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knew who watched Meet the Press , scoured the op-eds of the Nation and the National Review , and knew more about Bill Clinton than they did about the New Kids on the Block or the Backstreet Boys. Back then, after a couple of wine coolers and too many spins on the merry-go-round, they would sheepishly admit their most wild fantasies—Carrie’s to sit on the Supreme Court, Bill’s to be the president of the United States.
    Compared to where most people got with their dreams, and where the two of them had started in Red View, they’d done pretty well for themselves.
    Perhaps because they were each in a unique position to know how much the other appreciated the success they’d managed to achieve, he felt free to share his current frustrations. The head of the state assembly was too stupid to understand basic law that governed the real life of street policing. Public employee unions were too entrenched to understand that the state could not afford to keep up with the rapid increase in retirement benefits. “Plus, I finally sold the condo in Rochester, at a huge loss, and now I find out that the place I bought in Albany might have termites. They need to do a second test. Maybe it’s just the porch, but it could be the whole house. Sorry. I think that’s what they call First World problems.”
    “I think I’m having one of those moments myself,” she said. She took a gulp of her second margarita and slammed the glass on the table. “I quit Russ Waterston today.”
    He nearly spit out his water. “Isn’t that the job you called your happy place ?”
    That sounded so ridiculous now, but it was with good reason that Carrie had always felt lucky to work at Russ Waterston. For fifty-seven years, the boutique law firm had managed to attract top-ten-percent graduates from the elite five: Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia. Carrie had shared a hallway with law review editors in chief, Supreme Court clerks, and Solicitor General externs. It was still hard for her to imagine, but her first job out of law school (when she finally graduated) was to join the best legal thinkers and writers in the world for what was arguably the most rarified legal practice imaginable: federal appellate work.
    “I know. It’s a big deal,” she said.
    “So . . . what’s next?” he asked. “From what I read, people only leave that place if they’re about to accept their own judicial appointment. And if that’s what’s going on here, I’m going to take back all that Podunk state government stuff I just rambled about, because obviously I should be president by now.”
    “No, it’s nothing like that.” She was about to tell him everything about Anthony Amaro and his plea for Linda Moreland’s involvement, but she really didn’t want to make the night about her. “A former law professor of mine has a tiny practice. Postconviction work in criminal cases. More responsibility. More specialization. I’m happy about it.”
    “Good for you.”
    She knew she could count on him not to point out, as her law firm colleagues surely would have, that working for a solo practitioner was not exactly a step up—or even a lateral move—from the job she had left.
    “Good for both of us.” She clinked her margarita against his water glass. There was a pause in the conversation, and she found herself asking, “Do you ever feel guilty?”
    “For being so ridiculously good-looking?” he said. “All the time.”
    “You know what I mean. Every time I talk to Melanie, it’s like I almost want to apologize,” she said. “Maybe she’s different with you. I always wonder if she resents me. Like we both wonder whether I really earned it.”
    The three of them were all clumped together in high school, always within a few hundredths of a point in their GPAs. Melanie, Bill, and Carrie, the three star pupils whom any of their teachers would have pegged to make it out of Red View. In the end, Carrie was the one who got the biggest scholarship any