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What it actually sells is the sensation of feeling slightly behind. It has engineered a machine that makes eleven million men feel soft in a way that registers as discipline, and it has done this so well that they pay for the privilege annually and thank the company in the comments.

I have read the terms of service. All of it. I found it appalling.

"Of course," I said. "Saturday. I'll move the Hoffman call."

"You're the best."

He was already back on the phone, thumb moving. Something on it always requires him. "Everyone's dying to meet you, by the way. You're like this mysterious figure." He looked up. "I keep telling them you're a litigator and they think it's so hot."

He paused. Ran his tongue along his lower lip and held my eyes over the top of the phone, which on any other man is an opening bid.

"It is hot," he said. "I think it's extra hot."

"Thank you." I smiled. I have a very good smile. I’ve had it appraised. But here's the part I've never said out loud, and will say now only because there is no one else in this room.

I felt nothing.

Not warmth, or irritation. Not the small pleased flush a man is supposed to feel when the person he has agreed to marry tells him he's hot in an office on a Thursday afternoon. What I felt was what I feel when a contract clause is well drafted.

Correct. That is the right thing to have said there.

Which is not nothing, exactly. Steven is a beautiful man and we are perfectly functional in the bedroom. It’s scheduled, pleasant even, and afterward we both fall asleep facing our own sides of the bed like two men who have completed a transaction to mutual satisfaction. There is a great deal to be said for that.

I know precisely what actual love feels like. That's the trouble with having had it, once. Years ago, when I first met Gregory, my ex. He looked at me across a producer's ugly rented living room in Los Feliz for approximately one and a half seconds and I lost the ability to hear the conversation I was having. I couldn't put a sentence together. Me. I had to leave the room and stand in a hallway with my hand flat on somebody's wallpaper, doing arithmetic in my head, until my pulse came down.

I didn’t know then that the feeling was a bill. I know it now. I know exactly what it costs, because I paid it in full, and the receipt is in a box in a storage unit in Emeryville along with everything else I couldn't look at after the divorce.

So — nothing is good. Nothing is affordable.

And I want to be clear that I know it. People assume the coldness is a wall I built and then forgot the far side of. I’ve never forgotten anything. I ran the numbers on this arrangement the way I run numbers on everything, and they were good. Steven will never leave me to produce a film in New Zealand, because Steven doesn’t have that kind of scope. Steven's entire life happens inside a four-inch screen he carries in his hand, and there is nothing in it big enough to take him anywhere I'm not.

If I feel nothing when he says I'm hot, then I will also feel nothing on the day he's gone. I have examined that price at length and I can afford it.

The other thing — the whole reckless animal of it, the version where you hand somebody your heart and keep nothing in reserve — I bought that once. Six years, in installments, plus everything at the end. I don't have the emotional bandwidth to spend again. This isn't sad. I need that understood. I’ve never once experienced it as sad. I experienced it as a problem solved.

"I have meetings the rest of the afternoon," I lied, and we both knew it was a lie. But it was the good kind — the kind that ends a visit without anyone having to be rude about it.

"Okay! Yes. Go be terrifying." Steven stood, gathered the phone and the bag and all that warmth, leaned across the desk, and kissed the top of my head.

The top of my head. Like a nephew. Or a dog.

Then he was gone, all at once, taking the temperature of the room up four degrees with him.

I sat still for a moment.

Then I moved the orchid back. An inch, maybe less, until it squared to the edge of the blotter and the line of the desk was whole again. Sixty-eight degrees. Everything where I had put it.

My phone buzzed.

Not Steven. My mother, which meant the wedding, because my mother does not call me about anything that is not about the wedding.

I let it ring twice and looked out at the Bay going flat and silver in the late light, at the boats — there are always boats, I’ve never once in my life managed to get away from boats — and I felt, for no reason I could name and would not admit to under oath, a draft move through a room I had thought was sealed.

I answered. "Mother."

"Darling. The fitting is Sunday, and Ines has held the entire afternoon open for us."

Ines is the tailor. Ines does not have a last name, in the manner of people who charge what Ines charges. The suit is my mother's project, the way all of it is my mother's project — a hand-loomed hemp silk in a white so unbleached it reads as an apology, woven by a collective outside Kyoto that my mother describes, with no detectable irony, as doing important work.