The Better Sister - Alafair Burke Page 0,2

his dead body.

Part I

Adam

1

Fourteen Years Later

The back of Café Loup was dark and cool, so every time the restaurant door opened to the sun and humidity outside, I found myself craning my neck to look for Adam. He hadn’t promised to join us, but I knew that the entertainment reporter conducting the interview was “dying to meet the man behind the woman.”

Unfortunately, I had made the mistake of telling Adam about her expectations. If I had kept that piece of information to myself, I could have lied and told her that my husband had a scheduling conflict and couldn’t make it. But instead I had set myself up for uncertainty and therefore disappointment, and was now waiting anxiously to see if he would put in an appearance.

I forced myself to focus my attention where it belonged.

The interviewer was named Colby and was probably twenty-five years old, around the same age I was when I first landed a journalism job in New York City. The landscape had changed dramatically in the interim. When I started at City Woman, we boasted an average monthly circulation of nearly three hundred thousand copies, and a staff that occupied a full floor of a prestigious midtown high-rise. Eve was one of the last women’s magazines standing, but we were struggling to crack a hundred thousand print readers a month.

These days, most publishers were putting the “free” in “freelance.” Given the changes in the market, my guess is that young, eager Colby had twice the résumé I’d compiled at her age, yet was happy to have landed her full-time gig with a web-only e-zine aimed at millennial women.

We were finished with introductions, and I could tell when she looked down at her notes that we were moving on to her prepared questions.

“By the time you were named editor in chief at Eve, the industry had all but written the magazine’s obituary. But you worked a complete turnaround—ramping up online readership, adding more politics and less fluff—and now Eve is one of the last remaining successful feminist-oriented magazines in the country. Now you’re on the eve—no pun intended—of receiving the vaunted Press for the People Award for your influential Them Too series. Does this moment feel like the culmination of your entire life’s work?”

I knew my answer would make me sound sad and tired to Colby and her peers, but I told myself that at least it was authentic. “The culmination of my life’s work? I certainly hope not. That kind of talk makes me feel like I’m being put out to pasture.”

She hit the pause button on her iPhone and began apologizing profusely. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. You’re like my idol. That’s not what I meant at all.”

I hit the record button again and told her that she should never apologize for a question, and then gave her a sound-bite she could use.

“I feel guilty taking credit for any of it,” I said. “The real heroes are the women who told their own stories first. The Me Too movement made women begin to feel safe speaking out. We all knew such conduct was repugnant—and rampant—but we were always taught to tough it out. Don’t rock the boat. Smile and make it to the next day. But then women found power in the collective, and powerful men learned that there could be consequences to their actions, even if delayed, even without police and courtrooms. That was the starting point for everything, so, really, my work was just following the lead of all those other women, and the journalists who helped tell their stories.”

The work she was asking me about was a series of features covering an initiative I launched at Eve. On the heels of the Me Too movement, I wrote an opinion piece exploring my concern that the movement’s seismic cultural shift would be confined to high-profile, celebrity-driven workplaces. After the initial takedowns of predators who had committed heinous acts for years, the movement’s influence had seeped into a discussion of lesser offenses by other famous men. But would it affect the workplaces of women employed by bosses we had never heard of? What about the women who worked in factories and on sales floors? What about waitresses and bartenders who were beholden to managers for the busiest shifts, and to customers for tips? To help spotlight their stories, I paired “everyday” women suffering sexual abuse and harassment in the workplace with a better-known Me Too groundbreaker. I personally wrote the articles tracing the