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The next morning, I slept through my alarm. I wanted coffee and a moment to think about everything that had happened the night before, but I had a pool party to organize and five thousand dollars of Net-a-Porter dresses from Vivienne’s shopping spree that still needed to be boxed and returned. And besides all that, surviving one of Vivienne’s Mommie Dearest meltdowns alone was especially traumatizing, so I didn’t like leaving Sofia by herself too long.

The drive to work was as congested as ever, and the weaving traffic demanded all my attention, but I still found myself glancing in the rearview mirror, asking myself how long the car behind me had been there. Hypervigilance quietly thrummed through me like a low-grade fever.

I found Sofia wiping her brow at the ironing board in the laundry room, in a cloud of gardenia-scented spray starch and steam.

“She’s going on a date,” she said, her voice low. That meant Vivienne was probably milling around in her kimono with octopus stealth.

“She wants me to iron all this so she can try everything on.”

I glanced at the pile. There were twelve dresses, four blouses, and a pair of silk pants.

“A date? With who?”

“Some guy named Rafael Vieira.”

I frowned and unlocked my phone. A quick search and I found him: a thirty-one-year-old model with glossy black hair and a body like an Olympic swimmer, trying his very best to break out of lifestyle modeling and into couture.

I showed Sofia.

“Madre mia.”

I laughed. “I guess he’ll be at the pool party. And I guess he likes the idea of Vivienne funding his test shoots.”

“Nothing is ever free,” she whispered, expertly creasing a Miu Miu blouse.

I got busy boxing the Net-a-Porter returns, folding each dress in its tissue paper and taping the box shut.

But then Vivienne was in the doorway, sweating profusely, wrapped in a towel.

“There you are, darling! Something’s wrong with the infrared sauna.”

I followed her to her bathroom, which was the size of my apartment. One of the sauna’s bulbs had burned out.

“I’ll run to the store and get a new bulb,” I said. “You could soak in Epsom salts instead.”

She turned to face me, clutching the towel closed. “That’s not the same, Marlowe! I don’t need a bath, I need to sweat out fifteen years of marital trauma. It lives in the body. It lives in the fascia.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why don’t we have more bulbs? When you ordered the last set, did you not think to order extras?”

I didn’t tell her that I’d suggested we do exactly that, and that she’d told me I was micro-managing her wellness.

“I’ll get plenty this time. Sorry about that.”

“While you’re out, you can pick up some Manuka honey from the farmer’s market,” she said. She’d moved to the vanity and was now inspecting her face for hyperpigmentation spots. It was, like many things, an obsession adjacent to mania. Her bottles of Véla skincare sat perfectly lined up on the marble, expensively minimalist and menacing. I wondered about the women inside them.

“Tell me how the pool party planning is going.”

I lied through my teeth, looking at the floor tiles. After the events of the last five days, for once, the events in my own life felt more pressing than hers, and I’d forgotten all about it.

“I’ve finalized the invitation list and contacted Solange. Just waiting to hear back. I’ve also started building a playlist.”

“I don’t want a playlist. I want a harpist.”

“A harpist. Got it.”

“And I need you put a Pinterest board together, so I understand your thinking. I want the pool deck to look like the most aspirational moment of an Italian summer rosé editorial. Not a theme. Not a mood board full of striped cushions and those awful scalloped umbrellas everyone thinks are chic because they saw them at a hotel in Positano. I want expensive restraint. The ambiance should feel sun-drunk but disciplined. Sensual, but not vulgar.”