Listen to Christine Sneed read an excerpt from “Over My Dead . . . Whatever.”

Skyler’s application arrived in the HR portal on a Thursday morning and was forwarded to Katherine for her review on the same day, a record for Brett in HR who, shortly after Katherine began searching for a new assistant, was out sick for a week and subsequently gone for ten more days on a Mediterranean cruise to celebrate his second wedding anniversary.

Katherine’s hope had been to make the hire within four weeks, ideally three, but the search dragged on for eight. Most of this was due, she was certain, to Brett’s lackadaisical review of the applications, more than fifty streaming in during the first few days after the posting went live. She hadn’t known there were so many until her friend Trina, who worked in HR as a benefits specialist, mentioned it a couple of weeks into the search over Cinco de Mayo margaritas. Up to that point, Brett had forwarded only eight candidates’ materials for Katherine’s review. She’d scheduled interviews with five, but none had inspired enough confidence for an offer.

Brett was the son of Katherine’s boss, Angie, one of the agency’s cofounders. Before landing at Fallon & Fief, Certified Public Accountants, he’d been out in Silicon Valley, where he’d brainstormed app ideas and failed to sell them to developers, Katherine suspected, otherwise his mother wouldn’t have had to bail out him and his wife (who reportedly made corn-husk miniatures of squirrels and foxes and sold them on Etsy) with a job Brett had no qualifications for and a move back to Chicago. Skyler, however, appeared to be overqualified for the position she was applying for: University of Illinois alumnus, 3.8 GPA, major in accounting, minor in communications. Both her Zoom and in-person interviews went well—she’d arrived on time, asked non-generic questions, and sent a thank-you note, and after her background and reference checks were complete (Brett once more coming through despite the odds), Katherine called to tell her the job was hers if she wanted it.

“I’m in, Kate!” said Skyler, interrupting Katherine’s offer mid-sentence. “I just knew you’d hire me. We totally vibe with each other.”

“I need to tell you the salary and the benefits before you formally accept the position,” said Katherine.

“Doh. Guess you can tell I’m super pumped,” said Skyler, laughing.

Katherine glanced up at the flickering light above her desk, an abominable fluorescent tube she could also hear buzzing faintly. “Yes, I can tell.” She paused. “One thing, I go by Katherine. Not Kate or Kathy.”

“Katherine. Got it. Same name as my aunt, but she goes by Kate,” said Skyler. Katherine could hear her drinking something before she added, “She’s a trip. Tries to make me eat carob brownies and seaweed every time I’m at her house, and she’s got eight cats! Three of them are diabetic and another one’s senile and craps everywhere. Kate’s bananas, but I love her.”

This goofy, giddy version of Skyler was both mystifying and alarming. She sounded a little stoned or drunk, possibly both. She hadn’t been a compulsive talker in either of her interviews and had struck Katherine as smart and funny, her long brown hair sleek in a businesslike ponytail, her clothes stylish but not showy. Katherine recalled thinking, I like her. This could work.

Now her interior monologue was, Oh god. Oh shit.

Pete, Katherine’s most recent ex-boyfriend, had accused her of attracting bad luck due to her refusal to believe in karma or a grand cosmic design. He’d made these sorts of bizarre declarations and juxtapositions increasingly often before they broke up. Mostly she’d ignore them, but in this instance she’d pretended to take him seriously. “I believe in a grand cosmic design,” she said. “It’s very simple. Each one of us is like the rubber ball attached to the wooden paddle.”

“If what you’re saying is that the universe is the wooden paddle,” he said, “I have to disagree. It isn’t violent or punitive. It’s neutral.”

She looked at him as if from the other side of a vast crater. “It’s about as neutral as Italy was in World War II.”

He stared at her for a few seconds before he said, “You think what you want, but I’m not a freaking rubber ball, and the universe is not an abuser.”

It was Pete and this conversation, which had led to one of the worst arguments in their two years together, that resurfaced in her memory after Skyler brought up her aunt Kate, but Katherine hired her anyway.

