Had they really done it on the pitcher’s mound at Frontier Field in the dead of winter? Check. Had she really given him a hand job in the Wendy’s drive-through? Roger that. It had all been for fun. And he was fun. Hung like a horse, quite the kisser. Said all the right things. After this, seriously? Faithful forever. To Rob. Unless someone else awesome came along. What was she, dead? Rob was great, Rob was thoughtful, Rob was sweet. But she had Rob. What she’d found out about herself, six months into their marriage, was that what she loved (what she lived for, actually) was: getting someone new to want her. There was nothing like it. Sue her, she wanted to live. She and Rob had an open thing. Rob was cool with it. She, yes, invoked the open thing somewhat more often than Rob. Who, so far, had never once invoked it.

But that wasn’t it.

It was this thing with Brenda. Tim might be down in his office right now, thinking less of her. Believing that she’d been agreeing with Brenda’s negative yammering about him. Why did she care? Well, she did. That’s just how she was. Responsible. Good team player. Tim was, after all, their boss.

Their “boss.”

Hard to believe that shrimp was anybody’s “boss.”

Ugh, this was going to ruin her whole day if she didn’t take care of it.

She’d go down there, bring up the topic of Brenda, giving Tim a chance to say, Yeah, you know, I heard something kind of weird just now, back in the break room. Then she’d confess. Confess that Brenda had been shit-talking him. While she, Gen, very much disapproving of that kind of talk, had stood there helplessly trapped by her own politeness.

She strode down to Tim’s office and dropped into his wobbly guest chair with a soldierly familiarity.

“That Brenda, wow,” she said. “I just love her. What a wild card. Sort of hard to break away from, you know? Once she gets going. She just talks and talks and says the rudest, most inexplicable things. I find myself literally avoiding the break room if she’s in there. Which is sad. Because I know she’s had some issues. But still, wow.”

Tim pulled the front-end loader out of his fleet of toy trucks and rolled it over to some pencils he’d apparently rubber-banded together to, she guessed, represent some sort of payload. What was he, six? The loader, scooping up the pencil-bundle, knocked it off the cliff that was the desk.

Bending to retrieve it, he looked up at her, like: And?