“You know what?” I say to her, and to her only. I’ve kept my voice in the same register it’d been in before Cameron’s little performance, as though nothing at all has happened to disturb our fun. “This is my favorite, too.” I set my finger to the sheet of paper she’d been reaching for when Cameron interrupted her with his “God is dead” garbage.

Lark’s face is flushed, but she smiles at me gratefully. “We made some progress today, right?”

I can tell she wants to wrap up, to get me out of here before Cameron does or says something else that’s rude and patronizing.

And because I know that feeling, know how it is to pretend not to hear all the subtext that lies beneath a he just loves his work or to laugh uncomfortably at a hurtful joke about taking the fun out of things, I oblige. I tell her I’ll work on this composition more, try it in different colors. I encourage her—pointedly, only her—to send me some ideas for quotes over e-mail. I shake Cameron’s hand again and tell a bald-faced lie, because it was not at all nice to meet him, and I gather my stuff in my bag, tossing out a couple of self-deprecating jokes about its sloppy contents to break some of the tension that’s hovering in the air.

But when Lark walks me to the foyer, the scene of Cameron’s bonanza of cursing at a tiny type-pad that probably has more skills of human intuition than he does, I’m oddly unable to keep the ruse going. Why are you with this guy? I want to say. But I don’t want to make her uncomfortable, don’t want to shine an even brighter light on something she so clearly didn’t want me to see.

“He’s been under some stress lately,” she says, before I can speak.

Default protocol is telling me to nod and smile again. But I must be all kinds of unblocked now, because I bypass it entirely and blurt, “That really sucked, what he said.”

I only think fleetingly about whether or not he can hear me. I’m not sure I care if he does.

But I do care that Lark stiffens, her chin raising. She purses her lips and turns to the type-pad, punches in a code, and waits for a click before setting her hand on the doorknob. My face feels like I’ve stuck it against a hot oven door.

“I’ll send you some of those quotes,” she says sharply, and oof. Probably “God is dead” will end up in there, after this. The bright side, I guess, is that she’s not firing me, but I feel such a potent, shaky-stomached feeling of dread. Why did you say anything? Why couldn’t you have left it alone?

“Sure,” I say. “Listen, I’m sorry if—”