I’m willing her to take one; be the first to open the gates of processed sugar hell. It just takes one to reach forward and grab something, then all the pregnant ladies will dive in, then everyone else will feel like they’re allowed. They’ll call it “nibbling,” the cute, pathetic way women are supposed to eat. I won’t take anything. Politely say, I’m good, thank you, when someone inevitably holds out the tray and offers. But part of me wishes I could stay late tonight, claim to be just finishing up before I leave. Then, once everyone’s gone, I’d descend upon the box of doughnuts, shoving them into my mouth two at a time, leaving a couple for the cleaning ladies as a thank-you for scrubbing down the toilet I’d immediately rush to throw up in.

“This is the fucking worst,” Lena whispers in my ear from behind, breaking me out of my obsessive stare at Kiley. “What, she couldn’t buy herself a fucking stroller? Her dad’s a vice chairman at Goldman and her husband’s on his way there. Why am I shelling out two hundred dollars so her nanny can walk her kid around SoHo comfortably?”

She speaks slowly, with the rhythm of someone you’d expect to be wielding a gold-handed cigarette holder, taking puffs in between syllables for emphasis. Everything Lena does is slow, calculated. She’s never rushed. Never caught off guard. She’s as level as a plank and nothing affects her.

“I’m waiting for someone to bring up the wedding,” I whisper back. “I think she’ll throw the stroller out the window if another person asks me what the weather’s like in Vermont this time of year.”

Lena was the only one invited to the wedding, no one else from work. One of the many benefits of having it in Vermont, at Graham’s childhood home. I didn’t want to invite her—I didn’t want to invite anyone—but my soon-to-be husband, in all his childish naivety, thought it was “bad luck” not to invite the woman who kind of introduced us.

Lena is also a director of communications (a title so meaningless, there are two of us). At thirty-two, her saddest and most admirable trait is that she still shows up to work hungover, though with perfect hair and pristine makeup. It’s really just the added glow of a one-night stand that gives her away.

We spend another ten minutes going around the room guessing the weight of Rebecca’s baby. Part of me hopes the baby is super fucking ugly, in that way you do when two really hot people get together. As if even natural selection knows a person with genes as ridiculously lucky as this has no choice but to be an asshole, so it intervenes early, gives him a pointy chin or a left-leaning dick.