Skyler was a quick study, and despite Katherine’s misgivings, her first week went smoothly, her arrivals and departures timed in strict observance of the eight-hour workday, no dilated pupils or whiff of weed or alcohol about her. When she took her to lunch on her first day, Skyler made her laugh when she showed Katherine pictures of her aunt’s diabetic cats, two calicos named Fred and Ginger, and a tabby named Mario who loved pizza.

“They all used to be such fatsos,” she said. “But now Kate chases them around the house for exercise and is super strict with their diets.” She gazed at Katherine appraisingly. “Are you a cat person or a dog person?”

“Probably a dog person. But I don’t mind cats.”

“You’re totally a dog person,” she said, decisive. “Cats are overrated, but don’t tell my aunt I said that.”

Her liveliness and charm were infectious. Katherine could feel the knot of anxiety lodged in her chest begin to loosen, and Skyler further endeared herself when she tried to pay for her sandwich, but Katherine always treated when she took a new assistant out for lunch.

On Friday morning of that first week, Katherine found a box of doughnuts on her desk when she arrived in her office, a heart-shaped note taped to the top: “To the best boss I’ve ever had. L, S”

If she remembered Skyler’s resume correctly, she was only her third boss ever. She raised the box lid, the scent of fried dough and confectioner’s sugar wafting up. The doughnuts were fetchingly frosted and powdered, half of them heart-shaped, the other half the usual iconic wheel. She could sense Skyler’s eyes on her, and when she turned toward her cubicle, her assistant was peering at her over the top of the divider, her expression mischievous and expectant.

“You’ve only been here for five days and you’ve already found my Achilles heel,” said Katherine with a small laugh. According to her killjoy doctor, doughnuts were even more of a dietary outrage than French fries. “Thank you, Skyler. What a nice surprise.”

“DFF,” said Skyler, her cheeks flushed, her dark eyes gleaming with companionable sugar-lust. “Doughnut fiends forever.”

“You have to help me with these.” She carried the box over to Skyler, who erupted out of her chair and threw her arms around her. They both stumbled in the propulsive embrace, Katherine almost dumping the doughnuts onto the floor.

“Oops!” cried Skyler, giggling as she helped Katherine steady the box.

By mid-morning, Brett had sniffed out the doughnuts and snatched up two. Katherine had already eaten a chocolate doughnut with sprinkles and two coconut ones, alternately cursing herself and Skyler, who’d taken only one doughnut and eaten it slowly, having cut it into several pieces. She’d noticed Brett on her and Skyler’s side of the office more often in the last week than she had in the last few months, but from what she’d been able to overhear of his exchanges with Skyler, her assistant didn’t seem to be encouraging his attention.

Brett’s mother, unbeknownst to him, was in Katherine’s office when he came by to ogle Skyler and the doughnuts Katherine had left out by the print station. Hearing him begin spouting some nonsense about the White Sox, Angie abruptly got up and poked her head into the hall, startling Brett, who scuttled back to his office a moment later.

Shutting Katherine’s door behind her after she’d chased off her son, Angie said, “I rue the day.”

Katherine waited for more, but Angie only frowned before returning to the particulars of the account they were discussing before her second-born had shown up to flirt with Skyler, who was “pretty, but not a knockout, thank God”—something Angie had allegedly said to Hugh, the agency’s other founder, within earshot of Trina.

Trina was a very skilled eavesdropper, and also, it had long seemed to Katherine, the kind of person who was often in the right place at the wrong time, or, as Trina saw it, the right place at the right time.

Over lunch that afternoon, Katherine’s mood and her stomach both tetchy from the doughnut binge, Trina advised her to proceed with caution. “Those doughnuts are probably a quid pro quo tactic. You know, gift theory. There’re always strings attached. My advice? Don’t let your guard down. She’s probably trying to build capital so when she screws up or asks for time off she hasn’t earned, you’ll be less likely to tell her no.”

“You’re so cynical,” said Katherine. “I don’t get the impression she’s especially calculating.”

Her friend gave her a canny look. “You hardly know her. Keep your guard up. When was the last time one of my predictions was wrong?”

“You said you thought Pete might finally be the one.”

Trina made a face. “I said that after the first couple of weeks you were together. It hardly—”

“It still counts.”

