I had been friends with Laney for eleven years. We met at a brand agency in Chicago when I was twenty. She was twenty-four. She was my manager at first, but the hierarchy dissolved quickly — we became friends so fast that by my second month at the agency, we were having drinks three times a week after work. Laney was magnetic in the way some people are magnetic, which is to say — she was the most confident person I had ever met, and she made you feel, when she pointed her confidence

at you, like you had been selected. I had been selected. For eleven years I had been the main person Laney called when anything happened — the guy she was dating had cancelled, her mother was sick, her sister was getting married and cutting her out of the wedding party. Every crisis. I had, over those eleven years, been the beneficiary of her attention in equal measure. She was, or I believed she was, the best friend I had ever had. But she also had — I had always known this, privately — a streak I tried not to see. She was, for lack of a better word, competitive. About everyone. Including me. Especially me.