A year ago, I’d set up a nice little desk overlooking the patch of scraggly garden below my window. I’d bought a banker’s lamp and a paperweight that looked like a gemstone, fancy filing folders, and a cup for my pens. All very pretty. All underused.

Instead, I dragged my laptop and papers into my bed and propped myself up on pillows, which was definitely not good for my back. I was making progress on my tasks and avoiding all thoughts of Atlas when Blake and Wallis, having spent the night together, showed up on my doorstep, intent on coaxing me out of the apartment before Sunday dinner.

“The weather is divine,” Wallis declared in my doorway. “Unseasonably warm. Put down your work for a few hours. Leave your phone. Blake will drive us to Georgetown and we’ll take the water taxi to Southwest.”

Going outside was low on my priority list. I had no plans to leave. “But Miles—” I said.

“Miles doesn’t need a chief of staff with a vitamin D deficiency,” said Blake.

“Where’s Cricket?” I grasped for excuses, wishing I’d been quicker. I already sensed Wallis anticipating the next obstacle I’d throw down. Her whole body was poised like a hurdler. I saw it in her elbows, her knees. “Shouldn’t we invite her?”

“I have no idea where she is. She dashed off this morning with her laptop and reading glasses. Didn’t even have time for coffee. She’s quite the busy bee these days. Come on, we don’t need her.”

“Let me text her,” I said.

“Call,” Wallis ordered.

I’ve heard people use their children as pretexts to get out of things. She has to nap. Bedtime, you understand. Though I was ambivalent about becoming a mother—what baby wanted to exist mainly as an escape hatch for introverts?—I did envy the parents who always had this ready justification.

I managed to get ahold of Cricket on my second try; she sounded frazzled, but promised to meet us at the water taxi. My brain, dulled by a morning of paperwork and frozen pancakes, could think of no easy way out, except to admit that I was sad, and wanted nothing more than to continue drowning my feelings in PDF documents. But I could not find the words to tell Wallis and her beaming bright side of a boyfriend.

“Let me change,” I said. Wallis clapped and grinned. So did Blake. “But if there are typos and errors in Miles’s briefing binder tomorrow, I’m blaming you both.”