“No way. Ninety-day probation period, just like at work.” Trina took a drink from her water glass, her eyes meeting Katherine’s over the rim. “Seriously, be fair but firm. You won’t regret it.”

It was discouraging to go through life assuming everyone was an adversary or would soon become one if she was too easygoing or nice. Along with calling down chaos on herself, cynicism was another tendency Pete had accused her of, but his problems, in her view, had been worse. A month or so after she moved in with him, he began letting erstwhile fraternity brothers and friends of erstwhile fraternity brothers stay in their guest bedroom after a wife or girlfriend (or in one case, daughter) kicked them out. Pete lent these strays money and sometimes stayed up very late with them drinking beer, watching terrible movies, and ordering hot wings from Uber Eats at two in the morning. When the arrangement turned too weird or otherwise unbearable, he made Katherine kick them out. It wasn’t until one of these hangdog men stumbled naked into her and Pete’s bedroom and began peeing in the closet that Pete finally agreed to stop running a halfway house out of their home, but by then, she’d had enough and moved out a month and a half later. The tenants in the little house she owned in Edgewater and had been depressingly prescient enough to hold onto weren’t happy that they couldn’t renew their lease. She was apologetic and disappointed too, but could not stomach the thought of spending money on rent in lieu of kicking out her tenants—she was not that selfless. (“Thank God,” said Trina when she heard Katherine’s guilty lament. “You don’t need a second job . . . as a doormat.”).

On the Wednesday of Skyler’s third week, something in their microclimate shifted—a disturbance in the field was the phrase that came to mind, an expression of Katherine’s grandmother’s, who had devotedly read her horoscope every day.

Passing Skyler’s desk on her way back from the kitchen with a mid-morning cup of execrable coffee she nonetheless couldn’t stop drinking, she noticed Skyler wiping tears from her cheeks. Her instinct was to scurry into her office, but instead she quietly asked, “Are you all right?”

Skyler nodded, clearly embarrassed. “It’s that time of the month,” she whispered. “I’m always like this. Consider yourself warned.” She forced out a laugh that sounded more like a suppressed sob.

“Do you need any Advil?” Katherine couldn’t remember a previous assistant alluding to cramps or other menstrual trouble. She rarely brought it up herself with anyone other than Trina, who had two small children and a home perpetually plagued by what she described as the standard child broth of vomit and urine.

“I took three earlier,” said Skyler. “I’ll be okay.”

Katherine hesitated on the gray felt perimeter of Skyler’s stalwart cubicle, wanting to ask if she was done with the Crisman file, which Skyler was supposed to have finished proofing the previous afternoon. Before Katherine could piece together the proper wording, Skyler said, “I don’t know if you were in a sorority.” She grimaced. “Some of the other girls in mine were super nice, but some were huge bitches. Like the hugest, and they still are. It’s been over a year since we graduated, but they’re like—” She shook her head. “Never mind. Sorry.”

“I wasn’t in a sorority,” said Katherine.

Skyler’s chin was trembling. “It was fine, except when it sucked.”

“Not that you asked for my advice, but I’d stay off social media as much as you can,” said Katherine, her eyes scanning Skyler’s desk for her phone, but she didn’t see its hot pink edge poking out from beneath a stack of the agency’s green file folders or the morning’s lumpy mail harvest.

“I’m trying,” said Skyler with a shaky exhalation. “Two hours a day max. But I’m not always—” She shook her head.

“Take the apps off your phone,” Katherine said gently. “I know it’s hard, but I did it last year and felt about fifty percent better almost immediately.” Along with Facebook and Instagram, she’d deleted Hinge and Bumble, but had wrestled on and off with the urge to re-download them and lost twice. Presently, however, both dating apps were malingering back in the cloud.

“Yeah,” said Skyler. “They’re all cyber-crack.”

Katherine took a sip of her coffee before lumbering ahead. “Is the Crisman file ready?”

Skyler looked at her blankly.

“The deli in Northbrook. Nathan and Arlene Crisman?”

“Oh! Right. It’s all done. I’ll email it to you right now. Sorry I forgot to yesterday.”

“It’s okay,” said Katherine. “Next time just be sure you remember.”

“I will,” said Skyler, nodding vigorously.

