Meanwhile, Annie Get Your Gun was in danger of collapse. Troubles had haunted them from the start. To begin with, so few people had auditioned that Rainier had cast everyone who showed up, even the parents who’d just brought their kids to try out. Some cast members could sing, some could dance, and some could act, but virtually none could do all three. Buffalo Bill kept calling for line cues; Lucy, who was playing Dolly Tate, sounded as though she was developing vocal cord nodules—“like poor Julie Andrews,” she kept pointing out, though that was where any similarity between the two ended. She’d left rehearsal early tonight to set up a dessert table at the hearing, abandoning them midscene.

Then there was Grant, who was having trouble remembering his blocking and the words to his songs. Sometimes something mysterious struck him as hilarious and he couldn’t stop laughing. What had happened to him? He’d been terrific, memorizing his lines and everyone else’s before the cast was required to be off book, but recently he’d been coming to rehearsals looking as though he was half asleep, and maybe he was. He had a lot on his mind, with a son having undiagnosed headaches and a baby on the way. Not to mention the addition they were planning to put on the house. Well, an addition had been the original plan, but now Grant wanted to knock down the whole house and build anew. He and Suzanne were locked in battle over it.

A good Frank was nearly as important as a good Annie. Was she a good Annie? Valeria would have been better. What should they do? Allison wrote desperate e-mails to Valeria, but Valeria seemed to have no advice to pass along from her perch in Paris. She was too busy sprinting off to the Louvre and the Pont Neuf.

All of these things were happening, and Allison did her very best to care about them, her very, very best, but in fact there was just one thing on her mind. It had started last week, when she ran into Nick at Lucy’s. When he had touched her lip. She’d had to work very hard not to lick his thumb. But she hadn’t. That was the point. She hadn’t done that. So if someone at the café saw them together, someone inside or around back, there would have been absolutely nothing to report.