“Maybe she remembered she was out of tonic. I always forget the tonic when I have a party.”

“Holly pays someone to remember the tonic. And she pays me to drive. I’m sorry, I need to go deal with this, but you can hang out in here as long as you want.” He lifted the lid of the humidor. “Stogie?”

She laughed. “Not in this dress.”

He closed the lid. “Back in a bit.”

In a moment, she heard the door to the house close behind James. Phoebe was alone. She stood and peeked out of the office’s narrow window at the party and then pulled away before anyone spotted her. She’d go out there soon, she would. As soon as this Justin Bieber song was over. “Ohhh,” she said, finally putting it all together.

“My Baby Left Me.”

“Baby, I Love Your Way.”

“I’m Your Baby Tonight.” Now this one. They were all baby songs. It was going to be a long night.

Phoebe sat down in James’s chair now. She could check her email. Behind his email, the web browser was open to WebMD. Most breast cancers associated with the gene BRCA1 are triple negative. Oh shit. Who? His wife? His mother? He hadn’t said a word. But then she hadn’t told him about Umma either. She clicked to another tab, as if closing an open diary. Now she was on another website, InsideScoop. It took a moment to understand what she was looking at. Someone had marked up a job posting with mocking annotations, the online equivalent of taping a Kick Me sign to someone’s back. She scanned it quickly. You could almost smell the schadenfreude—screenshots of a highly detailed and very ridiculous listing, and the pile-on that followed. Phoebe instantly understood that she was looking at Zanne’s job. Poor Zanne. Had she seen it? Of course, it had come to this: Ted’s wishes stated this plainly and exactingly. In college he’d been merely offbeat, but as he aged into the success of his midtwenties, his hyperparticularity became borderline obnoxious. He’d had the sense not to nitpick Phoebe, but she’d been the listening ear to enough of his rants to know how he thought about the average person who worked for them. The incompetence! The irrationality! Did he have to paint a picture if he wanted something done correctly? Maybe if he—or better yet, Phoebe—gave crystal-clear step-by-step instructions to the crew, he could finally have everything the way he saw it in his mind’s eye. Phoebe looked at the couple’s must-haves: superior analytical skills, a familiarity with cross-examination techniques, background in statistics preferred and an ability to perform linear regressions. Oh yeah. Ted was absolutely capable of writing a job description like this. Poor Zanne, she thought again. LOLOLOL indeed.