Most nights they sup late together, after nibbling at two or three quasi-professional gatherings, from food that appears somehow in pots on the burner, pots they leave halfheartedly soaking in the sink, someone else’s problem. The screens flicker like candlelight, and when the Vic takes a call outside, or strides off to check something in his office, Padgett finishes the bottle, whatever bottle it is, and for the most part they are in an agreeable semi-silence just like an actual couple. There’s sex but not unduly so, not passionate or trashy enough for her to be the widower’s rebound party girl she sure as hell looks like to herself. She’s drinking more now, but somehow, in her new bewildering circumstance, this just means she knows a lot about wine, and similarly she has risen in the language of digital description, once gossiped about as a former cater-waiter and now as someone, spotted and phone-documented spitting a clam dumpling into a napkin—in the world of food. But Padgett does not know what world she is in. She hasn’t been in her old place, her old bedroom, in a long time; last she checked it looked like the room of someone who had gone missing, kept just the way it was on that day, clothes flat on the floor like a suicided girl, uncoiled headphones on the carpet listening to nothing. And where’s her life now? The Vic still lives like she can’t believe, and now she can’t believe how much she can’t believe. She sleeps beside him in a tightly made bed now. Now, she feeds his little baby.

“She likes you,” the Vic says.

“She likes milk,” Padgett says.

He shakes his head, not necessarily in disagreement. “You’re good. You’re getting good with her.”

“Thank you,” she says, and holds Kitsune’s head, a larger grapefruit than last time. She’s half done, so Padgett takes the bottle and hands it to Vic, who turns it carefully in his hands like he’s unloading a gun. She lays a towel and then a baby on her shoulder, pit-patting for burps. She faces the Vic’s unshaven smile, his eyes jazzed from financial success and too little sleep.

“I have to go in today.”

“I had a feeling.” One of his interests was merging, or expanding, or what have you.

“Can I leave you with Kitsune?”

What is, she thinks, the line of how much you can drink with a baby in your care, even one surrounded by soft objects in a cage? The Vic, she’s learned, tracks his bottles, so she drinks her own, scattered hither and yon, but not too yon, in the condo’s satellite refrigerators and two duffel bags. “OK,” she says.

“Unless you have plans.”

“You know my plans,” she says. “Not until five. Until then I can make the plan of taking care of this duffel. Bundle. Baby.”