Let me tell you about a very successful woman.

This woman is a partner to a powerful leader and he needs her to achieve his goals. She alone has enabled him to successfully carry out the aggressive power plays that enrich him and expand his empire. She started with a set of skills that no one else recognized, she honed those skills, she studied with masters, she explored possibilities, tested hypotheses, and created new solutions to his problems, solutions that no one else could even imagine.

And she is incredibly loyal to him. She has known him all her life and, in fact, has loved him all her life. Unfortunately, he married someone else. Someone who wasn’t his first choice. Someone that his advisors pointed out would be more advantageous to him. This marriage enabled him to achieve his first big power play, and was necessary to secure the loyalty of powerful people around him and even the legions of people that he leads.

So, instead of marrying his childhood friend whom he loved and who loved him, he married someone else.

How did this woman respond?

She disappeared.

She left silently, in the night, without a word to anyone. She disguised herself. And then, on the day of her wedding, she delivered herself, in disguise, as a gift to the man and his new wife, with a note from a competitor. (The note specified that “Kane” – her assumed name – was unable to speak. And the disguise caused everyone to assume she was a man.) Later, she revealed herself to the man and he arranged a private space where they could meet alone and continue their personal relationship.

Later, as she had racked up score after score for him, raising his name and her disguise-name to legendary status, legends that lasted eons, she began to want something for herself.

She wanted a child. He agreed. But she couldn’t have the child in his home, for obvious reasons.

Pregnant, she left his home to do “research”, and searched through time for a place that she could leave the child to be raised, while she continued to work with him to conquer new challenges. She leaves a memoir, written in a language that only her child will be able to decipher. When the child finishes reading the memoir, it will trigger a signal to Kane. Then Kane will lead her lover and his army to that place, where they will take over, dethrone and replace the ruler of that place with their child.

When they do that, things don’t go as planned and the woman is forced to make a decision.

And, only in that moment, does she recognize what she has given up.

While “Kane” is a legend as part of the legend of the man she loves, she herself is nothing. She has no friends, other than her lover. Her family assumes she is dead. She has given up her life as a woman, appearing only as a man. She has given up time with her child.

She has even given up her name.

While this story is only a subplot in Patricia McKillip’s Alphabet of Thorne, it is an important subplot, bringing together the climax of the main plot and answering the questions that the book has set up.

When the book ended, I found myself thinking more and more about “Kane’s” story.

Do you know a woman who feels like this?

A woman who puts her partner or her career ahead of her own success? Who gives up her name, who she is as a woman, time with her children, to give her partner what he needs or to gain success at work?

What will it take for the woman you know to look in the mirror and recognize that she is not reflected there?

What will it take for her to take action to reclaim her name and her life?

It’s a question that a lot of women are facing now. We’ve been good little employees our whole career, forming ourselves into the brand of a “model employee” who gives things up for the places we work, sacrificing pieces of ourselves for the success of the organization. Perhaps some of that success reflects off on us. But when we leave the company, does that success come with us?

No, it was a reflection of the successful organization, not a reflection of us. And so we search for another organization that we can make successful, to rebuild that reflection of success. Fearing that, if we leave, the reflection will again disappear and we will disappear with it.

What is the alternative?

“Kane” solves the problem by stepping away from the success.

“Here […], I can walk with the sunlight on my face. I can speak to anyone who speaks to me. […] I can be called the name I was given when I was born. Here I am no longer my own secret,” she says.