Free You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz

least, had been a highly unusual thing to hear in the marble entry foyer of the Rearden School.
    â€œShe’s very odd,” said Sylvia.
    â€œSally?”
    â€œNo.” Sylvia allowed herself the briefest laugh. “That woman, Malaga. She sits across the street on one of those benches in the park, you know? After she drops the son off. She just stays.”
    â€œWith the baby?” Grace frowned.
    â€œNow with the baby. Before she came when she was pregnant. She doesn’t even read a book. Doesn’t she have anything to do all day?”
    â€œI guess not,” said Grace. For her, as for Sylvia and probably for every person they knew on the island of Manhattan, not having anything to do—indeed, not being frantically busy at all times—was an unfathomable state of being. It was also, for women like themselves, the most supreme New York put-down possible. “Maybe she was worried about her kid. Miguel?” Grace asked.
    â€œMiguel, yeah.”
    â€œYou know, and wanted to stay nearby in case he needed her.”
    â€œHm.”
    They walked a block or so in mutual silence.
    â€œIt was just bizarre,” said Sylvia, finally. “I mean, sitting there like that.”
    Grace said nothing. It wasn’t that she didn’t agree. Just that she didn’t want to go on record agreeing. “Could be cultural,” she offered finally.
    â€œPlease,” said the woman whose Chinese daughter was now preparing for her bat mitzvah.
    â€œWho’s the husband?” said Grace. They were nearing the school now, converging with mothers and nannies.
    â€œNever seen him,” Sylvia said. “Look, for the record, I was just as shocked as you were when Sally suggested you auction off a couples therapy session.”
    Grace laughed. “Okay. Thanks.”
    â€œI know it’s supposed to take a village to raise our children, but why does ours have so many village idiots? I mean, did I really just hear about toe shortening?”
    â€œI fear so. Then again, I once had a client, this was years ago, whose husband left her because he said her feet were ugly.”
    â€œGod.” Sylvia stopped. After another step, Grace stopped, too. “What an asshole. What was he, like, a fetishist?”
    Grace shrugged. “Maybe. It’s irrelevant. The point is, he made himself very clear about what mattered to him. He was a guy who had always told her she had ugly feet. From day one. And when they split up, her feet were right at the top of his list for why he couldn’t live with her anymore. He was an asshole, of course, but he was a straightforward asshole. And she married him anyway, even though it was blindingly obvious that he was at least capable of contempt for her. What was he going to do? Change?”
    Sylvia sighed. She was reaching into her back pocket and removing her phone, which was apparently vibrating. “They say people do.”
    â€œWell, they’re wrong,” said Grace.

Chapter Three
Not My City
    R earden had not always been the demesne of hedge funders and other assorted Masters of the Universe. Founded in the nineteenth century to educate the sons and daughters of workingmen, the school had once been identified with atheist Jewish intellectuals and their red diaper babies and attended by the offspring of journalists and artists, once-blacklisted actors, and socially conscious folksingers. Students of Grace’s generation had taken perverse pride in their school’s having been disparaged as “Bohemian” (by The Official Preppy Handbook , no less), but over the following decades Rearden, like nearly every other private school on the island of Manhattan (and a few in Brooklyn to boot), had shifted substantially—not so much politically, but in the general direction of money. Today, the typical Rearden dad made money out of other money, that was all, and he was intense, distracted, extraordinarily rich, and nearly