“And how often would you like updates?”

“How about a week from now, and then...oh, I don’t know, once a year thereafter?”

“Got it.”

Zanne added a line to the project list and typed the word space as a placeholder. She’d need to assign the research to someone, but who? Technically suborbital flight was travel, but the travel team was swamped with regular old flight. The project would fall to her somehow, she knew it. She typed pfft in the ownership column.

“Anything else?” Ted asked.

“No,” Zanne said. “If you have no more questions, I’ll connect you now to Stu.”

“Sounds good.”

She connected Ted with the New York office and hung up. Through the doors, she heard the deep, soft baritone that made everyone lean forward to listen. Ted was settled. Now it was time to get Gaby.

Zanne waited outside the gate for Gaby, who’d texted ten minutes ago to say that her Uber was ten minutes away. By now, she must have been squarely within the opulent zip code, coursing along streets with names like Amalfi and Corsica, passing giant houses pressed close together on little lots. Some people bought in Pacific Palisades to show off their wealth; they planted elaborate rose gardens in their front yard and had wide driveways for their Aston Martins and Teslas. The celebrities, on the other hand, hid all they had behind high hedges and low-hanging fig trees. By design, the entrance to the Stabler estate was humble, easy to miss—just an intercom on a stick peeping in front of a wooden gate set into a tall hedgerow. There was no street number, nothing to interest the double-decker buses loaded with tourists.

Zanne bounced from her heels to her toes. She wanted a cigarette, but she’d quit three months ago. Gaby had turned up her nose the first time she saw her light up, outside the club the night they met.

“The smell?” Zanne had asked, pitying these Gen Z kids who hadn’t known the filthy pleasures of smoke-filled bars and fingertips stained with tar.

“No, the death wish,” Gaby had said.

It was the first time, and not the last, that Zanne had wondered how this thing between them could really work, when one of them was so mentally healthy she had no idea what it was like to know you were going to die before you hit thirty. But Zanne had made it to thirty after all, and now she was nearing forty. Slowly she’d started to reckon with the changes she would have to make in her life, since it seemed, against all odds, that she would go right on living.