Carrie Blake: The Woman Before You: An intense, addictive love story with an unexpected twist...

My friends and I never talked about what happened in that cubicle, and I think I learned something from that, though I couldn’t have said what it was. At least not then. Not yet.

Later, after everything had happened, I thought back to that day. And I thought I knew what the lesson was: Be careful. Trust no one . You never know the secret reason behind what seems to be happening. When (and if) you find out, it’s usually more sinister than whatever you could have imagined.

I’d always taken people at their word. Once, I ate a giant spoonful of cayenne pepper because a mean girl told me it was cinnamon candy. I dove into a slimy pond that a cute boy told me was clear. Everyone laughed when I came up for air, slicked with algae and mud.

For years the joke was on me. But what saved me was that I always somehow knew what people were thinking and feeling. It wasn’t anything weird, like telepathy or ESP or anything like that. But it was a little like that. I looked at the person and I knew . I could feel what they felt.

It was strange, I could almost see into their hearts and minds. It was like a new window opening up on an electronic device, a tablet or a phone. There was me, and there was that other person in a corner of my consciousness.

I sat with the kid at the party who needed someone to talk to. I stuck up for the bullied. I comforted the kids with problems at home. I wasn’t afraid to do the right thing, though I didn’t always know what it was. Even the cool kids came to like me for it. I was like their conscience, so they didn’t need to have one. Doing the right thing was a service they paid me for, with their friendship.

I never told my super-nice high school boyfriend that our hot romance bored me. Why would I hurt his feelings, telling him how often I was thinking of something else—a movie I’d seen, what Mom was cooking for dinner?—when we had sex in his bedroom after school while his parents were off at work? I was always relieved when he made that funny little snorting noise after he came. It meant that the sex part was over, and I could lie with my head on his chest and think my own thoughts, which I actually sort of liked. I was good at playing the girl in love for the time being.

After we graduated high school he went off to Oberlin. I could have gone to Oberlin, too. I got into all of the schools I applied to. And yet, despite the objections and fears of my mother, who thought that New York was a dangerous and scary place, I was going to New York to be an actress. Theater was the only place I felt at home. But this didn’t fit in with the kind of girl I was supposed to be—the one who went away to college to study hard, and then went to grad school to study harder, until I became a lawyer or a psychologist or a director of marketing at some startup company. Thankfully, my mother had raised me to be an independent person, to believe in myself, to be strong and not to let anyone make decisions for me. My dad had been killed in a car wreck when I was four, and she’d supported us since then, without a man to help her. She was an inspiring example of how a woman could be her own person and follow her own lights. And now she had to stick by her own principles, even though she worried about me.

My boyfriend and I pretended to be really sad about the fact that circumstances beyond our control were separating us. I could tell that what he was feeling was mostly relief … and happiness that he was leaving town to start over somewhere else. Maybe he’d meet a girl who honestly thought that he was interesting and sexy. We broke up with a long lingering kiss and hug. We were Midwesterners. We were nice.

On the day I met The Customer, that niceness began to crumble. That do-the-right-thing conscience started to peel away, like the papery skin that flakes off after a sunburn, and you can’t stop picking at it because it hurts so much and it feels so good. When that clean, pure surface was burned away by sex and need and desire, I was left with my true self: all body, all skin, all touch, no soul, lustful, depraved, and corrupt.

I’d always wanted to be an actress. It was where I could use my ability to see what other people were feeling, what other people were thinking and make a crowd of strangers see it, too. I could even make them feel it. It was like a superpower. There was no limit to what I could do in these pretend worlds. That should have raised a red flag; pretending is never too far from reality. But I saw no flags. I loved the feeling of not being me, of being someone else. I loved the attention. I loved making my whole school cry when I did Emily’s ‘Goodbye, World’ speech in Our Town , at the end of senior year.

By the time I was in high school, my mom had finished school (she’d put herself through college working as a waitress) and had a job she really liked as an administrative secretary in the English department at the college in our town. I could have even gone there for free. But I needed to leave. I loved the small Iowa town where, it seemed, I knew everyone and everyone knew me. But that was another reason why it was time for me to get away.

When I moved to New York, I had about six hundred dollars of my own money—money I’d made when I’d worked every summer, babysitting and minding the neighborhood kids. And Mom had given me a fraction of the money she would have spent sending me to college—money that I knew she didn’t really have—in one lump sum. I dreamed of late-night rehearsals, smoke breaks on fire escapes, stacks of scripts piled high on dusty Turkish rugs in my bohemian penthouse. There’d be bottomless brunches and dinners till dawn with the crew. My name in lights. My glorious stage and film career.

I went to a few auditions. It took me a couple of weeks to realize this wasn’t high school anymore. I stopped going to auditions. I took a drama class at the New York School of Theater, which is where I met my two closest friends in New York, in fact my only friends in New York, Marcy and Luke.

I tried out at a few more auditions. I quit again. Everyone was better than me. I could hear them through the walls as I sat in the corridor, waiting for my name to be called. And when I got through the door, I could see the casting directors’ eyes glaze over. I was pretty, but not pretty enough. I wasn’t this enough, I wasn’t that enough. I looked like a million other girls who’d come to the city with the same hopes and ambitions. And boy, were they ever not interested in hearing me do the tragic monologue from Our Town .

Thanks. We’ll call you. Next!

I was running out of money way faster than I thought I would. If I wanted to stay in New York, I would have to make some changes. It wasn’t easy to give up on my dreams. And when I finally called my mom in Iowa to tell her that maybe I didn’t want to be an actress after all, it was as if I’d somehow made it official. Even though I knew my mom loved me and believed in me and wanted only the best for me, it made me furious when I heard, in her voice, that she’d always known how small—how ridiculous—my chances were.

She said, ‘Maybe you should consider something else, dear. Maybe you should think about becoming a psychologist. You’re so good with people, so sensitive. So intuitive. So caring.’

That was when I almost told her what the school guidance counselor had done in that dim cubicle off the gym. But I didn’t.

‘Thanks, Mom,’ I said. ‘I’ll think about it.’

That night, I cried myself to sleep. Could it really be this easy to give up on so much of myself?

Maybe that was part of what I saw in The Customer.

He gave me a chance to act, to pretend to be someone else—someone hotter and sexier than the nice girl I’d always been. But he knew I wasn’t pretending.