Mabel saw him at the bookshelves. Jonathan Strasser was reading spines—oh, he pulled on one. It wouldn’t come out. He put his wineglass on the floor and tried with both hands. Would he go to the author photo? Would he go to the blurbs, or the jacket flap? The index, to look for his own name? Perhaps the dedication, scoping for marital status. He did none of these—he opened the book and rubbed one of the pages between his fingers and a thumb. He put his nose to it for a moment. He took off the jacket carefully and moved his palm across the hardback as if it was soothing—to him, to it, hard to say. Then he wrapped the flap around the front board, closed it, and eased it back into the tight shelf. She chose the pause after it was lodged to make herself known.

“I didn’t know you were a bookbinder.”

He lost his balance in surprise and knocked over the wineglass with his foot. Oh holy mother, she said to herself, now others will come. She and Strasser were standing in a hallway apart from the dinner party. He had probably just come from a bathroom. These were Don’s books. His home office was the next door down. But no, her masterfully uptight help was otherwise busy. They hadn’t heard the glass on the limestone. She hated limestone. She had chosen it, and now it looked like the floor of a bank lobby or a museum fountain. Here was something lucky. The glass had only tipped over, not broken. She picked it up and poured some wine from her own glass into his.

“I didn’t see you there,” he said.

Well, at least he wasn’t a bumbler in all ways. He said that with calm.

“I didn’t want you to,” she said.

He shrugged. She appraised the shrug and straightened up.

“I often look at bookshelves at dinner parties,” she said. “They’re usually more interesting.”

“Oh well, this is a marquee evening. I don’t need to tell Mabel Cannon that.”

“I’m curious,” she said, moving stiffly, not flirtatiously, toward him—it was important to know when to pull back hard on the reins. Her one hand tugged out the book he’d just had in his both. She had a feeling it was a book by a woman he wanted to seduce. Or one he’d had and lost. She looked. Getting to Parity: Balancing Subsidies in the New World Order by Frances Strasser.

“It was her first,” he said.

She looked at Jonathan Strasser pleasantly. She nodded and smiled.

“A difficult, complex subject—she must be brilliant.”

“I love her so much.”