How can Margaret take off her cowboy hat and reveal herself?

If only I could distill and market the wild bursts inside of me when Margaret throws her cowboy hat off at high speed and stops her horse and the engineer jumps off his and lifts Margaret out of the saddle and sets her down on the dry earth, and she turns and says, Not so fast. I may not be an errant ranch hand, but you better back off if you want to romance me, the world would be a better place.

Marcus came out, wearing his headpiece. He gave Blithe a slight nod, but Blithe was really inside himself. His biodata had shifted from anxious scanning to blissful immersion.

Blithe paused to get cafeteria sushi and to tell his division’s assistant what to research. Passing the fountain in the atrium, he pushed away thoughts about the state’s drought.

Keep your eyes not on what’s in front of you, but on the oceans within, he chanted to himself a few times. It worked well enough. He ran his hands down the cool chino of his pants.

He sat down with a juice and some cucumber sushi at a far table overlooking the hills. There was too much haze for a good view, so he made up his own.

Birds of paradise slipping through glades; the eternal juiciness of life here on earth.

He thought about plopping down some sort of marketplace in the Sonoran, so that Margaret could run her hands over fruits and rugs and spice piles. A general store about thirty miles northwest of the sea—a day’s ride—would have to do.

He skipped the producer’s status meeting to keep feeding the beast. He felt rugged and drowsy. A voicemail message from Saul popped up. He listened to his boyfriend’s sweet voice coming at him from far away. Still, he did not respond.

Cooper was also skipping the meeting and sat on his mobile desk throwing orange peels at the trash can. He paused to adjust the collar of his Oxford. He’d married rich, and Blithe could see that the partnering had created an invisible noose around Cooper’s neck that he was always trying to loosen. “Hey, dude. Guess who’s in the conference room?”

Blithe tried to create a wall of calming energy around him. “Who?”

“Rachel fucking Remedios.” In his excitement, Cooper slam-dunked the skinned orange. “Shit,” he said, and took it out of the trash, wiped it off with a paper towel.

A shiver of before. Rachel Remedios was part of a tacky, early-aughts rom-com quilt that taught everyone what normal was supposed to look like.

“Is she here for Catalpa?”

“Dunno. But that doesn’t bode well for our Violetizing chances if they’re fishing in that pond.”

Why did Cooper have to take the studio’s lingo and make it even worse?

Blithe hoped Rachel didn’t get anywhere near Margaret’s character. She was too facile. Still, it would be a cool to tell age-thirteen Blithe, “Well, look at me now, on the same floor of Elemental Studios as Rachel Remedios.”