Violet, who had invited him into the group in the first place, was directly across the table from him. She had been, until quite recently, a fellow assistant of his at the august, maybe dying small magazine where he still worked. Now she had a job as a web editor at a more prestigious, definitely not dying, publication, and Derek saw her mostly at parties or at book club (reading group), though she did text him sometimes, often five or six messages in a row, to complain about some obstinate writer who wouldn’t take edits or, more pointedly, at least in Derek’s mind, about the ridiculousness of the date she’d been on the night before. Sometimes—good days, as he thought of them, with some embarrassment—this would lead to hours of nearly unbroken texting between them, during which Derek’s work, to put it lightly, suffered. He’d carry out his tasks in a haze of composition, mentally rearranging the punctuation in his responses until they had achieved a perfect balance of intelligence and spontaneity. He could hardly remember what they’d been discussing even minutes after the flurries ended—the editor who’d gotten fired over an ill-judged headline, the Arab Spring, the inadequacy of birth-control options—but the exchanges left him humming with pleasure and immediately starving for more. Most times, the conversation would go cold after one or two volleys, with Derek feeling phantom buzzes against his hip, checking his phone every few minutes for the rest of the day hoping she might have decided, after a few hours of serious contemplation, to reply to, “Ha, crazy! What do you think he meant???”