There’s a knock at the door. I barely register the sound before Heidi, over the phone, snaps, “Who’s that?” and I lie, claiming, “Room service,” because I refuse to admit that Cassidy offered to stop by and proofread the offering memorandum—the company profile and financials for some asset we’re trying to sell—before we all head down to the hotel bar for a nightcap.

I move from the bed and to the door, telling Heidi how I ordered room service. How I was staying in for the night to finish up the offering memorandum which I was supposed to finish last weekend. How I ordered a turkey club sandwich and cheesecake and how I might tune in for the end of the Cubs game, if I finish the offering memorandum in time.

I slide the door open and find, as expected, Cassidy on the other side, bright red lipstick delineating her lips so that I can think of nothing but those lips.

I raise a finger to my mouth and silently whisper Shh.

And then, louder, so Heidi can hear, “Did you bring any ketchup?” and watch as Cassidy stifles a laugh.

I’m going straight to hell, I think as I thank the bogus room service attendant and slam the door closed, grateful when Heidi says she’ll let me go so my food doesn’t grow cold.

“Love you,” I say, and she says, “Me, too.”

I toss my phone onto the bed.

I watch Cassidy move across the room with gall. As if this is her room. There’s no hesitation about it, no hovering in the doorway waiting to be invited in. Not with Cassidy.

She’s changed her clothes. Only Cassidy would change from a dress into a dress for a nightcap, replacing the formal black suit with a Grecian style dress, fitted and sleeveless, the color of rust. She sits on a low yellow armchair slinging one long leg across the other, asking first about the offering memorandum, and then about Heidi.

“She’s good,” I say, pulling up the offering memorandum on my laptop and handing it to Cassidy, careful not to touch as the computer passes between hands. “Yup, she’s good.”

And then I excuse myself before I say it a third time, forcing my eyes to stay on her eyes and not her legs or her lips, or her breasts in the rust-colored dress. Not big. But not small, either. The kind that work well on Cassidy’s lissome frame. Too much extra baggage would throw the whole thing off. She’d be disproportionate, I think as I stand, staring at the display of hotel freebies on the bathroom’s black sink—shampoo, conditioner, lotion, soap—as I rip open the soap and wash my face, splashing cold water on the skin so that I’ll stop thinking about Cassidy’s knockers.

Or her long legs.

Or the lips. Red lips. The color of a cayenne pepper.

She calls to me from the adjoining room, and I step from the bathroom, patting my face dry with a towel. I slide into my own low yellow armchair beside hers, and pull it up to the round table.

We go over the offering memorandum. I focus on words like shares and stocks and per unit, and not the manicured hands that work their way across the computer screen, or the skirt of the rust-colored dress hovering mere millimeters from my leg.

* * *

We head downstairs when we finish, standing side by side on the elevator. Cassidy leans close to me to mock a man riding downstairs with us, a man with a bad toupee, as she elongates her neck and laughs out loud, her fingernails grazing the skin on my forearm.

I wonder what others think of us: me with a wedding band, her without.

Do they see us as colleagues in New York on a business trip, or something more than that: me the adulterer and her the mistress?

In the hotel’s bar, I snag the steel side chair so that Cassidy is forced onto a low sofa with Tom and Henry. We drink. Too much. We talk. Gossip. Make fun of coworkers and clients, which is far too easy to do. Satirize spouses, and then claim to be kidding when someone’s wife becomes the butt of a joke.

Heidi.

Cassidy sips from a Manhattan, leaving ruby red lip marks along the edges of the cocktail glass, and says, “See this, gentlemen, is the reason I’ll never get married,” and I wonder which it is: that she refuses to be the butt of some joke, or refuses to mock the one she vowed to love in good times and in bad. Sickness and health. So long as they both shall live.

Or maybe it’s the whole monogamy thing that dissuades her.

And then, later, in the john, a completely sauced Henry accosts me with a condom. “In case you need this later,” he says, and he laughs a haughty laugh with that lewd sense of humor that is Henry Tomlin.

“I hardly think Heidi and I need birth control,” I say, but I take it anyway and slide it into my pants pocket, not wanting to be crass and leave it on the bathroom sink.

Henry leans in close, reeking of good old Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, a throwback to his redneck days, and whispers, “I wasn’t talking about Heidi,” and gives me a wink.

We lose track of time. Tom orders another round on him, some type of pilsner for Tom and me, more Jack Daniel’s for Henry, an Alabama Slammer for Cassidy. She pulls the fruit out—an orange and a maraschino cherry—and eats that first. The bartender announces, “Last call.”

I forget about my phone completely, the one tossed onto the bed, hidden beneath the folds of the white bedspread.

HEIDI

Zoe goes to bed early, riddled with a headache and stuffy nose, the return of spring allergy season, or maybe just a cold. It’s impossible to tell, as is nearly always the case this time of year, when tree pollens are at their height, but cold and flu season has yet to recede from view. So I dole out both pain relievers and antihistamines, and Zoe falls into bed, drifting immediately into a drug-induced sleep, as I kiss her forehead gingerly, leaving the TV on in Chris’s and my bedroom, as the sound of some reality TV show permeates the walls.

Willow and I sit, perched in the living room—she, reading silently from Anne of Green Gables, and me on my laptop, feigning work though it’s the furthest thing from my mind. It’s been three days since I’ve been into the office, three days since anything work related has crossed my mind.

My absence has been felt at work, a happy bouquet of roses and lilies now taking up residence on my kitchen table with a Get Well Soon card. Each morning I prepare my most macabre voice and put in a call to Dana, receptionist extraordinaire, and say that I’m unwell, the flu, I believe, and blame my own foolishness for not getting the vaccine. My temperature hovers somewhere around 102, depending on the day, and my body aches through and through, everything from the hairs on my head to the tips of my toes. I’ve wrapped myself in blankets and layer upon layer of clothes, and yet I’m overwhelmed by chills, never warm, praying that Zoe doesn’t get sick though, being the good mother I am, Zoe, of course, had her vaccine.

But still, I say, before breaking into a coughing fit that sounds really quite sincere, silently giving myself kudos for thespian abilities of which I was unaware I possessed—the compression of air in my lungs, the muculent secretions that erupt from my chest like hot lava from Mauna Loa—you never know.

None of it, of course, is true.

I’m finding myself to be quite skilled in the art of lying.

I gaze eagerly at the baby, sound asleep on the floor, waiting impatiently for the first hint of movement—the fluttering of eyelids, the flicker of a hand—which will eject me from my chair and to her side a split second before Willow, like children in a competitive game of slapjack, both driven to be the first to spot the jack and whack it with their hand.

I type meaningless words into the computer screen, evidence that I am working.

My eyes move from Ruby, to Willow, to the laptop, and back again, a never-ending circuit that makes me giddy, afflicted with the sudden sensation of vertigo.