I applied for job after job after job.
I even hired someone to help tweak my résumé with the little money I had left, convincing myself it was an investment instead of a gamble. It didn’t matter. Every lead turned into a dead end. Hiring freeze. Market instability. “We’ll keep your résumé on file.” After 9/11, it wasn’t just that people’s perspectives changed—the job market did. Everything dried up at once. Opportunity evaporated.
Maybe that’s why I called Sage.
She was the only bright light I had. She made me feel good about myself at a time when that felt impossible. I stopped shopping on Newbury Street. We went thrifting instead—Goodwill, secondhand stores, places that smelled like dust and old perfume and other people’s lives. We couldn’t even find second jobs after our day jobs. Everything was terrible.
One afternoon, she wrapped her hands around her coffee and said, almost casually, “Actually, I’ve been working at night. I’m gonna take a few shifts this weekend too.”
“Doing what, Sage?” I joked. Sort of.
“Dancing?” I said, laughing, but not entirely.
She shook her head. “No. Well—yes. Kind of.”
Uh-oh.
She explained that there were these high-end clubs. The kind with forty-dollar cover charges and nonstop techno music. Places where the crowd wore black and money and entitlement like a uniform.
“They hire me between DJ sets,” she said. “I dance in a cage.”
I stared at her.
“I wear six-inch stage heels,” she went on, totally unfazed. “It pays eighty dollars an hour. The cage is locked. No one touches me. No one talks to me. I’m above the floor.”
She smiled. “It’s my form of therapy.”
Therapy.
“They just look,” she said. “And I dance for myself. I dance for him. I dance to feel free.”
I didn’t know whohimwas, Ethan? Her dead ex? Or someone new? I didn’t ask either.
“I can get you in,” she added lightly. “I’m the best because of me.”
My stomach dropped. My mom would die. She went to church every Sunday and baked for the bake sale. This was not something I could explain away.
“No one would know,” Sage said. “I’ll give you a wig. I have a bunch. My clothes too.”
A wig?
She stood up, slid her coat on, and said she was done paying for her coffee. We moved to a seat by the window, the city sliding by like it didn’t care whether we survived or not.
Then she told me the other thing.
“You know I work for the law firm,” she said. “Well… sometimes they don’t want to pay for a private investigator. So I do it.”
I blinked. “You what?”
“I’m really good at it,” she said. “My blonde hair stands out, so I use wigs. Glasses. I follow people. I get names, addresses. Photos. Clear ones.”
Cheaters. Affairs. Husbands with men. Politicians. Lawyers. Athletes. She said it all in a low, conspiratorial voice, like we were sharing a secret over coffee instead of unraveling my understanding of who she was.
“They pay me a bonus if the pictures aren’t grainy,” she added. “And sometimes I have to sign NDAs. I see settlement agreements. Confidential stuff.”
Then she smiled—sharp, almost dangerous.
“There’s nothing I love more than busting a cheating man and watching his wife take him to the cleaners.”
