That is the thing about people like Beatrice, people who rule through fear and never meet real resistance: they lose the ability to imagine it.

She had won so consistently, for so long, that she had stopped watching for the possibility of losing.

She had grown careless in her certainty.

And so she slept soundly in her beautiful house, planning, I imagine, her next day’s brunch, her next small demonstration of control, with absolutely no idea that the ground had moved, and that the least powerful person under her roof was now holding, in a purse decorated with plastic beads, the one thing capable of ending her reign.

There is an irony there so complete that it almost seems designed.