They were sitting on the grass in the golden light of the early evening. Angie, who had skipped lunch and was making up for it with a second beer, was finding it hard to worry about much at all.

Angie pressed the cold beer bottle to her cheek. “It was perfectly innocent.”

Rivera made a grand gesture, one long hand revolving through the air in a corkscrew motion. “Angeline, my love. Two points. First, where you and John Grant are concerned, nothing is innocent. Anybody who sees you standing next to each other knows that. And second, Patty-Cake might be many things, but she’s got a good nose. Watch yourself. Unless you want to call in the big guns.”

“John?”

Rivera, whose mother was administrative assistant to the mayor of Hoboken, shook her head with great solemnity. “Rob,” she said. “It’ll be Rob who writes her job evaluations. Of course, that would be a declaration of war, and you’d end up on the sisterhood’s ten-most-loathed list. You’ll have to sign an affidavit to get a paper clip in any and every office across the country.”

Angie considered. “Do you think administrative assistants take courses in military tactics?”

“That’s classified,” Rivera said. “Though my guess is that it’s administrative assistants who teach those courses.”

“The sisterhood,” Angie said, burping softly.

“The source of all real power,” Rivera agreed.

“Now what?”

Rivera rolled over on her stomach and waved her bare feet in the air. “Well, first you’ve got to put your requests in writing. Of course she’ll ignore the first memo and misplace the second one. The third time you copy it to Rob, and then she’ll start to move. Slowly, of course.”

“I could go buy a fan,” Angie said thoughtfully. “And I do have a cell phone. If it weren’t for the computer I could just steer clear of her.”

“You’re forgetting about the copy machine.”

Angie began to giggle, partly because beer on an empty stomach made her head buzz and partly because of the absurdity of the situation. Then she remembered Tony, who still hadn’t showed his face, and the fact that Rivera hadn’t seen him, either, all day long.

“What if Tony doesn’t come home again tonight?”

“Then I go looking for him tomorrow,” Rivera said. “And I make him understand the error of his ways.”

“We never should have come down here,” Angie said, putting an arm across her face.

“I’m glad you did,” said a familiar voice.

Caroline Rose had come up behind them. She was wearing a pink linen sleeveless blouse, white jeans, and a friendly smile.

“Well, hello there,” Rivera said. “You look like a strawberry parfait, pink and white.” To Angie she said, “I forgot to say, we’re going out for dinner. You want to come along? We can get Caroline to advise us on how to handle—”