Donald beamed. “It would be a very nice gesture.”

I wanted to hit him, then flay him, then slow-cook him on the open flame of that gas grill we were going to get.

“Let me think about it before I definitely commit myself,” I said, wanting to leave myself an out in case I had a sudden change of heart (return to sanity). “I’ve got to go upstairs and check my book, see what the week looks like.”

“Oh my God! You’re going to meet your fiancé’s ex-fiancée!” Gayle said. “Have lunch together—with his approval! How many people actually get to be face to face with their nemeses? To see what they eat?”

I regarded my white Flair pen cap and sucked on it furiously. Gayle was my best friend in Washington, and I’d called her from our bedroom after leaving Donald downstairs pulling cookbooks from the shelf. Born in London, educated at Cambridge, and, at the age of forty-seven, impossibly thin and childlike, Gayle had the body of a twelve-year-old girl and the sense of wonder about the world (read: emotional immaturity) to match it.

Fascinated by everything and everyone, her erratically “eclectic” career mirrored her extremely brief attention span: over the years, she had been a freelance writer who had contributed feature articles sporadically to the Washington Post, Washingtonian magazine, and even Sassy, which was how we’d met (I’d edited a very funny piece she’d written about growing up flat-chested); she had written grant proposals for nonprofit groups and annual-report copy for think tanks; she’d even penned an as-yet-unpublished biography of Frank Perdue at the behest of a D.C. lobbying firm that had made her an offer too lucrative to refuse (I’d never gotten a straight answer out of her as to why anyone would want to know that much about Frank Perdue). Currently, she was writing for Congressional Quarterly, a magazine she confessed she never read and which I confessed I’d never heard of (we were quite a pair; what either of us was doing in Washington I had no idea). Gayle had been through everything—two divorces; four children; countless ill-fated love affairs—though somehow she’d managed to learn nothing from any of it. Every time another dramatic situation befell her—a romance; a breakup; a lawsuit; a career disaster; a terribly disappointing meal—it was as if she had never experienced anything even remotely like it. Unpredictable and unreliable as she sometimes was, and wrong as her instincts and judgments often were about people (and always were about clothes), she was charming and hilarious; completely sui generis. Not to mention generous, too—she’d taken extremely good care of me when I’d first moved to town (she took me out for lunch or dinner while I was still in between paychecks; drove me wherever I needed to go before I bought my car; called me late at night when she suspected I might be, and was indeed, lonely; assured me that changing careers, as she had done so many times before, was a sign of strength, not weakness).