The perversity of woman is so great as to be incredible even to its victims.

I remember that quote from college. The great philosopher Caro. Deep in the stacks of the State U. library, I found it in a dust-gilded book from the nineteenth century, its leather slipping from its cover like old skin. Sexual Aberrations in the Criminal Female.

It was filled with revelations. For instance, the most intelligent female criminals favor poison. And the blame for women’s crimes must sit squarely on the shoulders of their mothers. Want of maternal affection, he called it.

But what I remember most is the story of an epileptic tattooed prostitute who murdered her lover, then embroidered his epaulets on her own shirt, declared herself “chieftainess of the brigands,” and terrorized her small Italian town.

Women have always been far less violent than men, the author conceded. The facts speak for themselves.

But why, then, he asked, are women so much more ferocious in their violence?

It has always seemed to me that the answer lies in the question.

Here we are, snug in a corner booth. It’s a restaurant like in old paintings, crimson-flocked wallpaper, heavy drapery with dustless fringe. Round, red booths like tight cherries and pristine white tablecloths with napkins so heavy they feel like a psalm book across your lap. And no sound from outside or anywhere. That must be the thing when you have money, I think. You never have to hear anything you don’t want to, ever.

Across the table, Diane is asking smart-girl questions in her low voice. About the first round of study participants, about which of the neuros will be participating and did she see the article on brain-derived neurotrophic factor and stress paradigms in the latest Biological Psychiatry?

“Look at you. Straight out of the gate,” Dr. Severin says, smiling and not answering any of the questions. “We won’t waste your time like Freudlinger did. Is he still hot on the ASR?”

“We used it on his cocaine study,” Diane replies. “But only with animals.”

“Giving foot shocks to rats,” Severin says, raising one long hand for the waiter. “Sounds like Freudlinger.”

I sit there, mindlessly flipping the pages of the thick, bound menu, crêpes Suzette and chicken à la champagne and iced cracked crab. The hushed room, the passing waiters in their black waistcoats and glossy black shoes. I keep thinking about Diane’s internship with Dr. Severin, what it means. Maybe nothing. Maybe not.

At the next table, a trio of white-haired businessmen are hunched over steaks quivering on their plates. Instead of sawing, all of them seem to stroke the meat toward themselves, never switching hands, never scraping the plate, never doing anything I’d need to do to make eating happen.

Their plates pooled red.

It makes me think of when I was little, my dad had that job selling watermelon at the county fair. He’d dig a chunk out to show passersby how red its meat was. Plugging, he called it. Tender as a…well, you know, he’d say to the men, and I’d always ask him, Tender as what? As what?

Tender as your mama’s heart. He’d wink.

“I have to wash my hands,” I say abruptly, rising.

Diane and Dr. Severin look at me, surprised.

At the gilt-rimmed sink in the ladies’ room, I run the hot water over my hands. A sweet-smelling older woman stands in front of a gold-rimmed tray of colored tonics, lotions, mouthwash, tampons stacked like cigarettes. When I turn the water off, she gives me a hand towel, soft as a baby blanket. It smells like lilac.

I stand there another minute, drying my hands laboriously, and the woman never says anything but never stops looking at me. I have a feeling she knows all about me.

I peer into the dining room, my hand holding back the tasseled curtain.

You couldn’t miss them, Diane’s golden hair and Dr. Severin’s sable black, skunk-striped. Diane’s head is down, and Dr. Severin is speaking to her, her wine-colored lips dancing.

There is, between them, a feeling of something I can’t put my finger on. Neither one is smiling and Diane lifts her hand to her neck, a nervous gesture I remember from long ago, her hand always to her throat, her earring, her necklace clasp.

There is definitely something between them. Something I don’t have with Dr. Severin.

I walk toward them, soundless on the thick tongue of carpet.

They are chatting, both looking intermittently in my direction.

What lies behind two such expert poker faces? I wonder. For different reasons, for reasons professional or emotional, they likely have spent most or all of their lives wearing masks, cool and aloof and impenetrable. It serves them in the lab, in the research community, in our profession. It serves them, period.

Not me. Not me.

“Did I miss anything?” I say, too loudly, tugging back my chair, where I find my napkin tidily refolded into a perfect seashell shape.

I look up, both sets of long-lashed eyes blinking at me.

“No,” Diane says. “Just talking about the study protocol.”

