Evelyn

Evelyn Mercer is fifty-five, a divorce attorney of some reputation, and a woman who has never required a theory in order to be in charge. Her working life consists of deciding what men will be left with, and she has never once found the work distasteful.

She does not think of herself as dominant. The word has never occurred to her. She simply expects things to happen properly, expects her decisions to stand, and is genuinely astonished when a man who has placed himself under her authority begins behaving as though the arrangement were open to negotiation.

She is not a tall woman, and it is never the first thing anyone notices. She carries herself with such certainty that she appears to take up more room than she does. Her pale grey-green eyes are steady rather than hard, and they have a habit of resting on a man a second longer than he finds comfortable.

Her platinum hair is cut in a sharp asymmetrical pixie, cropped close along one side, and against the tailored black she favours it reads as something very near severity. On one arm, from shoulder to forearm, a dark mandala runs beneath the sleeve of a very expensive jacket — the only visible evidence of a woman who was not always this composed.

There is nothing cold about Evelyn. She is warm, funny, generous with the people she loves, and barefoot in her own house by six o'clock. She does not regard any of that as inconsistent with the rest of her. And when a man tests how far her patience extends, he does not have to wonder whether she has noticed.