As for today, it was time. The big local story this morning is a rumor, everywhere onscreen, that one juror in the long-delayed fraud trial of Ariel Park, after ten days of deadlock, threw a chair at another. He hadn’t been identified except by race, which leads in the posting to other points, more or less freely associated, about the races of many other participants, and about Ariel Park and the Kitsune School and its power couple founders and some remark from an anonymous source about the propriety of co-opting ancient cultural traditions by the white males dominant in tech, and when Padgett hit this paragraph out loud, Vic stood up from the table and stalked out loudly. The kids were glued to some new episode on the DXM and didn’t notice, but Padgett followed him uncertainly back to the master bedroom to find him walking into his walk-in closet. She hadn’t been in there herself in who knows how long. He was up on the stepladder, pushing down hats and sandals until he had the cardboard box and stepped back down to her.

“Today, I want to do it,” he said to his wife.

Padgett had to think for a minute. The box looked like something summoned onscreen, shelled around some catalog item she’d ordered and forgotten. “OK.”

“I’m ready.”

“Because of that article? I don’t get it. OK, though.”

“It’s not the article,” he said, and handed her the box. He started to strip. He was changing already. “It’s just, it’s enough.”

“Should we tell Kitsune?”

“No we should not tell Kitsune,” he said, in a disgusted burst, too loudly. “Sorry. But no. They can run around and we can do it.”

“Do you want anyone else there?” she asked, but then retreated before he’d snap again, made her own decision and phoned another couple. She took the box back to the kitchen. The kids looked up, Kitsune and then Charles, but she shook her head, the practiced mom gesture of This is not a present, this is not anything interesting, nothing to see here, nothing for you.

“Time to get dressed,” she said, instead, and dressed now, they walk on down. Vic has the box and she has his arm, almost formally, and they will scatter the ashes of Maureen, his first wife, not in the field where people get married, but in the wide-open space of the amphitheater beyond.