“That seems harsh.” Katya had never been known for her sympathy, but she now felt herself indignant at this sudden change in the rules. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go! You had your job and people told you what it would take to succeed at it, and you did that thing and then everything was fine. “Why are you telling me this, anyway?”
“They’re going to start doing the audit soon. I haven’t gone through your stories yet, and I don’t think you’re in danger, exactly—I mean, your traffic is very high—but I don’t know, Katya, we’ve talked about this, sometimes it can seem like you’re doing only the quick and easy stories. Like this Connectiv post—I mean, it’s great, but is it really going to move the needle?”
“What do you mean, move the needle?” she said. “And I ran it by you last week—why didn’t you say anything then?”
He ignored the second part of her question. “Like, is it going to get people talking. Is it going to change the way people think about something. Is it going to be something that people are talking about on Twitter all day. Is it going to—”
“Okay, I get it. It seems like you’re really on my case today. Besides, people don’t talk about things on Twitter all day.” She knew she sounded bratty, but this attack was coming out of nowhere.
“You know what I mean. I’m just saying, if there was any time to publish a big story, now would be that time.” Dan’s phone chimed. He took it out of his pocket, unlocked it, and read his screen. He rolled his eyes. “Worst decision of my life was telling my wife it’d be great if she got a job in the same building.” Dan’s wife, Sabrina, worked at TakeOff, three floors above TechScene. Katya had seen her only twice and from a distance; both times she seemed to be in a bad mood. Dan was typing something back to her as he spoke. “Unlike her, I actually have work to do during the day, I can’t just, like, drop everything because the nanny’s not feeling well. I don’t even know why she’s bothering to ask.”
He read out what he was typing back to her. “‘Super…busy…today…can…you…handle.’” He put his phone in his pocket. “Let’s go, just in case she comes out while we’re here. She’s been on my back lately about the smoking.” Katya followed him wordlessly inside. Marriage seemed like a real bummer sometimes.
3
Just Breathe
SABRINA BLUM WAS TIRED. Their three-year-old, Amelia, had, God knows why, toddled into their room at five thirty a.m., even though she’d been consistently sleeping until six thirty, which was at least tolerable. But this morning she wouldn’t stop whining about wanting to watch “toys,” which meant the videos on YouTube of people unboxing or unwrapping toys; there was one with a little girl unboxing My Little Ponys and their various accessories that Amelia had watched probably seven hundred times. So even though she and Dan had a rule that Amelia was allowed only an hour of iPad a day, Sabrina got out of bed, retrieved the iPad from the kitchen table, parked Amelia on the couch, and let her watch videos until seven. Then Owen woke up, saw Amelia on the couch with the iPad, and started screaming that it wasn’t fair that Amelia got to watch in the morning when Mommy only let him use the iPad in the afternoon after he’d had his snack. Her response was to stand in the living room of their Park Slope floor-through and let Owen scream until he finally just gave up and plopped down next to Amelia and watched with her until it was time to get ready for school. Dan usually got Owen dressed and made sure he had everything he needed in his backpack, and this morning he even poured Owen and Amelia some Cheerios and milk before giving each of them a kiss on the forehead and leaving on the dot of 7:45. “Have a great day, honey!” she said so forced-cheerfully that he jerked around at the front door and glared at her. The kids didn’t notice, probably because they had started throwing Cheerios at each other. “Asshole,” she muttered under her breath as soon as the door clicked shut.
Sabrina, who was thirty-six, had long ago resigned herself to the idea that marriage was, inevitably, death by a thousand little cuts; the problem was that the cuts—strictly metaphorical, of course—weren’t as little as they used to be. They were more like gashes, deep wounds that required triage and left scars, and she and Dan both had become addicted to them.