“You’ll get up to speed fast,” I say, sitting down, determined. “After all, you’ve worked with Dr. Severin before.”

Neither one flinches.

“Yes,” Dr. Severin says, turning to Diane. “When was that?”

“Years ago,” Diane replies. She looks at me. “But I didn’t work with her. It was just an internship. Dr. Severin was gone most of the summer. I just did scut work for the grad students.”

“But you remembered her,” I say to Dr. Severin. Bold—I, who’ve never had a conversation with Dr. Severin lasting longer than three minutes that didn’t involve supply orders or lab data. “All this time later.”

“I’d like to say it was my keen foresight and elephant memory rather than the petty desire to pillage Dr. Freudlinger’s finest booty.” She pauses. Then: “In fact, why not say that?”

Dr. Severin lifts her hand for the waiter.

“And you, Kit,” Diane says softly. “You have a history too. You were one of Dr. Severin’s scholarship recipients.”

Hearing her say it aloud feels strange. I wonder if Dr. Severin knows Diane and I were competitors. What a tangled history we all have with one another, knots upon knots.

“I just got lucky,” I say.

“You both had very strong reports,” Dr. Severin says, opening her menu. “And I’ll tell you both something: Banish the justs from the way you speak about yourself. It’s tedious and not productive.”

“I’m sure Kit was very deserving,” Diane says, looking at me.

Dr. Severin looks at me too, as if waiting.

“I was,” I say, firmly. Then, even more firmly: “I really was deserving.”

Saying it out loud, and seeing the look of satisfaction on Dr. Severin’s face, it changes things. It gives me a burst in the chest. It is maybe the greatest feeling I’ve ever known.

And then, as if on cue, champagne arrives in a dewy bucket, for-real French champagne in a sleek black bottle, and Dr. Severin leans back, looking first at Diane and then at me.

“Do you two know why I brought you here?” she asks.

Then we must wait as the waiter pours champagne into glasses shaped like long tulips.

“I’m the daughter of two agrochemists,” she says. “I’ve been working in labs since I was twelve years old. I’ve lived a long time in that world, the world of oil and commerce, and in this one. The world of scientific discovery and, well, commerce. And I’ve been hustling for my work for going on two decades, the last hooker in the hotel lobby every night.

“So I can tell you this: It’s important to honor these moments, because they are few.”

She lifts her glass. We follow suit.

“This is the beginning for both of you. A grand beginning. And for me, the culmination of so much.”

She leans that dark, shimmering head of hers back and takes a long sip. Again, we follow suit.

She looks at us both, her eyebrows so immaculately arched, her lips so dark, she reminds me, fleetingly, of the queen in Snow White. Except Diane and I are the ones with the poison apple in our hands.

“And you two didn’t get this because you’re women,” she says. “You didn’t get this because of institutional politics, or optics, or because you bleed every month, because of pussies and tits—”

Heads turn slightly at the table beside us.

“Or whatever any of the less competent boys might say behind your back or in the lounge when they think we can’t hear.”

It is nearly impossible for me to imagine any of our group, even Zell, saying pussies or tits, but it makes me wonder how it was for Dr. Severin twenty years ago.

“And you didn’t get this because you work longer hours than anyone else or play by the rules or can be counted on to do the grunt work or clean up your lab bench immediately and maybe your neighbor’s too.”

Diane has her eyes on her hands, folded. She is nodding and her face is trembling.

“You got this because I wanted you. No. Scratch that. I wanted your brains. Young and fat and juicy. I intend to feed off them mercilessly. So, in the coming months, plug your ears to all the rest. Including any voices in your own noisy heads.”

She looks at us, then adds, “You must never be fearful when what you’re doing is right.”

Both Diane and I nod. Those words. Marie Curie.

The champagne hums madly inside me. All around the room, the dark suits and bobbing white heads of white men.

“Because this,” she says, pressing one manicured finger on the tablecloth, freshly scraped clean with a thin silver wand by the waiter, “what we’re doing, what I’m doing, will make you.”

She lifts her glass. “And I’d hate for you to blow it.”

She turns from me to Diane and back again. “Got it?”

Then she leans back, spreading her arms across the booth in a way that reminds me of the way John Wayne, in old movies, would lean against a corral, rifle balanced on his shoulders.

I can’t deny that I desired her in that moment. Anyone would have.

