She raised her eyebrows and scrunched up her mouth like if you say so. She handed me a magazine and motioned for me to start fan-drying my left foot. “Act one, scene one: cataclysm. Scene two: war of attrition, followed by the age of terror, the Great Recession, and then a false ending, the presumed conclusion, the first Black president, the dawn of a new Pax Americana.” Ana looked up at me and widened her eyes. “But our story was not a Disney film. It turned out it was just the latest installment in a tawdry, serialized drugstore thriller with embossed bold letters on the front cover. An installment which leaves off with a totally implausible cliffhanger.” She burst into a pained laugh. “And now we’re standing on the side of the road waiting for the Boomers to hand us the fucking keys already, though they seem intent on driving the world into the ground before they do.”

I looked over at the laptop and blanched. “He just took New Hampshire.”

“Fuck, I thought that place was like Vermont.”

“And look —”

“Babe, hold still.”

“Michigan.”

“Babe.”

“Sorry.”

“Just keep waving the magazine.”

“My arm hurts.”

“Surely you’ve given it enough of a workout over the years,” she said.

“No, I do that with this one.” I lunged towards her with my right hand and she yelped, laughing, rolling back in the bed, and knocking Sassy Saffron all over the sheets. “Oh fuck.” She grabbed a wad of Kleenex from a box on the floor and dabbed at the spill. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine. I have to wash them anyway.”

“To be honest, they smell pretty strong of sex.”

“No they don’t.”

“It’s fine, at least you’re getting some.”

“As if you’re not.”

She took a sip of tea and bounced her eyebrows. “I’m on a little cleanse.”

“Are you still seeing that hand-holder?” I asked.

She held the tea in her mouth for a second before swallowing. “God no.”

Right before I’d left for London, she’d begun fucking a minor reality-television celebrity who grabbed her hand during sex right before he came. The first time he did it, she said she found it endearing. And every subsequent time increasingly repulsive.

“One night he was supposed to meet me at Bambi’s for a drink but didn’t show. And I sat there by myself for an hour.”

“An hour?”

“I was like, oh my god I’m just another girl waiting for a guy in a fucking bar like it’s the nineties.”

“I would’ve been out of there in fifteen minutes. You called him and told him to go fuck himself, right?”

She shrugged. “Eventually.” A small, momentary sadness played across her face. For all her bravado, she was eternally patient and forgiving of people who were shitty to her.