Phone never leaving my hand, I spent my nights up very late on my couch, watching PBS documentaries, including one the previous night about NASA. I had tuned in just as an off-screen producer asked a former astronaut, If you hadn’t worked for NASA, what would you have done? The man who’d floated near stars stated—and I’m paraphrasing here—that this question was dumb. He was an astronaut. There was no plan B. Still, the interviewer pressed, If you had to choose another job...

“Leave the poor spaceman alone!” I yelled at my television. See what happens when I don’t have meaningful work? “He had no backup plan! That is fine and normal!”

His answer was succinct: My choice would not be a person. I’d choose to be a satellite in gentle orbit, living usefully and long, unperturbed by earthly disturbances.

Of course he would feel that way; he’d orbited earth, witnessed the sun rise over its curvature, had an unbroken view of our world as a whole. Maybe I’d be able to think of removing myself from the fray, too, after I’d actually accomplished something, years in the future. Something to look forward to! Until then, I had to work. We—meaning, our lawyers and bill collectors, the American taxpayer we were paying back—needed the money.

And the pressure to carry this out had only increased after what Atlas had uncovered. I hadn’t told anyone about it yet. I’d simply informed Cricket and Wallis the morning his article was supposed to run that he’d opted not to publish after all, brushing off their questions, which hadn’t been particularly pointed. Both had seemed preoccupied with other matters. Wallis, continually hollow-eyed and grumpy, delivered only one-word answers if she had anything to say to me at all. Cricket was always running to one thing or another; she’d begun work on a journal, she said, and spent hours at the petite desk in her room, one set of glasses on her nose and one on her head. Every time I considered bullying them onto the couch and forcing them to listen, I pictured Miles, in France, eating croissants and running through the itinerary I’d prepared for him, who’d never have me back if this news got out.

Fortunately, sensing my rising desperation, Bo had given me a tip: Miles would be attending tonight’s book launch party for Wallis’s boss—the perfect opportunity to oh so casually run into him and beg for my job. All I needed to figure out was the proper wardrobe for groveling.

After great deliberation, I selected a serious black pants suit and white blouse and made my way with Cricket to the Willard Hotel at the prescribed 7:00 p.m.