The next morning, further disturbance in the field: Skyler was almost a half an hour late.

“The CTA is like the worst public trans in the whole effing world,” she said, arriving at her desk in a flurry of flying hair and breathy apologies. “It won’t happen again. I’m so, so sorry.”

Katherine took a long, silent breath before she said, “Call or text me if you’re ever delayed like that again. I was starting to get worried.” In truth, she was more irritated than worried, but she left that for Skyler to infer.

“I was just so annoyed that I wasn’t thinking straight,” she said, her cheeks flushed, her white blouse half untucked from the waistband of her pink skirt. “I was going to get off the el and take an Uber, but I would’ve had to wait twenty minutes for it to pick me up. I was seriously about to lose it in front of everyone. It won’t happen again, I promise.”

The following Friday, however, she was nearly an hour late. “I had the stomach flu last night,” she said, her eyes darting nervously from Katherine’s face to the floor. She did look wan and underslept.

“Did you get my text? I sent it as soon as I was on the el,” she added when Katherine didn’t reply.

Katherine regarded her, pity and distrust warring in her chest. She hadn’t gotten a text. She’d also tried to call her at nine forty, but Skyler’s voicemail had picked up on the second ring. “No,” she said. “No text.”

“You must think I’m such a fuckup.” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry about the f-bomb,” the words muffled by her palm.

Down at the far end of the hall, Katherine saw Brett emerge from his office, a pineapple, inexplicably, in hand. Skyler turned, following Katherine’s gaze, both of them watching as he raised the large, spiky fruit and shook it like a maraca. “Great source of vitamin C,” he said before disappearing into the hallway that led to the kitchen.

What a ding-dong, thought Katherine, barely managing not to say it aloud. She looked at Skyler, who was trying not to laugh.

Katherine pressed her lips together, forcing back her own laughter. “I think you know it’s very important to arrive on time each morning. Things obviously happen, but two late arrivals in less than two weeks—” She had to glance away. Skyler’s face was doing something complicated as she tried not to cry, or more probably, laugh. Loud meowing was now coming out of the office next door, Jon’s, the agency’s IT director. A timid, long-haired man in his mid-forties who hid behind three large monitors as he did whatever he did each day, he loved cat videos and baking tutorials. “It’s concerning,” said Katherine, trying determinedly to focus on Skyler.

“I’ll stay late to make up for it,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

When she was back at her desk again, she heard Skyler laughing in her cubicle. A few moments later, she was standing in Katherine’s doorway. “I wasn’t laughing at you,” she said, leaning forward with the air of a co-conspirator. “It’s that insane meowing.”

“It’s okay,” said Katherine. “I didn’t think you were.” Please get back to work, she thought, faking a smile and holding Skyler’s gaze until she returned to her cubicle.

With every successive assistant—Skyler her fifth in the decade she’d been head tax accountant at Fallon & Fief—Katherine had found herself cast more and more in the role of a scold. The immaturity, the bewildering self-importance, the emotional fragility had increased with each new assistant. Skyler, she’d hoped, would finally be the person to break the demoralizing cycle.

Her most recent predecessors, Bryan and Julia, had each lasted less than a year, Bryan claiming the week after his ninety-day probation period ended that his biorhythms required him to begin the workday at eleven instead of nine. He also needed to work from home because he’d recently discovered he was allergic to carbon emissions and could no longer do the five-mile commute from his apartment to the office. When he produced what turned out to be a fake doctor’s note, Katherine had fired him.

Julia had left of her own volition, but her complaints were from a neighboring constellation: the air quality and the lights in the office triggered her migraines. She also had social anxiety and couldn’t stand being bullied by everyone in the entire friggin’ world to keep up the façade of the perky assistant who was never allowed to be in a bad mood, even though her roommate was stealing her food and banging random guys on the other side of the thin bedroom wall they shared while the downstairs neighbors blasted Drake and Dua Lipa until three in the morning and tossed beer bottles out the window into the alley. (“So, basically, she’s living the same life most of us live after college until we find someone to marry and be miserable with in a different way,” Trina had observed after Julia gave her notice.)

