“I don’t want to know,” she says, because shouldn’t she? And doesn’t she? She has to remind herself that this thing, scandal or crime that locked up the school, is not her cloak and her dagger, not the scheme of which she was, and is no longer, a part. There was another story, bigger but harder to see, under her whole scheme, like love, or something else, under every moment of a marriage. She pushes her way out of him. He is looking at her and then at the phone. Her husband, she knows, is moving heaven and earth, and like so many wives, she is a bit player in a crisis, of little more use than a screen for the kid. It sickens her, it relieves her, to be far from her husband’s inner workings, the corridors and trails of his power. Otherwise he’d know. He’d know it and he’d throw her down the stairs.

“OK,” he says. “You OK?”

“Me OK,” she cavemans back, with a little smile. “It’s hormones, partially, it’s possible.”

He just blinks, so she wades farther in.

“I might be pregnant,” she says, and that story, might be, is true as anything. She watches her status, her esteem, rise. With a baby she’s a star. The Vic’s eyes widen. The Vic’s fingers cross with one hand. And with the other, while Kitsune laughs again, he is already calling someone back.

The movie is Fox’s Honeymoon, a Kitsune favorite. It’s of Japanese origin and animated, just like her, although the source material is Native American, as near as anyone can tell. The network, voice-activated, found it when she uttered her name: A fox loves a young man, and when he takes a wife—the birds sing the happy couple a song that Kitsune drones to herself in tuneless looped fragments while her hair gets combed—the fox hatches plan after plan, pleads for wish after wish from the magic waterfall. But the happy couple journey on, married and settled, no matter what tricks the fox plays, and at the end the fox has learned her lesson and—Padgett never gets this part—fallen in love with a snail. The erotic hush, unmentioned but omnipresent in the blue twilight of the film, is something Kitsune will carry with her, always and forgotten. It’ll be part of her love life, Padgett thinks, listening to the dim and plinky soundtrack, and this is what the story is. You meet people and you tell them stories. You meet someone, you marry them, and they’re not part of the story you’re in. They are it. You’re the same story and as it changes, every living day, you can never, never keep up.

•

“Let’s keep watching,” Ben says gently. “That’s enough checking on her, I think. Yes?”