Melissa, overhearing this conversation from the charcuterie station, did not know, but she clutched her drink tighter, letting it slosh around the rim. She would never admit it, not to anyone (the Star went into the recycling before the tub had emptied), but Liana’s casual laugh, her shrug: it scared her. She knew she should feel sorry for this woman, but she saw only a threat. Melissa drained her Cosmo and went in search of another.

The next day, the wives were at Pilates, inverted and scheming a lingerie party. Should we invite Liana? Hillary asked, her head between her knees, her ass wrapped in hot-pink spandex.

Melissa has a formula, a computation for how often the still-pretty exes should be invited to things with the active baseball wives. She did the math in her head, then reached for her toes. This was before she’d seen the news, his picture plastered on the local paper—Bad night for Goodyear. Her phone was on silent; she hooked her fingers around her toes. Mmm, let’s not.

The current wives sit together in the family section, behind the Lions dugout. Week one they all observed the men, swinging in the on-deck circle, thinking about how much weight the athletes had gained, how much time it might take to work it off. They remarked on the bachelors, the untaken ones, guessing at who would be the next to go. They examined their own husbands, wondered if they still appeared hunky in those stirruped pants. And, surreptitiously, they watched one another, to see who had puffed up or slimmed down, who had surgery or dye jobs or gotten prominent new jewelry. Hillary Oliveira’s boobs kept getting bigger, and Maggie Monterrey was wearing diamond earrings, each bauble the size of a baby’s fist. Melissa Moyers’s forehead was stiff, the telltale sign of a recent injection.