Although Katherine had planned to leave at five and stop at the grocery store and the dry cleaners on the way home, she stayed in the office until six to make sure Skyler kept her word. Jon was in his office with the door closed, the voice of what sounded like C-3PO upbraiding R2-D2 seeping out.

Katherine tried to focus on an appeal to the state tax board she was preparing for a new client, but her subconscious was sending forth its ghoulish emissaries. She was thirty-eight and by now she’d long assumed she’d be married—or divorced—and the mother of a child or two. Other than houseplants, however, she still lived alone and ate her solitary meals with the TV babbling and the lights on in the next room to give any lurking criminals the impression someone else was home with her. She had two younger brothers, both married and living in sunny states, Florida and Arizona, one already a father. But no one was pressuring her to be anyone other than who she was, and she had money and a nice enough home and got along with her neighbors. She knew she should be happy. Others had it far, far worse. This line of thinking had never done much to make her or anyone else she knew feel better though.

Consequently, here she was, babysitting her new assistant in the office until six o’clock, instead of at home with her progeny, haggling over the fact they couldn’t eat dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets for the ninth dinner in a row.

When Skyler turned off her desktop for the night and presented herself in the doorway of Katherine’s office, Katherine was looking at shoes online and telling herself she didn’t need another pair of clogs. “You want to go get a drink?” asked Skyler.

Katherine pretended to look at her watch. “I . . . okay. Sure.” Her heart was beating hard. She felt as if she were back in college, a fainthearted freshman about to lunge through the door into her first frat party.

“Really?” said Skyler, astonished.

“What the hell,” said Katherine, extracting her shoulder bag from the desk drawer she squirreled it into each morning. This was a horrible idea, but having already postponed it by an hour, she no longer felt like going home.

“I know this place on Grand that has happy hour until seven. Five-dollar loaded potato skins, four-dollar well drinks.”

“Perfect,” said Katherine.

Skyler threw an arm around Katherine’s shoulders. “Look out, boys and girls, here we come!”

I hope I don’t regret this, she thought as she followed Skyler out of the building and into the street where the humid summer air and the clamorous honks of irate drivers instantly slapped their faces.

Once their drinks had arrived, a white Russian for Skyler, a margarita for Katherine, Depeche Mode streaming moodily from speakers suspended from the restaurant’s dark corners, Skyler said, “You look really good for your age.”

Katherine laughed and shook her head as if warding off a fly. “Thank you. I guess?”

“It’s totally a compliment! You look like you’re twenty-seven or twenty-eight. How old are you, forty?”

“A hundred and two.”

Skyler whooped. “I want to be just like you when I grow up.”

“No, you don’t. Trust me.” But Katherine couldn’t keep herself from smiling.

“I definitely do,” said Skyler. “You’ve got your shit together. It’s so obvious that everyone in the office respects you, even Brett, who’s like this huge nerd who thinks he’s really cool because he worked in Silicon Valley for five minutes.”

“I hope he’s not bothering you.”

“No. He’s cute, but I’m not interested.”

“You know he’s married,” said Katherine.

“I’m not interested in guys,” said Skyler, her eyes on the table. “Like at all. I never told anyone in my sorority. I thought for a little while that I might be bi and mostly hooked up with guys in college. A few months ago I started seeing a woman. One of my sorority sisters found out and now they’ve all ghosted me.”

Katherine took this in. “It’s been over a year since you graduated, hasn’t it?”

Skyler nodded.

“That’s ridiculous. You’re not living with any of them anymore, or are you?”

“No, but some of them live here too.”

“I’m shocked they’re so homophobic,” said Katherine.

“I don’t know if they actually are. Except for maybe one or two. The girl who’s probably told everyone to ghost me is jealous of me because the guy she had a huge thing for junior and senior year liked me instead. I slept with him a couple of times, but it was pretty lame. Granted, we were both completely wasted.” She shoved a nacho into her mouth and chewed for a few seconds before she said, “Oh my god. TMI, sorry.”

Katherine knew she needed to change the subject, but she couldn’t keep herself from asking, “Is it at least going well with the woman you’re seeing?”

Skyler made a face. “She’s into polyamory, which I’m not, so basically it’s already over. But I think I’m in love with her, which really sucks.” She bit into another nacho, chewing as she said, “You’re not married, right? So what’s going on with you?”

