Cate lifts the comforter to get into Maureen’s expensive Swedish bed, and a sultry aroma escapes. Maybe she sprays her sheets with a signature perfume. Sexually, Maureen is more advanced than Cate, or maybe more jaded. Certainly more artful. Because she handles fabric all the time, the pads of her fingertips are rough as a dog’s paw. This is a nice feature she comes with. She also has a nightstand with a drawerful of lubricants, sex toys in lurid colors, with tricky protuberances. In their abundance, the toys embarrass Cate. They make her think of oppressed Asian women pouring hot-pink silicone into penis-shaped molds. Some of the toys are also a little scary. They look like they’d take you to a different place than a regular orgasm. Tonight Cate prevails and they have sex with just their bodies. Cate is too worried about her faltering career to get into it, although she pretends. She never wants anyone to feel bad in bed if she can help it.

Maureen’s affair with her sister is fading and blurring. There were, of course, mitigating circumstances, although maybe it’s just that circumstances usually mitigate. Frances is five years older than Maureen; she was off to college while Maureen was finishing up middle school. They almost didn’t grow up in the same family. Then, when Maureen was just out of CalArts, she got a job doing costumes for a summer theater production of South Pacific in Eugene, Oregon. She stayed on with Frances after the play opened. They went to a sweat lodge, also a massage workshop. That’s when the monkey business started.

And at that time Frances, from photos Maureen has shown Cate, was not seductive exactly, but had a definite ragged blondness to her. And the whole thing seems to have had very little carryover into the years since. It’s not like Maureen was molested by an archbishop, and ever since has had to get her sexual partners to wear vestments. What Maureen and Frances did was a now-and-then thing, a way of hanging out together like other sisters share jewelry or bleach each other’s hair. Except that it was having sex. That Cate is working so hard to find Maureen’s dark secret diluted by these additional facts probably means they are going forward.

She gets a text from Graham, who for no given reason—meaning he has hooked up with Eleanor—says he just took Sailor for a walk, but will be out for the rest of the night, can she get back soon?

“Can’t you stay over anyway?” Maureen says, reading the message over Cate’s shoulder. “It’s too cold out to go back to your place.”

“I can’t.”