To recap: Sheryl Sandberg joined Facebook as chief operating officer in 2008, promising to make the popular but weird social network profitable. She went hard into advertising, marketing, and data-mining—and, by 2010, Facebook was going great guns. It’s been well in the black ever since.

During these explosive years, the company enabled Russian troll farms. It found end runs around privacy regulations, enabling companies from generally aboveboard Netflix to shady right-wing Cambridge Analytica to harvest and exploit data from unwitting users and their even more unwitting friends. Facebook was also infiltrated by hundreds of millions of imposters, many of them bots and trolls. The company deleted some 1.3 billion fake accounts earlier this year. But Facebook continues to be riddled with fraud.

Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is an Ideas contributor at WIRED. She is the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, a cohost of Trumpcast, an op-ed columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and a frequent contributor to Politico.

Confronted with its misdeeds and worse, Facebook grew defensive. Sandberg herself turned on Facebook’s critics. In a recent New York Times exposé, she comes off as the field marshal in Facebook’s aggressive campaign to smash critics and forestall regulation. What’s more, according to documents discovered by Buzzfeed News this month, Sandberg personally requested details about the investment history of George Soros, the philanthropist who has publicly criticized Facebook. This looked for all the world like opposition research.

But that’s just context. Really, I want to tell another story. In 2012, I attended a Lean In dinner at a chic, cream-colored restaurant in Manhattan with about 20 other feminists. The host was—oh gosh, what was her name—she was so pretty and cool. Oh yes: Sheryl Sandberg. Then the recent author of the best-selling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead and the founder of Lean In groups. Also, the Facebook COO.

In person Sandberg is dazzling. She looks like the actor Carla Gugino—old-fashioned, with rosy lineless skin and 91 percent cacao-content hair. Maybe Gugino will play Sandberg in the movie about Facebook’s perfidy and demise. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I don’t think I’ve ever met a better host. At a table of decidedly anti-corporate women, Sandberg engaged, and seemed to win over, everyone. What did we think of workplace meetings, marriage, children, being heard, leadership, current pieces of legislation, the challenges facing women and feminism? Trump, #MeToo, and the corruption of social media hadn’t surfaced yet, so the “feminist” topics were those fancy morsels from Obama days: wellness, motherhood, and of course sleep. A starter came, and wine, then an elegant main dish, and finally dessert and coffee. We fell over ourselves to agree with Sheryl, as we called her, and laugh at her jokes; she did the same for us, and she seemed just merry.

Two things she said stood out. The first was that, in balancing work and life, the best asset would be a trusty husband like hers, Dave Goldberg. It was clear that night that she really loved her husband and found him a great help to her on every front; it was moving, especially when I think about it now, to hear her praise Goldberg, who died two years later. For petty reasons, though, at the time I bridled. A year earlier, my own husband had fallen in love with a friend of mine and moved in with her. At the Lean In dinner, I panicked at being told that the key to happiness was finding a good man, as I had evidently failed to do that. I sulked through much of the scallop course.

The second thing Sandberg said was that she didn’t expect her employees to come into the office if they didn’t want to. She cited one engineer who could get all the week’s work done in a single day. If he met his marks, she said, he was free to hike, play with his kids, meditate, take an infinitely rewarding nap. I’m not sure if she listed those exact activities, but the idea was that wellness must come first—even over productivity.

That month, Facebook stock was up 88 percent for the year. The company’s IPO, a year earlier, was said to have been a bust at the time; that proved wrong. From Sheryl I divined that when your stock is soaring, you can let employees work one day a week, and hold forth on fitness initiatives, nap rooms, and why a good husband is life’s centerpiece.