“Let’s save that topic for another time,” she said mildly.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” said Skyler. “Just ignore me.”

Katherine took a nacho from the messy pile on the plate, managing not to spill it down her shirtfront as she took a bite. “You’re doing a good job at work,” she said. “But you have to be on time. Angie noticed you were late this morning. You don’t want her noticing. It puts you and me both in an awkward position, especially because she’s seen her son flirting with you.”

Skyler exhaled noisily. “This morning I was fighting with Courtney—that’s her name. I’m really sorry. I told her I couldn’t be polyamorous. I mean, like, over my dead . . .” Her eyes were on the verge of spilling over. “Whatever. I don’t know why I’m so hung up on her. She’s got these spiky chin hairs and she never pays for anything, and she has this awful, high-pitched laugh.” She was crying now, miserable and lovesick, her pretty face crumpling.

Katherine patted her forearm lamely. “This’ll pass, Skyler. It will.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” she whimpered.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Courtney comes back as soon as she realizes how much work polyamory is. Who has the time?”

Skyler tried to laugh. “It is a lot of work, and she’s not very organized.” She wiped beneath her eyes with one of the bar’s flimsy white napkins. “I’m so embarrassed. I didn’t mean to lose my shit.”

“It happens to all of us. Don’t apologize. It’ll get better. One day at a time.”

She stared hopefully at Katherine. “You really think so?”

“Yes,” she lied. “I do.”

“Soon?”

Katherine nodded.

“Good,” said Skyler, appearing to believe her. “Because I don’t want to be with anyone else.”

After Katherine had taken a cab home and eaten the mostaccioli and wilted salad left over from the previous night’s dinner, she called Steven, her brother in Tucson. He was more likely to answer his phone than Kent, the brother with an eight-month-old son who lived in Jacksonville.

When she told Steven how much she was beginning to like Skyler despite her tardy arrivals and turbulent private life, her brother said, “Good, but I wouldn’t be writing her into your will yet. One of the other managers I work with had a batshit thing happen to her a few weeks ago with a new guy on her team.”

Dread dispelled the residual haze of her margarita buzz. “What was it?” she asked, apprehensive.

“This guy is just a year or two out of college, and he messed up pretty bad a couple of times. Sherri, his boss, was really nice to him, but he refused to take responsibility for his mistakes. The third time he screwed up, he lied and said someone else on their team had made the error.”

“Wow,” said Katherine. “Terrible idea.”

“You’re not going to believe this next part. His mom called Sherri to accuse her of not being fair to her son, of playing favorites. She went on and on.”

“No,” she cried. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, I know. I couldn’t believe it either.”

“Did Sherri fire him?”

“Yep. But only after he screwed up yet again a few days after his mom called. She should have fired him when she’d first found out about the lie.”

“I hope Mom doesn’t sue.”

“It wouldn’t hold up in court, but obviously it’d be a hassle if she did.”

“If you and Liz have kids, promise me you won’t turn them into shitheads.”

Steven’s laugh was strained. “It’s almost enough to make me not want any.”

She spent the rest of the weekend trying not to think about work but found herself awake and worrying in the middle of the night that Skyler would show up late again next week, forcing Katherine to fire her, and subsequently, Fallon & Fief would be sued by Skyler’s angry parents, and Angie, in turn, would fire Katherine herself for being an inept boss. “There’s no margin for error here,” Angie declared every year at the all-staff retreat in late September. “If there’s even one misplaced decimal point or mistyped digit, the entire agency could topple like a house of cards!”

But how to explain the fact Angie had hired her own goofball son? Did she not realize, Katherine wondered, she was guilty of a textbook case double-standard?

The week following their Friday happy-hour outing, Skyler was at her desk each morning by nine o’clock. Previous turbulence aside, it seemed as if she was growing accustomed to the office’s rhythms and routines, her work accurate and prompt, her voice carrying pleasantly into Katherine’s office whenever she answered the phone or spoke with a colleague who wandered by for an update on a project or to retrieve a job from the printer.

