Most people in the class made up a new character, but I chose to take Elizabeth and her Visa to Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. I’d never even been there on a school field trip. Definitely a place where I did not belong. Not back then. I knew nothing about art history or techniques. I wasn’t even sure what kind of art I liked. I walked the halls, shivering, reminding myself that the Visa in my pocket had no limits. I could buy it all and burn it for firewood if I wanted.

That helped, but I still didn’t want to “interact.” It felt more like lying than theatre. The “audience” would not know that they were inside a performance. But the follow-up paper was a third of my grade. I straightened my shoulders and breezed down a hall, inhabiting Betsy’s confident walk, trying to psych myself up to talk to someone. Trey always claimed he’d fallen for me then and there, watching me saunter past him toward a huge abstract painting at the hallway’s end.

I used that same walk now, confident and unhurried.

One of the men called after me, “Are we going the right way?”

I smiled over my shoulder. “Sure are. Almost there!”

And we were. Another two turns and I saw the broad green courtyard in front of the Orchid Center. The piano was off to one side, the singer a glamorous forty-something with a jet bob and lipstick as red as her sequined dress.

I passed through the crowds, smiling and greeting people, matching up names with faces, saying the right words, always looking ahead to find Spencer. My husband’s coworkers and friends were outlined sharply against the soft light of the paper lanterns strung all across the wide space, as if they’d all been drawn into the scene by CGI. None of them felt real. No realer than I was anyway.

The drugged bourbon in its silver flask, the three extra capsules rattling softly in their bottle—only these things were real. And Spence.

As I circled, I saw the party more clearly than I ever had before. I’d come here at least ten times over the years, but I’d never realized that it had a structure to it. The most important clients and the senior partners were scattered across the courtyard in front of the Orchid Center, this one near the piano, that one by the walk, and the party swirled around them. The more important the person, the less they had to move. Everything they wanted—conversations, little bites of food, drinks, fawning attention—came to them. Lesser beings orbited, looking for an in.