Jenny McAdam is the stage manager, an old pro, a security blanket for Cate. She comes with an air of capability and crisis management. She and Cate were friends back at RISD, so she’s a known among unknowns. Cate could even stay on her sofa to save the hotel bill, but she did that once and found out Jenny keeps ferrets as pets. They live in the hall closet amid a circus of hammocks and exercise wheels, but slither in and out through the night under its door.

Oliver Palmieri, the company’s dramaturge, is the last to arrive, and takes several minutes to negotiate getting out of his coat and sitting down on one of the folding chairs around the table. He weighs probably 350, and is a short man to start with. His butt cheeks overflow the seat of his chair, and the closest his stomach will allow him to get to the table is about a foot away. Cate used to enjoy watching extremely fat people—imagining what they eat when they’re alone, how they manage sex. But now that small, crummy curiosity has been corrupted. Now corpulence tugs a grimy cord inside her.

Ty Boyd gets up to stretch. He’s singular looking. Dramatic, with a white shock of Beckett hair, heavy glasses with thick lenses behind which his weak eyes swim. According to Graham, he’s asexual, which gives him a subtle aspect of outlier. Along with this, there’s a (Cate suspects deliberately) random aspect to the way he dresses. Today it’s a varsity swimmer’s jacket and dark green work pants. Hiking boots.

He was here before everyone else. He catches Cate’s eye and points to his wrist, although he has no watch, to say Lauren and Molly have yet to arrive. They always show up a little late for everything, to let a small flutter of apprehension gather up among those who await them. At the twenty-minute mark, Ty goes to the single window in the rehearsal space, opens it, sticks his head out and looks down the street. He pulls himself back in and shuts the window. “I guess we should just begin.” He’s clearly not convinced this is the right decision. Confirmation of that comes another fifteen minutes in, when Molly and Lauren swirl in, see the meeting in progress and don’t say anything, either of them.

They arrive just as Saya is suggesting—her first entry into the general conversation—that Vita be in skinny jeans for at least the garden scene. “The way Sofia Coppola put those Converse high-tops in Marie Antoinette’s closet. A little anachronism. You just know Vita would have worn Levi’s if she were around today.”

“We’ll think about that,” Molly tells Saya. This is her version of no.

Throughout the rest of the meeting, maybe forty-five minutes, Molly and Lauren are chilly.

No one will start a meeting before they arrive again.