“WHO IS MAUD DIXON?” by Alexandra Andrews

“In Florida, Florence had grown used to being the most sophisticated person in the room.
But in this grubby bar (NY), she felt inadequate–stupid, really–for the first time in her life. 
She had been blithely walking around thinking she knew more than everyone and all of a sudden she realized she didn’t know a thing.”

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“Her sense of self slipped from her as easily as a coat slips off the back of a chair.
She’d outgrown the girl she’d been in Florida, but how did one go about building up someone new?
She tried on moods and personalities like outfits. One day she was interested in ruthlessness. The next, she wanted to be an object of adoration.”

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“By the time she encountered Simon Reed at the Forrester holiday party, she had been in New York for two years and still a true self had not begun to solidify. She was a ship without ballast, tilting wildly in the waves.

This very quality of unfixedness had probably attracted him to her in the first place. He was one of those men helplessly drawn to these young, shifting forms–for she was hardly the only twenty-six-year-old woman to find herself grasping in the dark for an identity.
He must have known that sleeping with a young assistant who worked for him had the potential to destroy both his career and his family.
Why did he do it?
Florence didn’t flatter herself with illusions of her own irresistibility. She suspected, instead, that he had a pathological addiction, not necessarily to sex, but to the sight of his own reflection–powerful, confident, desired–in an insecure young woman’s eyes.
Plus, a nobody is less likely to kick up a fuss.

And he was right. She hadn’t.”

Kindle, 2021