By the time our entrées—some kind of diaphanous butter-swirled fish—are cleared, everything is glinting pinkly before me. A future grand and limitless. I can see myself, age forty-five or even older, with my own lab, a windowed office overlooking a warren of benches. There I am in chic eyewear and a sharp-shouldered blazer, leaning back in my Italian leather work chair, observing my team of grad students and postdocs buzzing silently below, leaning over centrifuges and chromatographs.

It’s amazing, the brain, isn’t it? What it can do? How we can make ourselves forget anything? Because in that moment, three glasses of champagne and the sun-struck pleasure of Dr. Severin’s delicious forecast of a life of professional achievement and acclaim, I forget everything. I forget the blood and the chaos and Diane’s slithering return even as she sits across from me, and I even forget my mom being gone, her body having sunk slowly and then suddenly into her hospital bed like a beautiful ghost.

“Get ready for the inane questions once this goes public,” Dr. Severin says, holding her empty champagne glass up to the light as if looking for a spot. “Everyone will ask you why you chose to study PMDD. And you will tell them how underfunded research into women’s conditions is. You will tell them there are five times as many studies on erectile dysfunction as on PMS and that you’re happy to play a role in changing that.”

“Is that why you do it?” I say, my voice slipping out like warm balm, like we are best friends day-drinking, spilling secrets.

Dr. Severin pulls a small pack of cigarettes from her purse, removes one—short and wide like Frenchwomen smoke in movies. Though I’m sure it’s not permitted, no one stops her.

She fumbles in her purse for a light. I nudge the candle between us toward her. That flicker of a smile as she bends down to light her smoke.

For a moment, I think she isn’t going to answer my question, which wouldn’t be unlike her.

Leaning back, she runs a few fingers through her dark hair.

“My mother was a very, very brilliant and difficult woman. The only female chemist wherever she went, and consumed by disappointment. She always used to say she’d be better off in the Soviet Union, where forty percent of chemistry doctorates were awarded to women. No one would hire her, especially—as was always made clear—once she became pregnant with me. Then, at last, she won a position at a plastics lab. I was in second grade and it was the only time I ever remember her laughing from happiness. She bought a new hat for her first day.” Dr. Severin smiles, wryly. “Sunshine yellow, with a wide brim. After school, I rode my bike all the way to the lab, four miles, to see her finally in her rightful place.

“But when I got there, no one in the office seemed to know who I was talking about. They kept saying, ‘There’s no Dr. Severin here, go home to Mama.’ At last, a filing clerk overheard. ‘She means Marina,’ she said, pointing me down the hall. And that was where I saw her. My mother, scrubbing beakers, loading them into a sterilizer in the washroom.”

Diane and I look at each other.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“The only thing one could. The only thing she’d have wanted. I snuck out the back way before she could see me. And never mentioned it once.” Severin taps her cigarette onto her china plate. “She worked there for years. Laid off during cost-cutting in the eighties. Lab aides are always the first to go.”

I take a breath. Such an intimate confidence, and she’s shared it so freely. Because we are close now, I think, taking one last sip of the last of my champagne, the bottle upturned in the bucket. We are close because we are embarking on this monumental project together.

But Diane is not even looking up. Staring at her hands folded before her—those red hands of hers, like the rough husk of a pomegranate—she does not appear moved or struck or anything. It makes me think she already knew this, though I can’t hold on to the thought, the champagne fizzing in my head and Dr. Severin mashing her cigarette onto the plate with a great flourish.

“But I would never tell anyone that,” Dr. Severin adds, leaning forward once more. She smiles ruefully. “You can never tell a man or he’ll think, Ah! That’s what drives her. And that’s a way to weaken her.”

She pauses and I wonder if she’s a little drunk too.

“Many of these men, and the women too, sometimes even more so, would like to use your heart against you,” she says. “They think it’s a ticking time bomb in your chest, waiting to explode.”

“Maybe it is,” Diane blurts out. I look at her.

Severin smiles. “Maybe that’s our strength.”

And with that, a small tray arrives with a trio of petite amber glasses, each barely more than a thimble. The waiter does not blink at the crushed cigarette on the fine china.

“Ladies,” Dr. Severin says, “one final toast before we get to work. The real work. Harder work than you have ever known.” She lifts a glass and gestures to us to do the same, one hand opening and closing as if performing a magic trick: Your future is under one of these two hands. Choose carefully!

Leaning forward, her face lit by the candle, she grins at us.

