“What are you doing here?” Nina says suddenly. She is looking past Padgett, and Padgett turns around to see her scruffy secret, with bags under his eyes and his hands in his pockets. He is sort of grinning, sort of relieved, wary too.

“Martin,” Padgett pretends to have retrieved from an address book in her head. She turns to Nina. “Martin Icke. From Bottle Grove.”

“Hello,” Martin says.

“Oh yes,” Nina lies, and Gabriel squints at him.

“You’ll have to excuse us, Martin,” Padgett says, impressed with her own airy tone. “Something has come up.”

Martin steps forward and back, a dance in Gabriel’s lawyerly gaze. “Come up?”

“Martin and I were going to talk drinks for the fundraiser,” Padgett says, concocting like an alchemist.

“Well, there’s no fundraiser now,” Gabriel says, disgusted, his thumbs busy on his little pad.

“We’ve just received,” Padgett says to Martin, looking as closely as she dares at him, “some bad news.”

“Bad news,” he says, and moves his shoulders in a shrug or something.

“I’ll have to talk to you later,” she tells him. “When we get this all sorted.”

The word in the air is “sordid.” Martin has reached into his pocket and retrieved a machine Padgett hardly recognizes, an old, old phone. “You have my info?” he asks.

“I should, yes.”

Nina somehow has heard something in this, some thread she ought to tug. “You were meeting here? So early?”

But Martin is already walking backward, half-turning around like there’s nothing, and there isn’t, to see here. “I had nothing else to do,” he says, and Padgett, where does it come from, loves him a little for the last time. He goes, keeps walking, around the corner, a tall glass of water, a whole bottle, she thinks, of white wine down her throat, as soon as they get home. She never calls.

•

“We dodged a bullet,” the Vic says. He’s cupping his hand over his phone, a gesture so twentieth century it’s jarring on her futurist husband. “Talk to you in a minute. Is Kit OK?”

“She’s fine,” Padgett says, but Kitsune has already hurried past. Now she stops mid-flight, in the bright kitchen, looking at her father in slack astonishment. The Vic holds both arms out like he’s being searched at the airport.

“Daddy’s working at home today,” he says, his attention fierce on the phone.

Kit stares at him like a frog walked in. The world is so strange this morning. “You can’t work,” she says, with crazy-eyed incredulousness, “at home.”

“How about a movie?” he says. “How about the V4U?”