Quite like a pirate.

I understood self-loathing as a woman’s inheritance, a curse we carry around discreetly like tampons, and the goal was to rise above this mental warp, not crater to market demands.

The correction officers eyed them with amusement. Even without their hair and makeup, they were a sight to behold, four exotic birds chirping in a cage. “Which one of you is the ringleader?” one asked.

God does exist, but it’s Zeus. Like, what the hell?

“Honey, she’s not done eating her pie,” said the older woman. “She’s been waiting here for you, only seems fair that you wait until she finishes her pie with us.”

“At a certain age — psychologically, biogenetically, I don’t know — you get to the place when a switch flips,” Ms. Tunney said. “You tell yourself, ‘I’m done.’”

In small communities, it's your own people you have to answer to if things go wrong. But Parata doesn't dwell on that. For her, childbirth is a natural life event. "When it comes to childbirth, I believe that women are in a state of tapu, in a state of sacredness. You are in a different realm of health. You have this connection through this baby you are carrying, a connection to the spiritual world," she says.

On Monday, at Mr. Epstein’s bail hearing, she got the closest she has ever been to the man she had spent years investigating. Seeing him seated before the judge in a blue prison jumpsuit, she thought he looked small.

This is not a ghost story; it’s a story about an inheritance. Grief takes so much from us. We are well-versed in its agonies, and if we aren’t yet, we will be soon enough. But nearly a decade down this road, I feel that I owe it to grief to honor its pleasures. To recognize what love gives us, and makes of us, even as it takes.

Imagine my surprise then, when several years after we buried her, I heard my mother laugh. Not in a dream, in the middle of the day. That same richness, that same timbre. I snapped my neck around, looking. Only to realize as the last traces of the sound colored the air, that my mother’s laughter was coming from my own throat. The person who had made me laugh, a coworker, had already walked away, but I stood alone in the hallway for a moment, delighted and heartbroken at once. I felt silly holding my hand to my throat for a moment, but I didn’t know what else to do. I even tried to recreate the laugh, to no avail. I just stood there, humbled, realizing that the laughter is mine to receive but never to own.

Janet Malcolm might be surprised at this trajectory; in addition to a cult, she also described Eileen Fisher–wearers as “women of a certain age and class—professors, editors, psychotherapists, lawyers, administrators—for whom the hiding of vanity is an inner necessity.”

She never let her fears or her desires block her ability to see reality, to be practical, to honor herself.

“A village without children is a village that dies,” Jean Debouzy, mayor of Montereau in the Loiret department south of Paris, told The Local.

Before evolution hit a snag, and we reverted to slouching and staring at our phones, human beings walked with their eyes up, looking at things. In the countryside, people contemplated church steeples, maple trees, clouds. In cities, they gaped at neon — and it was everything.

But before she requested changes or made suggestions, she always asked the team, "If we do this, this and this, how much human suffering will that involve?" Because if it meant that 17 people would be up all night making the revisions, Ms. Gallop preferred the key people involved in the pitch get their sleep so they would be at their peak performance. The typical creative director, she says, "goes, 'Change that, do that, I want this, that whole thing needs to be dumped' and issues all these directives. Then he gets up, walks out of the room and leaves behind a trail of devastation and human misery in his wake. I don't do that shit."

Our creative strategy at BBH was, 'We don't sell. We make people want to buy.' So I'm not selling gender and diversity equality. I'm making people want to buy it."

"I'm not doing this because I'm a woman, OK? I'm not doing this because it is the right thing to do. I am doing this because I quite literally want to weep when I see the enormous possibilities inherent in the massively untapped pool of talent and creativity of women and people of color that our industry is spectacularly failing to leverage," Ms. Gallop says. "Our industry thinks its glory days are over. Our industry's glory days have not even begun. Because we have not even begun to see what this industry could be with the creativity and the talent and skills of women and people of color."