“Until recently, it was my profession.” She told him about her former job at the Met, truncating the long personal story behind her dismissal. It was easier to chalk her current unemployment up to the museum budget cuts and layoffs that had made newspaper headlines.

The conversation between them came easily. He had a good, natural smile. Earnest eye contact. The appearance of a genuine interest in what she had to say. It was strange: there was nothing sexual about it, and yet she felt herself getting pulled in, not by the man’s looks or charm but by the refreshing feeling of being treated as if she mattered. Not merely as her father’s daughter. And not like an out-of-work single woman whose petals had already begun to wilt.

As she felt herself brightening in a way she could barely remember, it suddenly dawned on her how eight months of unemployment had taken their toll. Without even recognizing the transformation, she had started to see herself as a loser.

Alice never meant to be a thirty-seven-year-old woman without a career, but she knew that plenty of less fortunate people would question the choices she’d made along the way. Even in the beginning, she hadn’t gone to one of the intellectually rigorous prep schools that happily would have had her, opting instead to be with her more socially inclined friends. But, unlike most of them, she worked hard. She went to college-and not just a party school with a fancy reputation, but an actual school known for its academics.

Granted, it was a funky liberal arts college and not an Ivy League, and then followed by the few requisite years of postcollege floundering that were were typical for her crowd. The two-year stint as a publicist for a cosmetics company. That disastrous three-year marriage in St. Louis before she’d realized her mistake. But she’d started over, returning to school for her master’s in fine arts. And when she was finished, she’d gone to work in the development office of what she believed to be the most impressive building in the world-the Metropolitan Museum of Art.