Cleo tucked in close to my other side, and we walked out arm in arm, taking up as much space as we could as we made our way down the long hallway. As we emerged into the chaos of Midtown in the middle of morning rush hour, Lola stretched her arms to the sky, then landed one over my neck as we walked, pulling me in close. “Hey, Fran, have we ever told you we love you?”

Cleo, already on her cell phone dealing with work, looked up in agreement. “Big-time. Who needs a Subway QT when you have us?”

I felt awash in love for them, my chosen people, my unrelated family.

“I love you too, you jerks.”

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Hayes

“Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

Eleanor somehow managed to get the words out through a mouthful of oatmeal. I was snipping at a hot-sauce packet with a pair of scissors. We normally did our weekly check-in meeting around 4 p.m., but it was the Friday before a long weekend, and so we’d pushed it to the morning.

“What kind of question is that?” I asked, dumping the hot sauce onto my egg-white wrap. “You know I’m a bad news first sort of person, always.”

You were better off assuming the glass was half-empty, I liked to reason, because then it was a nice surprise if you find out it might just be half-full. This logic had driven Angie nuts. “Where’s the joy in that?” she said to me once, exasperated on a car ride out to Montauk for a long weekend with my parents. I had been complaining prematurely, assuming it was already a wash of a vacation. “That way,” I’d explained matter-of-factly, “I’ll appreciate it more if it doesn’t suck.”

I’d eventually come to find out that by then, almost everything I did had driven Angie nuts, my obsession with work topping her list. It wasn’t lost on me that this memory was sneaking into my brain during an early work meeting.

“The good news, then!” Eleanor said as she sprinkled a packet of brown sugar on her oatmeal. “I had Tyler compile all the inquiries we’ve gotten since your lovely appearance on New York News.” She spun in her chair to face her computer, clicking away at the keyboard.

“According to their tally, we’ve had”—she scrolled through an Excel spreadsheet—“twenty-six cold inquiries, total. Now, granted, at least ten of them were marriage proposals or some sort of other proposition.”

“Well, I guess that’s better than people calling me an asshole,” I said, with a hint of relief.