I’m doing this square breathing trick Meg taught me, trying to stay calm as I settle into Sue’s white guest cloud, when a man pops up from behind Sue’s desk. We scream at the same time.

“Rufus, what the hell?” I hiss. I can hiss at him because he’s my friend. It’s a love hiss. “What are you doing here?”

“Um, my job?” he says, rolling out his neck, which is always sore because he over-Pilates because he has the long-standing, unrequited hots for Brent, the instructor at Pilates World.

“Well, get out! Come back later. I have a meeting.”

“Sue’s printer broke,” he says, fiddling with some cables in a way that makes me suspect he won’t be done anytime soon. “Just because I’ve had to resurrect your hard drive from the underworld—is it three times now?—does not mean I don’t also perform valuable IT for the rest of this company.”

“In my defense—”

“Oh, I dare you.” He shakes his head in pity.

“Mercury was in retrograde!”

“Permanently?” He laughs. “Why are you hissing so much?”

“I hiss when I’m nervous,” I hiss, glancing out the open door. “Frank used the word fired.”

Rufus rolls his big brown eyes, which reassures me. A little. He thinks this is absurd. Then again, he doesn’t know about Noa Callaway’s egregiously missed deadline.

“Why would you get fired?” Rufus pauses. “Do you think anyone else saw you stealing those office supplies last month?”

“It was a box of tissues!” More hissing. I can’t not at this point. “I had bronchitis!”

“Lanie.” Sue sweeps into the office, passing me to hang up her white cardigan—this one has a kind of corset look going on at the back, which only Sue could make look classy.

“Good as new, Sue,” Rufus proclaims, setting Sue’s printer back on its shelf below her desk.

“Always with the words I like to hear, Rufus,” Sue says, taking a seat across from me on her white couch.

“I’ll just be going.” He says the words I want to hear, mouthing good luck to me as he closes the door.

“How are you?” Sue asks me once we’re alone.

“Good. Fine.”

With her pearls and capsule uniform, with her silver-blond, chin length hair always looking like it’s just been drybarred, Sue is so put together that even after all these years, it can strike fear into my heart to look at her. Once, the two of us were escorting an author to an event at a mall in a Westchester suburb. We had an hour to kill before the signing, and Sue bought me a fancy spatula at Williams Sonoma, telling me I’d never make a French rolled omelet without it. I feel like she can look at me and sense that, two years later, I have never swatted a fly without it.