He was a man who had never started — who had run a script on me, the same script, word for word, that he had run on Colette, and on how many others none of us yet knew.

There was, strangely, a kind of grim comfort in learning that — not at the scope of it, which was horrifying, but in the way that shared suffering dissolves shame.

For the days between understanding what Gregory was and finding Colette, I had been drowning in a private humiliation, certain I was uniquely foolish, that some weakness in me had let this happen, that other women would have known better.

And then here was Colette, a stranger on a phone line, describing my own relationship back to me in her own words — the same becoming-indispensable, the same talk of a shared future, the same agent appearing at the same moment — and I understood that I had not been singled out for my foolishness.