Ruthie giggles. “This isn’t, like, something we’re proud of. But all our boyfriends and husbands work together or have worked together! And Shirley’s wife. You know, a lot of the big tech companies are headquartered out in California. But we’re here, instead! It facilitates friendship among the families,” she adds. Then these women all knew Tom intimately, or their partners did. The thought leaves a bad taste in my mouth, a gurgling in my stomach.

“And Joanie and I are on the board at Tree of Life. So we spend a lot of time together,” a woman who introduced herself as Clarissa says. She’s Black, the only nonwhite person here, just as I predicted. Her head is shaved, and she’s older than the other women, closer to early forties, wearing a pink cotton jumpsuit.

“Tree of Life is a nonprofit focused on creating more parks and natural landscapes in low-income communities,” explains Joanie. She’s spry, prim and pregnant, hair chopped into a pixie cut, dyed blue, wearing a denim maternity dress. She’s the most ageless of them all.

“Odilie was on their board, too,” Shirley says, dropping her name like an extra ice cube in an overfilled glass of water, a sudden frosty splash. I hear the silence, the beat of it, as everyone looks nervously at each other, every lip trembling like a robin’s tiny ruddy chest.

“Yes, she was!” Ruthie finally says and there’s a collective swallow as we all drink a large draft of the sangria. “It has rum, red wine, pears, apple and orange slices!” Ruthie says for the second time that night. And I can, thankfully, feel it.

The night moves along and I relegate myself to silence, only speaking when I’m spoken to, keeping an easy, breezy smile on my face and listen to Page, fulfill my duty of watching her, making sure she doesn’t slip up. She’s doing a pretty good job. She follows my rule to an impressive degree, continually asking questions. The one mistake she makes is when she outwardly acknowledges that she’s never donated to a politician in her life, and I save her by saying that as long as she votes, that’s all that counts.