” Anne’s smile faded. “I thought you loved Ginny.”

“Tomorrow is Louisa’s night off. We won’t have any help.”

“Oh.” Anne went pale. This was serious. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I can take care of it. I’ll pick something up from the market. Pasta salad and corn on the cob. Ginny won’t mind.”

Mrs. Bradley emitted a mirthless laugh. “It’s a good thing Ginny’s mother is no longer with us,” she said. “She’s probably spinning in her grave. The Bradley family serving her daughter corn on the cob. My goodness.”

Anne looked miffed. “Well, times have changed.”

“Hmmph,” Mrs. Bradley said. Then she looked at me, and her expression changed. “Actually, I have a better idea.”

  

So this was how I spent my last day of vacation: cooking dinner for eight people. I went to the market that morning, Anne’s credit card in my pocket. “Spare no expense,” Anne had said, winking like she’d just given me a wonderful gift. She loved Mrs. Bradley’s idea. It was the perfect chance to show me off. Planning menus, cooking gourmet meals—look at how far Violet Trapp had come! I was tempted to throw the game. To remind them that they couldn’t count on me to be their performing monkey.

But I hadn’t gotten this far in life by being a spiteful jerk, so I settled on an heirloom tomato tart for an appetizer, followed by sirloin steak, zucchini gratin, roasted potatoes, and blueberry pie for dessert. At the wine store in town, I asked the clerk to recommend a pairing. When he asked about a price point, I repeated, “Spare no expense.” He steered me toward a thirty-five-dollar bottle of sauvignon blanc. I bought a case of it, threw in a few bottles of Bollinger champagne, and took pleasure in handing him Anne’s platinum credit card.

When I returned from town, Stella and Oliver were playing on the tennis court, which was right near the driveway. I hefted a paper bag into my arms from the trunk and squinted into the bright sunlight. “A little help?” I called.

“It’s match point,” Stella called back. “I’m about to finish him off.”

“Please? The ice cream is melting.”

She ignored me, bouncing the tennis ball with one hand, touching it to the racket and rocking back on her heels. She raised the racket above her head, and smashed it down in a powerful stroke. It was a perfect serve, the ball landing just shy of the service line, but Oliver returned it with a drop shot. Stella sprinted toward the net, but she was too late.

“Ha!” Oliver said. “Deuce.”

“Goddamn it,” Stella said.

“You’re both useless,” I shouted.

The steady thwack of their game continued as I carried groceries into the house. The Bradley family avoided the kitchen all day. By the time everything was done—the tomato tart and blueberry pie baked and cooling, the steak ready for the grill, the gratin and potatoes ready for the oven—it was nearly 6 p.m. Promptly at 6:30, I heard the crunch of tires over gravel. I was wearing my best dress, had put on makeup and jewelry. Tonight could be an opportunity to impress Ginny. To be charming and interesting, to lodge myself in her awareness as more than just another employee.

“How do I look?” I said to Oliver, who was mixing a drink on the porch.

He smiled. “Lovely.”

As I was about to say hello to Ginny, Stella swept onto the porch and cut me off, wearing the same ratty sundress she’d worn all day, her unwashed hair in a bun. This is the harshest advantage of the truly beautiful: the less effort they put in, the more they distance themselves from the rest of us. Stella managed to monopolize Ginny for the entire cocktail hour. The Stella charm offensive was at work.

Later, Anne clapped her hands. “What do you say, Violet? Are we ready for dinner?”

Everyone turned to look at me, including Ginny. She nodded, gave me her bland it’s-you-again smile. Grandmother Bradley took my elbow and tugged me away from the group. “We ought to serve the food in the kitchen,” she said. “I can’t stand buffet-style. Too messy. Then I suppose I’ll help you carry the plates out.” She said this last as if it was an enormous favor, not a basic courtesy.

But when his grandmother approached the table with two plates of tomato tart in hand, Oliver sprang to his feet. “Oh, Nana, you shouldn’t be doing all that,” he said.

