Mistress

Vivienne Sloan has always known exactly what she is worth-and exactly what everyone around her is worth in return. Beautiful, calculating, and utterly without sentimentality, she moves through a life of wealth and privilege as though she designed it herself, because in every way that matters, she did. A husband strategically chosen. Children were managed from a careful distance. A household staff is kept at arm's length and let go without ceremony when they become inconvenient-even when their only inconvenience is a cancer diagnosis.
But Vivienne's most dangerous quality is not her looks, though men lose the thread of their thoughts in her presence. It is her certainty. The certainty that the world can be arranged to her advantage, that every person she encounters is either an asset or an obstacle, and that she will always be the one doing the arranging. She has never been wrong about this. Until now. MISTRESS is a literary psychological novella that follows Vivienne through the architecture of her own carefully constructed life-from the mirror-lined dressing room she treats as a command center, to the golf course where she cultivates useful men, to the kitchen where an act of pest control and of betrayal converge with consequences no one anticipated.
Sharp, controlled, and unsettling, this is a story about what it costs to treat other people as furniture-and what happens when the furniture rearranges itself.