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priest ignored us. The whole family stopped going to church then—my dad and brothers stopped believing in God altogether. Only my mom still believes, but she will never go back. Aside from visiting me up here, she hasn’t been inside a church since Lizzy’s funeral.”
    “But you have,” Poppy pointed out. “You still believe.”
    Her hand remained on mine, warm in the drafty air conditioning of the office. “I didn’t for a long time,” I admitted.
    We sat in silence for a while, jostling shoulders with dead girls and disapproving parents and tragedies that lingered like the smell of old leaves in a forest. “So,” she said after a while, “I suppose you do know what it’s like to face your parents’ disapproval.”
    I managed a smile, trying to keep it from faltering when she withdrew her hand. “What did you do after you left Dartmouth?” I asked, needing to talk about something else, anything other than Lizzy and those painful years after her death.
    “Well,” she said, shifting in her chair. “I did a lot. The thing was that I was able to find tons of work on my own, work using my MBA, but how could I be sure that it wasn’t my scores of fancy internships and my expensive degree they wanted and not to have a Danforth working in their office? After six months in a New York office, feeling like DANFORTH was tattooed across my forehead, I left, as abruptly as I’d left New Hampshire, and I drove until I didn’t want to drive any more. Which was how I ended up in Kansas City.”
    She took a breath. I waited.
    “I never meant to end up at the club,” she finally said, her voice going low. “I thought maybe I’d find a small nonprofit to work at or maybe I’d do something prosaic, like waiting tables. But I heard from a bartender that there was a club hidden somewhere in this city—private, exclusive, discreet. And they were looking for girls. Girls who looked expensive.”
    “Girls like you?”
    Poppy wasn’t offended. She laughed that throaty laugh again, the laugh that kindled a low heat in my belly every time I heard it. “Yes, girls like me. WASP-y girls. The kind that rich people like. And you know what? It was perfect. I got to dance—I hadn’t danced anywhere other than a gala for so long. It was, all told, a fairly classy place. A mandatory $500 coat check. $750 for a table, $1000 for a private dance. No patron-initiated touching. A two-drink maximum. It catered to a very specific clientele, and so I found myself stripping for the same men who would have employed me, married me, donated to my pet charities, in another life. I loved it.”
    “You loved it?”
    Filthy girl.
    The thought came out of nowhere, unbidden but refusing to leave, whispering itself over and over again in my mind. Dirty, filthy girl.
    She turned those hazel eyes back to me. “Is that wrong? Is that a sin? No, don’t answer, I don’t really want to know.”
    “Why did you like it?” I was asking merely out of a counselor’s curiosity, of course. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
    “Why would I mind? I offered to tell you, after all.” She adjusted herself, the shorts exposing more of those firm legs. Dancer’s legs, I now knew. “I liked how it felt. Having men watch me with hooded eyes, wanting me and only me—not my education or my pedigree or my family’s connections. But even more than that, on this raw, primal level, I loved the way the men responded to my body. I loved that I made them hard.”
    I loved that I made them hard.
    I nearly choked, my mind fracturing into twin minds—one determined to see this meeting through with grace and compassion and the other determined to let her know how hard she made me .
    She was oblivious to my internal struggle. “I loved that they would become almost wild with the need to touch me, so wild that they would offer me astounding sums of money to come home with them, to leave the club and become their mistress. But I never accepted. Even though many of