The sky’s blue, a perfect gray blue from the bed. It’s the morning, the baby kicking in a little chair with sweet potato on its—her—mouth and she, Padgett, the coffee not strong enough, is standing in this miracle of an enormous kitchen. She does not check her phone but he has two, maybe three, and when he slips out to the balcony to talk to someone, making faces through the glass at the baby, she patters to the freezer at the far end and finds vodka, Polish and grassy-tasting, to gobble from her coffee cup, and she falls asleep in the bed again while he showers, waking after some jolty dream to his body leaning onto hers. He smells like pretentious soap. This time she does say no, citing the baby, although the baby has been taken someplace again. More vodka while he shaves, then he sits cross-legged in boxer shorts on the bed and asks her if she’s ever heard of, been to, a place called Cogwheels.

“I grew up in California,” she says. “My mom had a yoga protégé when I was twelve and we went there for his birthday. Or, hold on, maybe mine.”

“I want to take you there for the weekend.”

Padgett cannot remember what day it is. It apparently makes her look reluctant.

“Don’t look at it that way. It’s not a huge deal. My company has a plan.”

“What company? What plan?”

“They use my music. My music users get some discounts.”

“Oh, so you won’t have to pay much, Boy Billionaire. That’s a relief.”

“I need to meet them a little this weekend. But we could make a weekend out of it.”

“What’s the catch?”

The Vic laughs and stands up and starts with T-shirts and belts. “Eventually, the catch is that everyone will need to buy all the music all over again and pay me for doing it. It’s not going to be how it was. Songs, musicians, it’s just on now, like water from a tap. And the money’s in whose faucet it is.”

Padgett cannot get over what not a genius he is, how his ideas are just phrases with a cute face. “I meant, what’s the catch for me?”

“Oh.”

“Not for content utilizers in the world’s quadrants.”

“I just thought you would like it. Someplace fine.” He plops down on the bed again and flares back the sheet from her body. He is looking at her like an onscreen search, scrolling for the right hit. His fingers are holding her near the knees, fairly nonsexually, like he can check a pulse or chakra or whatever she has in her besides vodka and a feeling of falling behind. What is it, she thinks, he sees in her, what is he seeing? “You’re the first one,” he says, his hands moving up to hold her ass in two places, “since Maureen died.”