The next ten minutes were tense and ridiculous (not the red wire, I said the blue wire!—like they were in their own buddy cop movie) but also strangely satisfying for Zanne. To have foreseen, if not the monkey itself, then the possibility of network failure, to have averted it by good planning, to have been the one, always the one, to make things right—it was why Ted and Holly Stabler had hired her, why she’d climbed so quickly up the ranks of their personal staff of thirty. Afterward, Zanne filled a bucket with soapy water and mopped the floor clean, allowing herself this brief moment to do one thing well before she returned to the problem of the monkey. So many parts of the job were like this—almost soothing in the precision and patience they required—if you could find your way past the ludicrous banality to meditative enjoyment.

She made it outside just as Bill coaxed Alfie down from a fig tree, slipping a leash over the monkey’s head.

Zanne tugged at her short, black hair. Nothing surprised her about this job anymore. Not the range of competencies it required, from a fluency with security protocols and two-factor authentication to an encyclopedic knowledge of Minecraft and LOL Surprise! dolls; or the succession of raises she’d received, each bigger than the last; or the deep sense of personal responsibility she felt to make the Stabler family’s dreams come true, come what may of her own. Now she could add monkey wrangling to her résumé, too.

“What’d I tell you?” Bill said, beaming at Zanne, as if he’d just lassoed the moon. “Alfie’s my—”

“Alfie’s fired, Bill,” she said.

Today was too important to the Stablers, and to her future here, to be derailed by predictable chaos. Zanne would keep this day on track and nothing—not an ill-behaved monkey or a tech disaster or a ho-hum party—would get in her way.

2

Holly

Ted lay flat on his back—slack-jawed, legs akimbo, sheets kicked aside—looking like he’d been murdered. Holly slipped out of their bed, her shift completed but his only half begun. When they were dating, she’d tried to match her schedule to Ted’s, falling asleep in his arms around 2:00 a.m. But fifteen years into marriage, she’d long since faced facts. She was a morning person, her husband was a night owl, and they would rarely do much more than brush past each other in the night. At least he didn’t snore.