“Yes,” I confessed. “A little, just a few drive-bys, but nothing major. He changed most of his codes and passwords six months ago, way before the trouble, so I haven’t been doing any snooping like that, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Good,” she answered. “Doing that is only a world of hurt. You know that, right?”

“Yes, I know.” I hated it when she harped on me. I tried not to think of myself the way I was the night before, curled on my side in bed crying uncontrollably because I’d found a birthday candle that I’d saved from the red velvet cupcake Dave had given me last year for my birthday.

“Do you think he’s dating Chloe?” Lauren asked.

“I don’t know. I saw in the trades that she’s been in Prague shooting a movie about vampires for the Sci-Fi Channel, so whoever he was out with that Friday night, it wasn’t her.”

“Maybe he’s already cheating on Chloe, too,” Lauren said, trying to make me feel good.

Looking for a distraction for my misting eyes, I spied a man’s baseball hat on the kitchen counter. Lauren had been dating this indie filmmaker Michael for six months.

“Is Michael living here with you?”

Lauren followed my eyes to the baseball hat and her face flushed. I knew that look, the look of total infatuation and great sex. That was the look of always knowing there’ll be a message light blinking on your cell phone, and that someone would be waiting at home when you drove in from the airport.

“No, he’s got his own place, his ‘bat cave’ as I like to call it. We stay over a lot, but he likes to retreat to the ‘cave’ when he has his freak-outs.”

“Are things okay with you?”

“Oh yeah. It’s just the ‘tortured artist’ thing.” She shook her head in exasperation and pulled out a bottle of white wine from the fridge. “He loves me, but he says he can’t help but fuck it up.”

“Does that mean he’s fucking other people?”

Lauren pondered for a moment. “I don’t think he’s sleeping with anyone else, but it’s just that he’s just so impressed with artists, and he thinks that because I do what I do, I can’t possibly understand him.”

“But you’re amazing. You’re good at what you do, you’re kind of famous and smart and beautiful . . .”

“Yes,” she said, shrugging. “I know he loves me, but last weekend when we got the New York Times delivered on Sunday, I saw they had a feature in the magazine section about hot new up-and-coming female artists in Manhattan. There were a couple of really beautiful women in there. The article featured each one in a full page photo with a piece of their artwork—paintings and sculptures and stuff.”

“So?”