“Why do you hate them so much?” Wallis asked him.

“The conversation isn’t conversation at all. It’s one-upmanship. Before it devolves into people talking solely about themselves and their lives.”

“I was invited to join one, once, by a girl who worked in the office,” I remarked. “She didn’t call it book club. She called it her Sunday Salons.”

“The pretension of DC knows no bounds,” said Cricket cheerlessly before excusing herself to the restroom.

“Sunday salon,” Atlas said, his French accent not too terrible.

“Sal-LAH,” I said, high Parisian.

“Atlas.” Blake pointed at my plus-one. “Now I remember. You wrote that story about my mother and her friendship with my godfather. You remember? Melinda Darley and Frank ‘Fracking’ McGill?”

“I do remember.” Atlas glanced at me. “Was a few years ago now.”

“It was so fucking unflattering,” Blake said, straightforward. Wallis mussed with his hair. A warning to back off, maybe?

“Was it unflattering?” Atlas took a sip of his tea and shrugged genially. “Or is your godfather just a prick?”

Wallis’s hand paused in Blake’s hair. My glass of wine stopped midway to my mouth. But Blake just threw back his head and laughed. “You’re right,” he said. “He’s a paranoid, self-serving asshole who, I swear, gave me soap in the shape of coal every birthday. In high school, I was Jean Valjean in Les Mis, and he told me—to my face—I couldn’t sing for shit.”

“I love Les Mis,” said Wallis.

“I’m sure he wouldn’t like you hanging around with us,” I said. “Disgraced daughters of a crooked senator and a bona fide member of the dishonest press.”

He kissed my sister’s cheek and smiled. “I’m not too worried about appearances.”

The brass section of the band was having a moment, and further talking became impossible. Atlas scanned his phone unhappily and, when he caught my gaze, mouthed I need to take this. He got up, phone to ear, just as Wallis put her drink aside and pulled Blake to the dance floor. I waved goodbye, then felt awkward about it when they didn’t see.

I sat alone at the large table with only my coffee, which I take black.

“You should slow down,” I said to Wallis a while later in the ladies’ room. She was fiddling with her bobby pins and smiling goofily in the mirror. She’d taken off her strappy shoes and was now wearing a pair of cheap flip-flops that had been in baskets by the dance floor. She and Blake were having fun, that was clear, but I needed to remind her what was at stake before they got serious. If it wasn’t already too late. “You’re running through conversation topics so quickly that you won’t have anything left, and there will be nothing to do except fall into bed.”