GRANT AWARD CEREMONY says the hastily written sign, Sharpie on posterboard, an easel in the auditorium lobby.

I’m looking for Diane.

Glass-walled and teeming with people, the space reminds me of a greenhouse I once visited on a class trip in first grade. It was exotic, like a jungle in a book, but there was something wrong and I kept telling my teacher that there was a smell of dead things.

That’s how greenhouses smell, he said. That’s how nature smells.

But it turned out the place was filled with spring-loaded rat traps and we found a dead cat in one of them and most of the girls and two of the boys screamed. I knew I’d smelled the dead thing, even if no one believed me.

Through the crush, I see Dr. Severin. You couldn’t miss her. She’d made a quick wardrobe change for the occasion. The woman in red—red stockings, to be precise. And a black leather shift with long, vented sleeves like tent flaps. Booties with gold at the toe. Soft and hard. I can’t take my eyes off her. Who could?

The auditorium is swollen with university bigwigs in pinstripes, with white coats from the medical school, with grayish lab rats like me. Everyone so eager to be pulled from their routine at three o’clock on a Tuesday.

All of it feels faintly ludicrous. Let’s toast female hormonal madness! Let’s raise a glass for menses! Isn’t womanhood a dark and mysterious thing? Will we ever penetrate its surface, fathom its depths, dissect its enigmas, lay bare its witchy power?

I’m stuck behind Maxim, who’s nearly a foot taller than me and, texting furiously, barely notices me. Juwon and Zell don’t appear at all.

Scanning the crowd, I spot Diane standing over by the door, under the exit sign. Her usual poise gone, she leans against the curtained doorway, neck thrown back, arms hanging stiffly like an unposed mannequin’s.

Before I can move toward her, the ceremony begins.

Dean Baker presents Dr. Severin with a novelty bottle of champagne that is nearly half her height. Six liters, he announces, “a size known as the Methuselah.” It is bigger even than the novelty check behind her. The grant funds themselves, confetti-shredded by administrative fees and overhead, wouldn’t appear for months.

But the champagne bottle, wrapped in an enormous ribbon, looks oddly right in Dr. Severin’s slender hands. The way she holds it, like a club.

“I’m not going to give a speech,” she says, that sweep of her hair like smoke emanating from that leather dress, the red slash of her stockings. Chosen, I have to believe, for this occasion. Blood and the woman. And the woman waiting for the blood to come. “Instead, I just want to say a word about Shakespeare.”

I feel my lips part. I see Diane’s head turn. It swivels side to side. She finds me. I can feel her looking at me.

“My favorite character has always been Lady Macbeth,” Dr. Severin is saying. “And my favorite moment is when she’s trying to get her nerve up to kill the king. She calls upon the darker spirits and demands, Unsex me here.

“Make my blood thicken, she says.

“Make it come to a halt. Stop my blood. Stop me from feeling anything womanly, or human.”

I look down at my hands, which are pale. Blinking twice, for a second I see Diane’s hands there—gray-red, like a piece of meat left on the counter.

“Unsex me,” Dr. Severin repeats. “It’s a plea I’ve heard countless times. From Tania, who hid under her desk at work so no one could see her crying. From Ayoka, who dug a razor into her arms every month and became afraid to pick up her children. From Iris, who had a total hysterectomy at age twenty-four because the week before her period she couldn’t stop vomiting. From so many others.”

Looking up, I see Diane’s eyes on me again, direct and unblinking.

“Make my blood stop. Stop that unbearable push of feelings, feelings gone out of control. For these women, womanhood feels like a wretched curse, and they seek relief, would kill for it, some of them. And no one will help them. Not even the darker spirits.

“But the fault for these feelings, this monthly horror show, does not lie with uteruses, their sex. It does not even lie with their estrogen and progesterone. Not with their bodies at all, much less their minds. The problem lies with science. Which has failed them. We have. We’ve failed these women.

“But no more. We are only beginning, but we are, in fact, beginning.”

The clapping gathers loudly, thunderously, as Dr. Severin steps back, that face stage-lighted and luminous. In seconds, the crowd surges forward, moving toward the doorway, toward the lobby and the discount champagne.

