There were nights I told Jamie about Smith, the happiness and the heartache it brought me. And nights that he just listened, nodding, sometimes fascinated by it, or sometimes bored by it. I could see his eyes glaze over as he would nod along with what I was saying, and I tried not to take it personally. But unlike the wedges that being at Smith drove between its women, life was different with a man and different with Jamie because there wasn’t that undercurrent of competition, of the two of us always having to outdo each other or to mark our territory.

But I saw the same in the “real world,” as there was Lisandra, a producer who just did not like me. And I could never figure out why, but she went out of her way to intimidate me, to comment on my clothes or what needed to be scrap...

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