“Well, not exactly destitute,” John said pedantically. This was true, monetarily speaking. The judge or arbitrator had taken the attorney’s tallying up of what Maryellen would have earned in twenty-six years of TWA salaries had she not moved every one to four years in support of Ted’s career, while also raising his children. Incredibly, Ted’s attorney’s returned fire with charts showing that due to airline deregulation and Carl Icahn’s restructuring of TWA, which led to furloughs and bankruptcy following the explosion of Flight 800, Maryellen would have earned much less, had she retained her job at all. “I’m surprised the sonofabitch didn’t try to argue that I would have been on Flight 800,” Maryellen had told Bunny bitterly. The judge had taken the numbers and performed his own calculations and named a monthly sum that Ted was obliged to pay. This was Maryellen’s income, with which she could live and make payments on the home equity loan that had gotten her through the first years.

Sofie laughed again. “I’m sorry, but this is such an American tragedy! You work for the oil complex so you can have health insurance and a place to live!”

“Anyway, sorry,” said Sofie brightly, understanding that the evening’s festivities had taken a direct hit. “I’m a journalist; these are the stories I think about; it’s hard to leave work at home.” She picked up her drink, and each man was forced to reveal whether he would act like a dick in the face of such truth, and then such graceful accommodation, or whether he would stay and drink. Bunny considered the way Sofie was like a man in that she could speak confidently and at length, but like a woman in that she could read and direct the energy produced by the things she said. And one by one they clinked, and stayed. “Now what should we talk about,” said Bunny, laughing and taking Sofie’s cigarette gently to light her own.

Bunny thought of Konrad and her drunken night on the beach; he had talked about Libya. She thought of Sofie’s jeremiad. She could never have shown her this document. Bunny understood, logically, that Sofie was right about everything. But it was impossible to reconcile Sofie’s prognostications with the world Bunny saw before her, with all its foregone conclusions. She envied the men like Frank Turnbridge, the young man Frank Turnbridge had been, all the oil men, who had worried only about the bottom line and how they might close the deal. These men ran into each other across the world, on the course at Marsa el Brega, by the pool at Dhahran camp, on the shuttle plane at Bontang, always going somewhere new. As Bunny’s plane banked over Houston she looked down over the miles of cars, the sun glinting off the windshields. She imagined herself a young man, a full moon casting its light over the shimmering oil sands.

“Houston is cool,” Sofie said, looking around. “I was not expecting this. It has so many parks and bars and things.” Bunny also felt that Houston was cool, although she knew she did not have any meaningful connection to the cool part, the bars where people had gorgeous tattoos and wore crop tops and fanciful denim and were not all white and did not work in oil and gas. She appreciated being able to see, tangentially, this element of the city, to sample the foods and music of many nations, to have access to its multicultural riches at the most superficial level.

Francis made it into the shower and out the door at 2:28, the bag containing his tuxedo and shoes remembered by Bunny pressed into his arms as he left. She returned to her place in front of the mirror, her brushes and products before her. She had gotten a blowout that morning in a salon she found on Yelp, and she twisted and clipped it up to prevent further damage from the shower steam. Her face was red and she re-covered it carefully with a primer she had researched on Reddit, and then her Bare Minerals, and then her blush. She filled in her eyebrows and brushed them. She lined the top of her eyes and put on eye shadow. She pressed her eyelashes into the curler. She applied mascara with her mouth open.

Bunny wanted to ask how this woman had gotten her job. She had been strategizing with Francis about this during their long vacation, which had started with a flight to Seattle and a rental car and moved into a slow trip through the rainforests of the Washington coast, down through Oregon and into the redwoods, meandering between the One, I-5, and US 101. They listened to audiobooks as they drove. Francis was lightly obsessed with September 11 histories, because in his mind September 11 was a glaring example of unforgivable process error. Bunny had protested the selection of books in his Audible library, books whose titles made ominous reference to looming towers and black banners, but as they listened and drove, she was caught up. For one, the books affirmed the Glenn family’s longstanding disdain for the CIA, which Maryellen felt endangered regular diplomats by posing at embassies as something they were not. They also informed Bunny that the group in the joint FBI-CIA office that was supposed to prevent things like September 11 was largely composed of young women, and that they had derisively been called “The Manson Family” by their colleagues. There were a lot of women involved in the whole thing, actually, Bunny was surprised to learn. She was likewise surprised to learn that perhaps the first men to be extraordinarily rendered, by some iteration of this cadre, were snatched up in Baku just after the embassy bombings. Bunny felt a shiver at this. She had been there! It had not seemed like a threatening place, she told Francis. Francis told her that whenever he was tempted to obfuscate a mistake at work, or hoard information, or big-time someone, he remembered September 11. Bunny had laughed but stopped when she saw how hurt Francis looked. His current consulting project was streamlining returns processing to mitigate loss and maximize profit for a major athleisure retailer.

“Please get in,” she said. “I can drop you somewhere.” Gulbahar had been beautifully hostessing all day, and Elizabeth hated to keep her longer. She knew little of Gulbahar’s life outside of her work. She assumed she was unmarried—no ring—but she didn’t know for sure. Elizabeth had been amazed to learn that the receptionist in the BP office, a very young woman, had two small kids. Their photos were on her desk; she had first assumed they were her younger siblings. Elizabeth was constantly being surprised by the revealed information of people’s lives.

Elizabeth regretted immediately that they had done it before nightfall. It should have been a culmination, taking place at the last possible minute of their time together. How would they now spend the remaining hours? She prayed he wouldn’t get up and leave. She could almost hear the plea on her lips, for him to stay, to be kind to her, but she held it in. She ran her hand across his chest, the faded ink of his tattoo. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt her whole life hung on what the next utterance of a man might be. She had been with Francis for five years, had never been unfaithful, never considered being unfaithful, never had a real opportunity to be unfaithful. She could see how this event now put her beyond the pale, but it also seemed to put her into the stream of life itself, instead of beside it.

“Will you spend the rest of the day with me?” he said to her, his chest moving under her hand, and she nearly wept with relief.

“I believe that women should have educations and jobs and refrigerators to put their fucking food in and that they should be able to give birth in hospitals with incubators in the NICU,” she said, genuinely pissed. “That’s not a controversial statement.”

This was what Francis had said to her on Phil Miles’s roof the first time they met, and it was such a just and tidy logic she had never really moved away from it.

“Oil companies don’t care about incubators,” said Charlie. “They don’t give a fuck about you, or any woman in Kazakhstan, or any woman anywhere.”

“Neither do you,” said Elizabeth. “You’re wearing a fucking wedding ring.”