“Violet can handle it, can’t she?” Stella said. “Here, Nana, sit next to me.”

I carried the rest of the plates out by myself, and twenty minutes later I cleared them, and then brought out dinner by myself, too. The group was too absorbed in conversation to notice my to-and-fro. As I returned to the table, I saw Stella turn to Ginny, who was seated next to her. She touched a finger to Ginny’s wrist. “What’s this bracelet?” Stella said.

“Oh,” Ginny said. She fiddled with it. “It’s a medical bracelet. I have a heart condition. A form of arrhythmia.”

“Is it serious?” Stella said, her eyes wide with fake concern.

“If I keep an eye on my diet, I’m fine,” Ginny said. “You’re sweet to ask, my dear.”

“Violet?” Anne said. “Could you please bring out another bottle of wine?”

It was so easy for them: even though it was Louisa’s night off, they didn’t need to adjust any of their usual routines. The dinner was perfect—the white linen tablecloth, hurricane lamps flickering in the breeze, dahlias from the garden, the food exactly right—but beneath it persisted a sour taste. This had been a mistake. I should have stood up for myself, should have asked for help. Where was my backbone? I was letting them walk all over me.

“Oh, my favorite,” Ginny said, when I brought out the pie. “Is this from the bakery?”

“Violet made it,” Anne said.

“You did?” Ginny said, looking at me with new attention. “It’s delicious.”

“Thank you,” I said, refilling my wineglass with a generous pour.

“My sister and I would pick blueberries all through our summers up here. We’d eat them until we were sick,” Ginny said, wistfully. “That feels like a long time ago.”

“Remind me, was your sister older or younger?” Stella said.

“Younger, by a few years.”

Stella smiled. “I always wanted a sister.”

“We were close, growing up, but I suppose we drifted as we got older.” Ginny twisted the stem of her wineglass between her thumb and index finger. “We only lived twenty blocks apart in the city, but I rarely saw her.”

“You said she used to work as a model?”

“Quite a successful one.” Ginny smiled. “She was a muse to a whole contingent of designers. She saw something in their clothes that even the designers hadn’t seen.”

“Why did she stop?” Stella asked.

“You know, I never had the chance to ask her.”

Stella paused, then said quietly, “How did it happen?”

“A few weeks went by,” Ginny said. “Two, maybe three. She wouldn’t answer her phone. I started to worry. The doorman finally let me in to her apartment. It was very peaceful, in a way. It was winter. She turned the radiators off and opened the windows. The apartment was cold. There was no smell. The pills were on the nightstand. The strangest thing was, she looked so alive. So pretty. She looked like she was sleeping.”

The candlelight caught in Ginny’s brimming eyes. From the distance came the roaring ocean. From closer, the sound of crickets in the garden. When Ginny spoke again, her voice was quiet. “I don’t tell many people about my sister.” She smoothed the napkin in her lap. “A lot of people don’t even know that I had a sister. But it’s nice to say these things out loud.”

Stella put her hand on Ginny’s. “It’s clear that she meant a lot to you.”

Ginny smiled softly. After several long moments of silence, she sighed and said, “I think you have a knack for this, my dear.”

“What do you mean?” Stella said.

“You’re very good at getting people to open up to you, aren’t you?”

My stomach lurched. Stella shrugged, but there was the slightest curl to her lip. Her supplicant curiosity, her personal questions, it had all been part of her plan. I knew exactly how charming and convincing Stella Bradley could be. And she knew it, too. How could I have been so stupid not to see this coming?

“If you can get me to talk about the dreadful situation with my sister,” Ginny said. “Well. I’m not exactly an easy nut to crack. And I think your talents might be going to waste at KCN.”

“Oh, but Ginny, I love my job,” Stella said, her tone sickeningly sweet.

“You’ll love it more when you’re in a position that suits your talents. I’ll make a few calls next week. I don’t see why we should be squandering this”—Ginny gestured at Stella—“when we could have you in front of a camera.”