40 The Meadow their resources to pay the premium “Aegis Fee.” I work for SafeGuard and our Aegis services don’t come cheap. I told her what I always tell these days: “No one feels better for it.” She hiccupped again. Not crying now. Finally she said, “I will.” It’s what they say. It’s what they think. I know because I thought it too. There’s a network of associates after the defiler is dead. Our premium service means we take down the lot. The society matron who procures the girls, recruited from public pools and schoolyards and summer camps where she is a donor. The real estate agent who provides homes that are lying fallow before they’re sold, with empty wine cellars and attics and fallout shelters and groundskeeper’s quarters. The social media influencer who hypes his Coding Camp for Girls on her tween-friendly site. The lawyer who got him off three times by shaming his victims into silence—buying off their parents—exploiting legal loopholes. “I don’t kill women,” I told Janice on the phone. She inhaled. Paused. “Juniper didn’t tell me that.” “But it’s policy,” I said. “No women. Not because women can’t be evil. But we don’t kill our kind.” “OK,” she said. “They just go free?” “Certainly not.” Juniper would be working the back end on the associates. She and the handful of back-end girls were in charge of the humiliations; the exposures; the lost fortunes, siphoned through back channels to women’s shelters and rehabs and support groups, or for funeral services and the like; the photographic proof sent to places of work, family members, the press. Viola Geist is not an accidental name. I chose it from the pool of recently deceased whose identities we take when we are reborn. I like it because it sounds like “ghost”—one of
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