Dana’s place, Toaster, is a retro-hip twenty-four-hour coffee shop on Lincoln. She works on a higher plane than gilded eggs. Scrambled duck eggs fit the narrative of her menu. Parisian baguettes she bakes herself. Nothing arch, just better in terms of ingredients and preparation. Working on a play a block away—this goes back to the beginning, years ago—Cate and Adam Pryor and Lonnie McKeen, the lighting designer, would get together there for tech meetings. The attraction Cate felt toward Dana was so dense it had its own place in the booth. One night as they were leaving, Dana slipped Cate her cell number on a pack of matches, like they were in a 1940s detective movie.

At first it was just about sex, a secret affair. The secret part was so Dana’s girlfriend, Jody, wouldn’t get hurt. Jody is embedded in Dana’s life because of something Dana at first didn’t want to elaborate on. Initially Cate took this to mean Jody was fragile and needed to be taken care of. But it turned out the obligation was rather Jody having saved Dana. The specifics of the rescue were cards Dana kept chested for a time, but eventually laid down as troubles with addiction. Until then Cate had thought cocaine was an occupational hazard mainly for rock musicians and stock traders. But apparently apprenticing in high-wattage kitchens was, for Dana anyway, more manageable with coke. And then the coke was the problem. And then with some incredible amount of patience, a draining of their accounts for high-end rehabs, Jody pulled her out of all that. Dana thinks she owes her life to Jody. How can Cate get in the way of that? How can she even want to?

But when she tried to pull back, she found her principles had been shredded by desire. Principles lay in ribbons around her feet. She had allowed herself to fall into a ridiculous sort of heart-throbbing love based on small, colorful explosions of urgent sex and careless revelation. Huge amounts of self-exposure made possible by containment in a cloister. Over time, these revelations accumulated into a potent sort of knowing obtained by confession. Eventually, she and Dana found themselves in a place where they knew each other better than they knew anyone in their real lives.

Cate’s life was a cycle of concentrated time with Dana followed by delicious aftermath. Cologne trapped in a scarf. The chorus of a song, maybe “Stolen Dance” played on Dana’s cell as it rested on a box of four hundred eggs, then later turning up on the radio while Cate was driving. Then the thuddy drop into the gray scale of actual life. Then the longing, then the return to the scene of the crime for another crime or two.