What’s a femme fatale? Zoe had asked, and Heidi nodded her head to the woman in the strapless cherry dress and said simply, Her.

I reach for the quarters on my desk and announce that I’m making a trip to the vending machine. “Want anything?” I ask, hoping that when I return, I’ll find the office empty. She says no thanks and I take off, down the all but deserted hall for the vending machine in our inadequate office kitchen. I press the button for the highly caffeinated drink I need, and crack the can open while making my way back to my desk.

I’m plotting the next steps in my “find Willow Greer” adventure when I step onto the metallic gold carpeting that separates my office from the ceramic tiles of the main hall. I find Cassidy on her hands and knees on the carpeting, collecting a dozen or so pens that fell. That roomy ebony sweater nearly drags on the ground, exposing the rest of the red bra that I previously couldn’t see: the low cut, the Chantilly lace, the underwire cups, a delicate front bow.

She’s holding my cell phone in her hand. I squint at the clock on the wall, 12:02 p.m., and my heart sinks.

“Heidi,” Cassidy says, holding out the phone to me. She’s smiling. But it’s not a smile that’s nice or polite. “For you. Hope you don’t mind. I answered it.”

HEIDI

“What is that woman doing answering your phone?” I growl into the phone, as Chris’s reluctant voice says hello, the tone of his voice—cautious and yet strangely chipper—saturated with guilt. I drift from the living room where Willow sits on the edge of the sofa, baby pressed to a dish towel on her shoulder, burping her with a steady pat, pat, pat to the back as I showed her to do. And yet I see that the baby’s face is pressed awkwardly to the towel so that I wonder how well she can breathe, her body sloping at an angle that looks anything but secure. Anything but comfortable.

“Hey, Heidi,” Chris says, an unnatural attempt at remaining calm, cool and collected. “Everything okay?”

I imagine that woman sitting in his bland, box-like office, listening to our conversation. I envision Chris, checking his watch, making some sort of blah-blah-blah hand gesture to Cassidy Knudsen, to indicate that my rant—why is she answering your phone; and why didn’t you tell me you were going to the office to work with her; and who else is in today? Tom? Henry?—has gone on for far too long. I feel the blood creeping up my neck, turning my cheeks to crimson. My ears burn. A headache begins to form. I place two fingers to my sinuses and press. Hard.

I click the end button, not quite as fulfilling as slamming a telephone into its base. I stand in the kitchen for a moment, breathing heavily, reminding myself of all the reasons I don’t like Cassidy Knudsen. She’s breathtaking. She’s smart, shrewd. Very chichi, as if she should be in the pages of a fashion magazine, and not staring at Chris’s insipid spreadsheets all the livelong day.

But the biggest reason I don’t like her? It’s quite plain and simple, really. My husband spends more time with her than he does with me. Flying to bustling metropolises around the country, spending the night in pricey, sophisticated hotels where Chris and I only ever dreamed about going, dinners at expensive restaurants that we saved for special occasions: birthdays, anniversaries and such, rendering them ordinary on days which were far from ordinary.

I hear her strident voice reverberating in my mind, the overly animated, “Hey there, Heidi,” as she answered the phone. “Chris just ran down the hall. He’ll be back in a bit. Want me to have him call you?” she’d asked, but I said no, I’d wait. And I did just that, staring at the time on the microwave clock for the four plus minutes it took my husband to return to his phone, all the while listening to Cassidy Knudsen tinker with the items on Chris’s desk, hearing a crash and envisioning her knocking over his pencil cup—the painted pottery one Zoe made years ago—pencils and his ballpoint pens tumbling to the ground.

“Oops.” She giggled, like a scandalous teenager.

I imagine that once Cassidy Knudsen was a cheerleader, one of those girls in the skimpy polyester skirts and the half shirts, dropping her pencil to the floor before the supposedly perverse male science teacher, reaching down from her chair spread eagle to reclaim it and then later claiming foul play.

While I gather myself to return to Willow and Ruby, I hear the squeak of a bedroom door, Zoe drifting from her bedroom hideout and into the living room. There’s silence, and then Zoe’s voice, a bit thorny and stiff.

“Were you ever scared?” she asks. I lurk in the kitchen, wondering what she means. Were you ever scared?

“What?” asks Willow and I picture the girl, still wearing Zoe’s clothing from the previous afternoon, now sticky with syrup and wrinkled with sleep. She’s perched on the edge of the sofa and as Ruby lets out the belch of a male drunkard, the girls snicker.

There’s nothing like a little gas to break the ice.

“Out there, I mean.” And I imagine Zoe’s finger pointing out the bay window, to the commotion of the city outside: the taxis that soar up and down the street, sirens, horns, a homeless man playing the saxophone on the corner of the street.

“Yeah. I guess so,” Willow replies, admitting sheepishly, “I don’t like thunder,” and I’m stricken again by the clear truth that this girl, sitting in my living room with an infant in her arms, a tough mollusk shell protecting all that’s valuable and vulnerable on the inside, is a mere child. A child who devours whipped cream and pancakes, and is afraid of something as innocuous as thunder.

Profiles, vase. Profiles, vase.

I imagine the vigorous city when it finally does fall asleep for the night. When the sun sets somewhere over suburbia, and the lights of the Loop are ablaze. It’s stunning, really. But here, in our neighborhood, a mile or two north of downtown, nighttime means total darkness. Pitch blackness spotted with the occasional streetlight that may or may not work. The time of day when zombies come out to play, loitering in the city’s parks, in the darkened alcoves of closed businesses that line Clark and Fullerton Streets. Living in an upscale neighborhood doesn’t exclude us from crime. The morning news talks frequently of crime waves throughout Lakeview and Lincoln Park, of overnight robberies, about how violent crimes are on the rise. You hear all the time about women being attacked as they walk home from the bus, or as they make their way into their apartment building, grocery bags in hand. The neighborhood at night—strangely dark, fraught with an ear-splitting silence, must be a terrifying place to be. Ghastly.

I make my way into the living room and find the girls eyeballing one another awkwardly. Zoe jumps when I enter and says, “What do you want?” as if I have no business being in my home. She’s embarrassed that I caught her talking to Willow when it wasn’t required, embarrassed that she showed any interest whatsoever in the girl.

“I have something to show you,” I say, “both of you,” and I disappear down the hall.

It took over an hour for Ruby’s Tylenol to kick in, for the fever to subside. During that time she was irritable and moody, inconsolable whether in Willow’s or my hands. We tried feeding her, rocking her, thrusting a pacifier into her wide-open mouth, but all of our efforts were in vain. And then, per Chris’s suggestion, we sunk the baby into a lukewarm bath, which seemed to appease her a bit, and followed it up with layers of emollients to her bottom, a fresh diaper, a change of clothes. Because Chris had only purchased a single pair of blue pants to partner with the white jumpsuit, I lug the bin of baby clothing from Chris’s and my bedroom closet—the one mislabeled Heidi: Work—into the living room where the girls and I can sort through rompers with ruffles and animal print bodysuits, Onesies with tutus, organic fleece pajamas and satin ballet slippers made just for pudgy infant feet.