Still, despite her surroundings, she looks as impeccable as always. Leanne is Chinese-American, with long, straight black hair, the posture of a prima ballerina, and a wardrobe that almost entirely consists of structural pieces that look like they ought to come with blueprints. She somehow makes them work, whereas I’m pretty sure anyone else wearing them would look like they were dressed as the Empire State Building in a questionable Miss New York pageant.

“Care to explain what happened today, Miles?” she asks in her calm, deep voice, the kind you know has the potential to unleash a tsunami of devastating barbs if necessary.

I clear my throat. “What do you mean?”

“Let’s start with not knowing our client was in a string quartet. And move on to the whole pregnant belly debacle.”

“You know about all that?” I ask weakly.

“Miles. After the fiasco of the last three clients, I told you I’d be logged on to your computer to see your chats. And then you accepted my remote access request this morning.”

“Oh, right,” I say. Shit. I definitely had. And I definitely planned on being on my game today, but that was before Jordan announced to the world (and, oh yeah, me) that she was with child.

Leanne sighs. “Look. I know you’re going through a hard time right now.” I haven’t told her too much about what’s been going on, just that Jordan and I broke up. And that I moved out of our apartment into Dylan’s living room. And that Dylan’s boyfriend, Charles, has been passive-aggressively leaving me notes about how disruptive I am to their lives. And that he made me return the single-ply toilet paper I bought as a thank-you gift because, as he claimed, nobody’s ass deserves the degradation of single-ply, not even mine.

Okay, so maybe I have told Leanne a lot. The problem is that in the eighteen months we were together, I ended up co-opting most of Jordan’s friends, and now I’m stuck trying to scrape together some semblance of a social circle.

“Here’s the thing,” Leanne says, “I can’t afford this meltdown, Miles. I literally can’t afford it. Clearly, we are in some serious trouble here.” She waves her arms vaguely at the horror show of peeling paint and Formica office furniture she’s somehow ended up captaining. “And losing four clients in the span of a month? That’s just not acceptable.”