The Monday of Skyler’s sixth week, when Katherine arrived at the office, Trina was on her heels almost as soon as she stepped off the elevator. Katherine had to stop herself from blurting, “What did she do?”

Skyler, however, was already seated in her cubicle, her greeting when she saw Katherine and Trina as chirpy as usual.

“Brace yourself,” said Trina, a salacious note in her voice as she followed Katherine into her office.

Katherine felt her underarms prickling. Oh fuck, she thought. “I’m braced,” she said.

“Brett’s wife is threatening to leave him,” said Trina, lowering her voice. “I heard him on the phone this morning, and I think he might have slept in his office over the weekend. I came in at seven-thirty and he was already here. It doesn’t look like he’s shaved or had a shower in a couple of days.”

Katherine tried not to show her relief. “The poor guy. I wonder if Angie knows.”

“My guess is no.” Trina watched as Katherine rooted around underneath her desk for her laptop cord. “Between you and me, I think he’s got a gambling problem. I saw him on one of those sports betting apps the other day. If this is why they’re fighting, who knows how much money he’s lost.”

“He won’t stop if he’s addicted. Not without an intervention. But even then.”

“If Tim ever got into something like this, I’d kill him. Then our kids would end up in foster care after I get thrown in prison. What a nightmare,” she said, scowling. “Whoever’s behind these shitty apps should be shot.”

On her way out of Katherine’s office, she bumped into Skyler, who was holding a full cup of coffee. A few drops splashed onto the light gray carpet and Skyler’s shoes.

“Sorry about that,” said Trina. “At least we didn’t get your blouse.”

Katherine came out to shoo Trina away and help Skyler scrub at the carpet with wet paper towels. “Did you have a good weekend?” she asked.

“It wasn’t too bad, actually.” Skyler was smiling. “Turns out you were right.”

Katherine looked at her, unsure what she was referring to.

“Courtney came over yesterday and we made up. She’s not so into the polyamory thing after all.” Her face was lit by faltering optimism.

“I’m happy for you, Skyler. I had a feeling she’d come around.”

“I’m trying to be chill and not get ahead of myself. I don’t want to scare her away.”

Katherine couldn’t think of anything to say other than Good luck, or All will be revealed in time. But she hated when people said that. It was both maddening and true.

“I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but I heard a little of what Trina said about Brett,” Skyler whispered. “I knew some guys in college who were on those evil apps. It’s like, you know, welcome to Misery Town.”

“Exactly,” said Katherine.

Skyler hesitated before she said, “You’re so nice to me, Katherine, but if you have to fire me at some point, I won’t hold it against you.”

Katherine tried not to show her dismay. “Don’t say that. One day at a time.”

It looked for a second as if Skyler might hug her, but a cat’s disgruntled yowl emerged from Jon’s office, a second cat’s angry yowl answering the first.

Skyler glanced at Jon’s door before she raised her hands over her head, palms up. “Yeeeooooowwwww,” she cried in a perfect imitation of the tortured yowling.

“Yeooowwwww,” Katherine howled in reply, startling herself.

Jon was in his doorway now, a half-eaten poppyseed bagel in his hand. They met his quizzical gaze, Skyler still laughing as she went back to her cubicle. Katherine was about to go back into her office when he said, “I didn’t realize you could hear that. Sorry. I should have had my headphones on.”

“No apology required,” said Katherine.

“Cats are so funny,” he said. “But when my last one died, I didn’t get a new one. I’m thinking about adopting a dog instead this time.”

“You should,” she said. Should he? What did she know. But the impulse seemed like something she should encourage. He was sweet, if a little nerdy, and he wasn’t bad looking. He was in fact kind of cute, and his deodorant smelled like pine trees, but Katherine didn’t know if she could see herself taking off her clothes for him, or him taking his off for her. It was an outrageous idea, although not the most outrageous she’d ever had.

She glanced over her shoulder, thinking she heard footfalls, but the corridor was empty. A phone began ringing down the hall, imploring someone to answer. She could hear Angie talking on a different phone in her corner office, telling the person on the other end not to worry, not to worry, she would see to everything herself.

All morning Katherine had to keep muffling her laughter. More than once, she was certain she heard Skyler doing the same. ■

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