Jake stared at her. I should have stood up to you long ago. Do you know why I didn’t? Because I have always believed that you were special. But I’m not giving in on this. If you go to New York, Ursula, you go alone.

It was an ultimatum, but was he serious? Was Ursula serious? They let the topic drop; Ursula still had a year of her term left so going anywhere was a moot point. Maybe Ursula was suffering from PTSD. Maybe she would change her mind and decide that it would be nice to stay in the Bend with her mother and Jake’s parents nearby. Or…maybe Ursula and Jake would finally get divorced. While they were dating, they had broken up a handful of times and seen other people but they had always gravitated back to each other. In the late nineties, Ursula had had an affair with her associate, Anders Jorgensen. Jake had conducted a one-weekend-a-year affair with a woman named Mallory Blessing for the entirety of their marriage. They had survived all that; surely, they would survive Ursula’s presidential loss.

Now, it’s four years later. Fred Page will sail easily into a second term and Ursula is the managing partner at Hamilton, Laverty & Smythe, the biggest M&A firm in the country. She bought a two-bedroom apartment on the seventy-eighth floor of 436 Park, which is the premier address in Midtown, maybe in all of New York. Ursula lost the presidency and lost her husband—but she’s gained a city. She loves the noise, the taxis, the subway, the sushi restaurants that deliver twenty-four hours, the elegant hotel bars, the doormen, the bodegas with their rainbow of floral bouquets out front. She loves the Cuban coffee place and the Vietnamese food truck. She loves racing down to Soho when she needs something new to wear, she loves the FDNY, she loves the guys who drive the horse carriages in Central Park, she loves the Upper East Side mommies and nannies, she loves the ten-story screens in Times Square and the tugboats on the East River. She loves that while everyone knows who she is, nobody cares, because this city is also home to Alicia Keys, Yoko Ono, Sarah Jessica Parker, people far more exciting than Ursula.

Does she wish she had someone to share it with?

Yes, she does.

Maybe a dating app, then, after all?

Ursula laughs at herself, and calls Jake.

She’s fully prepared to hear about his fun-filled weekend: sailing on Lake Michigan, meeting his parents for dinner at the South Haven Yacht Club, picking cherries, brunching in Saugatuck. At some point she’s sure Jake will start dating. Ursula will pretend to be supportive and he’ll know she’s pretending.

When he answers, he says, “You’re never going to believe who just called me.”

“Who.”

“Cooper Blessing,” Jake says. “He has the craziest idea.”