When they’ve gotten themselves together, just before Dana pushes the red ESCAPE button on the closed door, she looks unblinking at Cate. “I understand it might be hard for you to see. You have to come at it from a slight angle, but what I’m trying to do with you is honor this as something important. And I know I’m not doing a great job. But I can do better.”

This is how Dana makes her crazy.

In spite of the back-and-forth to New York, Cate is trying to maintain the pieces of her life at home. Maureen is a piece. Sailor. Neale, even if she no longer wants to be an important piece. That Dana is even a piece at all is absurd, but there you have it.

Cate and Sailor spent last night at Maureen’s. They cooked from a service that FedExes a box of gourmet, premeasured items along with instructions for making a dinner for two. This is like eating in a good restaurant, only you do all the work. Maureen thinks it’s a fun thing for the two of them to do together, and it is undeniably a touching bit of domesticity. After dinner, they cleaned up the kitchen, then watched a movie with Sailor draped across both their laps. He’s so long he’s a laps dog. When Cate was on the sofa, under Sailor, snug against Maureen, both of them in plush “TV Sweaters” Maureen ordered off a commercial (as a joke, but still, they’re wearing them), watching Ben-Hur (so Maureen could ridicule the costumes), everything seemed in its place. But then this morning, Cate pretended she had a 7 a.m. flight back to New York. She dropped off Sailor at her apartment, picked up her travel bag, then told the Lyft guy to go down to Toaster, where Dana was at the change of shift and the two of them had maybe half an hour together before Cate ordered another Lyft, this time actually heading out to O’Hare in time to make her flight, which is actually at eight-thirty.

Here she is, finally pulling her life together:

She’s a hero in a crisis.

She’s working on what might be the biggest play of her career.

A fabulous dog has come to her out of thin air.

She has a real chance of making a relationship with an adult, also with a future.