“You haven’t mentioned Maureen today. Have you moved on?”

“Oh no. I’m actually kind of pinning my hopes on her.” Cate hasn’t mentioned Dana at the beach. Even saying Dana’s name gives her a level of reality Cate can’t bear.

“Really!?” Neale sounds surprised, and not pleasantly.

“I don’t want to still be looking for a relationship at fifty in what are probably going to be reduced circumstances.” What she doesn’t say is what she found out on the dog beach—that it is still possible she could retreat into a life lived in someone else’s back pocket. Going around with frostbite on her hands from making time-pressured love in the freezer at Toaster, haggard from nights of euphoric insomnia. Dana is Cate’s narcotic. Huge highs. Crash landings where she finds herself alone in an empty room. Yet here she is thinking about Dana even as she’s talking about Maureen. She has totally disconnected from this conversation. It’s like she’s speaking through a ventriloquist’s dummy. The dummy sounds confident saying, “I think if I put in all my little details, the algorithm on any dating site would come up with Maureen as my best match.” She pulls up in front of the library. “I just need to stop here for a minute. Maybe only thirty seconds.”

The book she has on hold is a collection of letters Vita wrote to Virginia Woolf. Cate has read the current draft of the play. Also two biographies. The corkboard in her workshop is tacked up with photos of

• Vita;
• her girlfriends (Cate has found thirteen so far plus a couple of random guys);
• her diplomat husband, Harold Nicolson (also busily queer, conveniently closeted);
• her neglected (sometimes totally abandoned) sons in ill-fitting suits; and
• her garden (major).

The space she has pulled into is right in front of the library entrance, marked LOADING ZONE.

She punches the flashers, tells Neale, “If you see a ticket person—”

Parking enforcement, once a lazy, city-run revenue effort, has been sold off to a ruthless corporation based somewhere in the Middle East that conducts a reign of terror. Meter readers in Day-Glo vests troll relentlessly, ubiquitously. Everyone now lives in fear of huge tickets.

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll take the wheel.” Sometimes the smallest thing like this blooms into a nervous consideration of what would she do if Neale weren’t there. To shift into the driver’s seat and, of course, everything else. Cate travels with a sense of safety, that if a trapdoor opened beneath her, Neale would grab her before she went down.