When I look up at the microphone again, Dr. Severin is reaching out for someone, pulling someone close to her to share the applause. She is even smiling.

I see the blondness first, the back of her long neck. Diane swept up by Dr. Severin’s silken arm, its winged sleeve long and shining. Diane steps inside it. She nearly disappears.

What might Diane have told Dr. Severin? I think again. About me, about Alex. And what might it take for her to cut me loose?

In the lobby, plastic flutes are stacked into high pyramids and someone has pulled out all the decorations from the science-achievements dinner last month: the double-helix-shaped table runners, the test-tube flower holders, floating candles in beakers. Where are the ovary gravy boats? Alex had joked to me. Oh, Alex…

It’s too much. All of it. The crush of the bald-pated well-wishers, the red-faced scientists and Adam’s-appled students encircling Dr. Severin.

As everyone pushes forward, I push harder. I don’t care; no one knows me, no one even sees me, ever. These men never do. And I need to reach Diane, at the center of everything. At Dr. Severin’s side.

I push through the lab coats, the shiny blazers and yellowing collars, all the white-haired white men with gray or flushed faces, and reach for Diane, whispering her name in her ear.

“I need to talk to you,” I say, pulling her near the windows, out of the scrum.

“Kit,” she says, her voice even lower than mine, “did you see him too?”

“See who?” I say. “Diane, you told the detective things. The questions she was asking—”

Diane’s eyes widen. “No,” she insists, our bodies pushed closer together with each wave of men behind us, “Kit, I would never do that.”

“How else would they know about Thursday night?” I say, trying to be discreet.

Behind Diane, a few feet away, a loud bearded man is talking animatedly to Dr. Severin, touching her shoulder over and over again with hairy hands. Sweat shimmers on her brow from the hot lights.

“I didn’t say anything,” Diane says, again, shaking her head over and over. “But I’ve been looking for you. To tell you about what happened.”

“You’re lying,” I say, and her hand is on my arm, pulling me against one of the cold, fogged-windowed walls. “You’re lying again.”

Her fingers slip around my wrist. “Kit, I saw him. Over in the vivarium.”

She is so close now. I can smell her, a whiff of something unclean.

“Serge?” I say, yanking my wrist free.

“No. No. I saw him.”

In that instant I know who she means and there’s a stiff feeling across my chest, my heart.

“That’s impossible,” I say.

Her eyelid twitches, and then again. And the smell from her, earthy and sharp.

“He was walking and holding his throat.”

“Diane, stop,” I say, turning away, pressing my hand against the cold glass. “We were there. We know.”

But she can’t hear me, her fingers to her own neck. “He was moving so slowly, but I’m sure it was him. I called out to him.”

“You were imagining—”

“He didn’t have a mustache anymore,” she whispered. “But I’d know his walk anywhere.”

“Diane.” His mustache. It’s just like in my apartment, that telltale slip: The poison wasn’t meant for him. It just happened and then it was too late. “Are you okay?”

She looks at me. “Of course I am. But we need to be careful, Kit.”

“What do you mean? Diane, I think you—”

“I’m not sure we can trust Serge. I don’t think he likes me. I know he doesn’t. I—” Her face tightens. “She wants us.”

“He doesn’t like…” I turn, following her gaze, and see Dr. Severin summoning Diane from her circle of admirers. She doesn’t seem to see me. Only Diane.

“Don’t go,” I say, my voice reedy and insistent. “We need to talk. You’re not okay, Diane. And what do you mean about Serge?” But Diane is already moving toward Dr. Severin, slipping between all the old men to her mentor’s side.

“Lena, dear!” The plummy tones of Dean Baker, his face Rudolph-red and shiny amid the flashing cameras, the energy. “I have so many people you need to meet.” He gets an eyeful of Diane, matching him for height. “Why not bring your lovely protégée?”

Through the white coats, the dark-flanneled arms, Diane looks at me, and then the crush of men temporarily overwhelms us, an enormous silver tureen of wan shrimp set down center table, an impossible wheel of cheese, and the pop-pop of the Methuselah, all heads turning to watch.

“What about Kit?” Diane is saying, the dean’s shiny arm around her, her voice small and far away now. “Kit?”

The smile on Dr. Severin’s face is fixed, a mask. Her eyes move right past me.