It was good for their imaginations to have a father with a relative dearth of one. Cassie asked him later, after she started writing plays, whether he’d found it stressful, as a structural engineer by trade, to come up with stories to tell them. “Not really,” he said. “You seemed pretty happy with whatever I said.”

She worked in an office now, as her father had, to pay her rent, and she went over the plots of movies she’d seen to make the minutes go by.

She was thirty-two, the age at which other peoples’ tattoos begin to feel like personal affronts. Jaunty skeleton, fake suture, wilted rose: stop. She had a single word of text branded below the knob of her left ankle. On the rare occasions when people noticed it, they were mildly amused. Some people knew her for years before they discovered it; others never did. It was what she aspired to on many fronts—the slow reveal of character, the possession of a personhood that could not be grasped whole without effort expended.

She’d learned that the key to email at work was to respond quickly, even if you didn’t have anything coherent or helpful to say. “Thanks for this!” was a good way to start. Then: “Let me check up on that and follow up with you soon.” Ideally, this was where the exchange ended, but all too often the correspondent took that burst of vague professionalism as a license to continue pestering her. She waited for texts from her brother—he currently reported on science from Mexico City—and for the moment between 5:00 and 5:30 when it would be appropriate for her to leave the office, depending on what time she’d managed to arrive.

After the workday, she hoped to produce some writing, maybe have dinner or watch a movie with the new maybe-boyfriend. Friendship, she was deciding, was a childish conceit, an affectation possessed by people who imagined that the conditions of their lives circa age eighteen would remain basically the same in perpetuity. She’d previously been a fan of this conceit—she just wished she hadn’t seen through it.

She lamented the fact that her new coworkers only saw her shadow self, quiet and obliging and maybe a little bit lazy. Ruefully funny on occasion, sure, but always within the bounds of office decorum. Her other self was for her family and the Internet, and maybe Leonard, if he stuck around.