“Then maybe we could just drive downtown, then back up to my place. It’s a beautiful night.” Maureen rests her hand on Cate’s thigh in a proprietary way. In the close, leather-upholstered, Bose-speakered interior of the Infiniti, things heat up a little. Cate notices how great Maureen smells. The car heat ramps up some spring-forest cologne she’s wearing. Vetiver and woody smoke and desire cloud the air, obscuring the giant chunk of unfortunate information now bumping around in the too-little space between them. Maybe it’s not so important, this thing with her sister. Maybe Cate’s being prudish, old-fashioned. Maybe it’s really less important than the silverware thievery. She needs time to think about all of this.

base camp

It’s a little before 2 a.m. Tonight they blocked At Ease. Her first chance to watch the actors negotiating her sets. A gloomy evening. Her sets are fine, but everyone knows the play stinks. Still, tickets have already been sold, ads placed. The show must go on. Cate took the job to pay respect to gay history, but she has an argument going with herself about whether even the better plays from earlier, benighted eras—plays like The Children’s Hour and Suddenly Last Summer—are too worn-out and anachronistic to put on for twenty-first-century audiences except as history lessons.

As she comes into the alley behind her apartment, Cate looks up and sees a wavy blue-green light in the room Graham is using. As soon as she is through the door, she’s in the new sort of quiet she has grown accustomed to: refrigerator hum overlaid with an intermittent narration coming off the internet as it bleeds out of her spare bedroom. Cate enjoys Graham’s company and is kind of crazy in love with his dog, Sailor. She has never had a dog, didn’t know how great it would be. Now she wonders how she got along without one. Graham and Sailor moving in with her was supposed to be a temporary situation, just until he got back on his feet after his most recent marital breakup (he is now two wives farther along from Cate), but man and dog have been here three months now and Graham is still off his feet. All that seems to have happened is that he has become increasingly nocturnal, interactive with the web. Watching someone from somewhere talking into his—in fewer instances, her—webcam. Different voices come in on different nights, but all with the same dark, knowing tone, a tone that has a sideways delivery, a hand in front of it.

When he sees her in the doorway to his room, Graham puts up a Metallica playlist on Spotify. For masking purposes.