They walked into Andrew’s apartment. The ceilings must be sixteen feet high, Katya thought. There was a fire going in the living room and the logs crackled pleasantly. She turned around and Teddy had wandered off, so she peered into the rest of the apartment. In the dining room was a huge walnut table set for eight, with a couple of small floral arrangements as centerpieces. One wall was dominated by a mural-size painting that looked like it had been done by a graffiti artist, all loops and tags and bright colors. In the open kitchen, Andrew was holding a drink and talking intensely to Victor and a woman whom Katya didn’t recognize. There was a tray of cucumber slices topped with crabmeat on the counter flanked by two cheese boards, and a full bar was set up in the living room. A couple of people were pouring themselves what appeared to be rather complicated drinks involving fresh mint. A tall black woman and a shorter white woman—both beautiful and thin and wearing oversize sacklike dresses—were bustling about in the kitchen, putting spices on sliced fish on baking sheets and chopping vegetables. They periodically checked on the appetizers, freshening up the cheese or bringing out a few more pieces of cucumber and crab. Katya mentally cataloged everything—the cucumbers and crabmeat, the fireplace, the mural—so she could report it all to Dan tomorrow. He loved hearing about shit like this. “Welcome to Startupville, population douchebag,” he was fond of saying.
Victor was deep in conversation with Andrew. She finally caught his eye and gave him a nod, and he smiled at her. She decided not to interrupt and instead helped herself to a club soda in a little glass bottle, sat on the edge of the midcentury modern sofa, and opened Twitter. Nighttime Twitter was different from daytime Twitter only in that the content shifted from people in her timeline making dumb jokes about tech news to people making dumb jokes about TV. Katya rarely watched TV except when Victor was over, and she had never really understood the appeal of getting “into” a show. And people who said that they watched shows ironically or as “guilty pleasures” she understood even less. Life was short. Why waste it on something that made you feel like you had to explain yourself?
“Hey.” There was suddenly an older Asian woman sitting next to her who hadn’t been there before, carefully holding an overly full tumbler of ice and alcohol. A sprig of mint peeked out from atop the rim of the glass.
“Hi.” Katya closed Twitter but kept her phone in her hand.
“Sabrina.” The woman extended her hand. Sabrina? Wasn’t that Dan’s wife’s name?
“Katya.” She shook Sabrina’s hand. “How do you know Andrew?”
“I don’t, really,” Sabrina said. She took a sip of her drink. “I’m here with his…girlfriend, I guess? Isabel. We work together at TakeOff. You know…we’re the ‘work more mindfully’ people?”
So it was Dan’s wife. How odd that she would be here. “Oh, yes, I am familiar,” Katya said. “I’ve seen you around. I work with your husband at TechScene. Dan likes to say that they used to just call ‘working more mindfully’ a smoke break.”
Sabrina grimaced, and Katya remembered, too late, that Sabrina disapproved of Dan’s smoking. “So you must be the bad influence on him.” Katya tried to keep her face impassive. Sabrina cleared her throat. “What do you, ah, do for TechScene?”
“I’m a reporter.” The dinner was technically off the record—and Victor had made it very clear to Katya that if she published anything she heard at the dinner, she was potentially jeopardizing any future employment or investment opportunities he would have with Andrew or Teddy Rosen or whoever else happened to be there. StrollUp’s demise had been quiet, although she assumed that the news would have traveled by now, at least to people like Andrew and Teddy. But Victor had made it very clear: She was not to discuss StrollUp at this party. “What are you doing here, anyway? I mean, not to be rude, but from what Dan says, you guys don’t venture out much.” Sabrina tilted her head to one side. Katya quickly amended her remark. “I mean, I assumed that from what Dan’s said. He didn’t, like, actually say that.”
“Hm. Well, it’s true that I don’t venture out much,” Sabrina said. “Dan…Dan ventures out a little more than I do. But Isabel invited me to this and I figured, what the hell, I haven’t gone to something like this in years.”
Katya was still trying to process what was happening: This was that Sabrina, the woman that Dan complained about during at least half of their smoke breaks and about whose marriage Katya knew way too much. But she was having trouble reconciling the nagging control freak Dan had told her about with this perfectly pleasant, if a bit anxious, woman sitting next to her. It was unsettling.
“So what else has Dan said about me?”
“Not a ton,” Katya lied. Dan was constantly paranoid that Sabrina was going to come downstairs to the building lobby and catch him smoking. “You know, just that you guys live in Park Slope and stuff.”
“‘And stuff,’” she said. “I guess that accurately sums everything up.” They were silent for a moment. “Why are you here? Are you friends with Andrew?”
“No, I don’t really know him. My boyfriend, Victor”—she gestured with her head in the general direction of the kitchen—“knows him from startup stuff.” Sabrina nodded. “Will you excuse me for a moment?” Katya said.