because we tended to be people with few external ties, without partners or children, with the very minimum of family. The way we lived certainly kept us that way. Out of Aimee’s four female assistants, only one of us ever had a child, and only then in her mid-forties, long after quitting. Climbing aboard that Learjet, you had to be untethered. It wouldn’t have worked otherwise. I had only one rope now—my mother—and she was, like Aimee, in her prime, although unlike Aimee my mother had very little need
