I nodded and smiled and said something about children. Running after them. Busy, yes, I was so busy. She said something else or nodded.

I really had to go look for E. I have to go look for E, I said, and M’s boss’s wife nodded, managing to look only very slightly relieved. I got up and pulled at the bottom of my dress, trying to unstick it from my back.

I walked down the hall. My feet were quiet on the gleaming parquet floor, the floor that was clean enough to eat caviar off, that was slick enough for dancing, that was made of hundreds of tiny pieces laid down one by one by someone else. I stuck my finger in my mouth and then touched a wall leaving a wet print. E, I called but not too loudly. There were so many doors. The bathroom is just down the hall, to the right, M’s boss’s wife called out from the living room.

I opened the first door in the hallway and found a bedroom. A guest room it must have been. More white walls. A bed with a plush dove-grey headboard and an opera sofa tucked under the window. The sofa had a curved back, soft, like the neck of a fallen giraffe. Like the neck of a giraffe that was lying down, shot on the Serengeti or some other place that wasn’t here. There was a door inside the room and I stepped inside to open it saying, E? But not really meaning it. On the other side of the door was a bathroom with a freestanding tub deep enough, almost, to drown in standing up, but no E.

A line of unused soaps cut to look like amber were arranged on a shelf. The faucet rose up from the sink like a taxidermied bird, frozen in flight. I felt suddenly trapped in a flashing clean menagerie of fixtures and fittings. I stumbled back toward the door and managed to get out into the hall. The next door I tried was the kitchen, presided over by a green La Cornue stove with brass trim. Then, a closet with a maid’s uniform hanging on a hook behind a door.

I really couldn’t find her. I went back to the living room. M said, Did you find her? I said no and M looked to his boss, to his boss’s wife and smiled at them and said something that was supposed to be about E that wasn’t really about her. She’s always this or that. When you’re a guest in other people’s houses, you have to say things to each other for them to hear. Oh E, we’d have to say, she’s always like this, or this, whether she was or wasn’t.

I sat back down at the occasional table. M’s boss’s wife looked up from the calendar on her phone and poured me another cup of tea. She offered me the plate of macaroons but by then I knew the game and said, No thank you, in the right sort of mildly shocked oh-I-couldn’t-possibly sort of way.