“Remember this,” she says, glowing, her skin golden and life-marked, “you will have to fight your entire life. And that’s why you’ll always be better. Because you wanted it so much more.”

We both nod and we all lift our glasses and knock them back.

Whatever’s inside tastes like a Red Delicious, both tart and very sweet, and it goes right down.

You will have to fight your entire life.

It’s the champagne, Dr. Severin’s sonorous voice, the amniotic warmth of our high-walled booth. For a half hour, the past two days seem to disappear.

My future unfurling like a great golden spool as Dr. Severin speaks. The three of us achieving a breakthrough, changing lives, grinding our heels hard into the thick earth of history.

It could happen. I feel it now, and the rest doesn’t even seem real. This is real.

My head is so full of plans that it seems aflame. Marie Curie working furiously, ceaselessly, radium tubes glowing in her dress pockets, slowly killing her. She would not be stopped.

Both Diane and Dr. Severin look at me and I realize I’ve said it aloud.

Dr. Severin taps the side of the empty champagne bottle and winks.

We’re gathering our purses, our coats, when Dr. Severin’s phone buzzes. Then buzzes again, and again.

“Well,” Dr. Severin says, looking at it, “interesting.”

Diane and I both stop.

“This business with Shaffer, who’s gone rogue—the security log shows he was in the lab on Saturday. Arrived at six thirty a.m.”

“Yes,” Diane says. “We saw him.”

Dr. Severin’s eyebrows lift. “Really? Both of you?”

“Yes,” I say, hard and quick. “On our way out. Diane wanted a tour.”

Dr. Severin glances at her phone once more. “The fiancée’s not going to like this.”

“What?” I say, my voice like a cough. “What won’t she like?”

We both look at Severin expectantly.

“The log says he left at nine thirty-six a.m.,” she says. Diane’s head jerks ever so slightly. “When did you two see him?”

“Nine,” Diane says quickly. “Around nine.”

“Did he say anything about leaving soon?”

“No,” I say. “He didn’t.”

“This girl, this Eleanor,” Dr. Severin says, shaking her head, “is apparently the take-charge type. She’s contacted the police.”

I look at Diane, who quickly looks away.

Dr. Severin shrugs. “If there’s something to be found, campus security has eyes everywhere.”

She slides on her trench coat. Neither Diane nor I can manage to say anything, the silence awkward, unbearable. Severin turns to me. “Kit,” she says, “you were friends with Shaffer?”

I pause, jacket half on, my hand resting on the white tablecloth. “No. Yes. I mean, lab friends, sure.”

“Did he have a wandering eye?”

“Pardon?”

“You know,” she says. “Maybe he’s ducking the ball and chain?”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

Dr. Severin, eyes on me, pulls her trench-coat belt taut.

“I mean, maybe,” I amend. “Aren’t they all?”

“Clever girl.”

As we walk away, my eye catches Dr. Severin’s napkin on her chair, oxblood lips smiling at the fold.

Walking from Dr. Severin’s green Citroën, battered and unbearably cool, to the lab, I have the fleeting notion that the police will be waiting, a ring of uniformed and plainclothes cops, batons in hand.

Then a darker thought strikes: It’ll be Alex himself who’s waiting, a thick bandage tied rakishly around his ruined throat and that crooked smile aimed straight at me. Milky coffee in his outstretched hand. A niggling, irrational fear scratching in the back of my brain: Is it possible that Alex didn’t die? That his heart leaped to life again and he rose, cleaned up his own blood, walked out the front door, and disappeared?

“We need to talk,” Diane whispers as we go in the building.

“Why didn’t you tell me you knew Dr. Severin from before?” I say, pushing the elevator button.

Diane looks at me. “But Kit, you never told her you knew me from before.”

I don’t say anything, watching the lit numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4.

It never crossed my mind to tell. Alex was the only one and it was a mistake. Telling meant something, seemed to suggest something. That me and Diane came from the same place, shared things.

In the elevator doors’ reflection, I catch a glimpse of myself, small and crouched.

“Does she know about us?” I ask. “Does she know about you?”

“No,” Diane says, her face paler than ever. In the door’s reflection, she is a ghostly smudge stretched. “She can’t ever find out. If anyone else found out, I would—”

The doors jolt open to the busy hallway and a swarm of grad students, backpacks heavy as infantry rucksacks, enter.

We are swallowed.