Chicago, the turn of the 21st century. Our narrator --- always there and never entirely present --- recounts her decades-long relationship with the heiress Katherine Stern. Through the years since boarding school, she has seen Katherine as a daughter who wants for nothing but respect from her psychotherapist father, as a woman with a kind but fortune-hunting fiancée, and as a mystery even more confounding than the gothic horror stories she evaluates from the slush pile at her job. Sometimes, despite their estrangement, she has even seen Katherine as a friend. Inspired by the classic story WASHINGTON SQUARE by Henry James, Norah Labiner reimagines the prolific tale.