She set down her pen and looked at me. “Charlotte, we know this thing is rotten,” she said. “But it’s still in our hands, we can still walk away. All we will have lost is some time!” I saw the martini in her eyes—the heat, the conviction. And a strange feeling overtook me then; it flared at the word “we,” a kind of vision—myself and Irene moving together into another kind of life: a life in which my choices were all different, in which I was different. The life of someone else. I glimpsed that woman rushing somewhere, engaged, engrossed, and a fat knot of hope snaked through me and jammed in my throat. And then she vanished. I was thirty-five. I’d made my choices long ago.