Zanne kept scanning the schedule but her gears jammed at five o’clock—the party. Ted hated parties—hated hosting them, attending them, and forget about planning them. Zanne had always been against throwing the party at the estate. Had everyone forgotten Ted’s aversion to themes? To signature cocktails? To small talk? She’d suggested a restaurant in town or even Stabler Studios as alternative venues, but Holly wanted it here. Dawn had for some reason chosen not to put up a fight and then conveniently picked this day to be absent, leaving Zanne to defend everyone else’s dumb ideas.

And there were so many dumb ideas! The bumper cars in the driveway. Moscow mules served in baby’s bottles. God knew where they were going to come up with thirty yellow ten-gallon hats. Hopefully Ted would be mollified when she explained that his day had been arranged to keep the party planners and guests out of his orbit until 6:15 when he would join the party for exactly fifteen minutes and then be excused/rescued.

Ted coughed, a grouchy rumbling that echoed through the wall between them. Here we go, Zanne thought. She braced herself for the onslaught.

“What’s the latest with suborbital space flight?” he asked.

All the words that were lined up across the ticker tape of her mind vanished, only to be replaced by an unending string of ????????

“I’m sorry?” she said.

“Private space travel. Jeff was working on it. And Richard. Have they done any manned flights yet? Elon wants to send someone around the moon, but I doubt he’s anywhere close. Suborbital flight, though—you go right up to the edge of the earth’s atmosphere, where weightlessness kicks in—that might be doable soon.”

Was he fucking kidding with this? Did Ted want to go to space? Did he want his own rocket? Jeff Bezos had edged into the streaming business in the last few years—was this some kind of power play to cut into Jeff’s other ventures, a billionaire tit for tat? Or was it simply a boyish fantasy of Ted’s, to seek, to discover, to travel to the Outer Ring like the Starfighter? Zanne opened up the project list and quickly searched for any active projects on space travel.

“Uh, let me see.” She was stalling. Had Dawn assigned someone the project and forgotten to record it? Had she assigned it to Zanne? No, there was nothing.

Instead, she went with the tried, the true. “We’ll look into that for you,” she said, buying herself some time.

“Don’t let anyone know it’s me who’s interested. The last thing I want is people hounding me for seed money. I told Jeff this thing would bring out all the wackos. I’m not sure it’s worth it. I won’t need it in my lifetime, but the kids... Anyway, we should probably keep tabs on it.”