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time and stop thinking about the dog , she told herself.
    “So what’s the story with the divorce?” asked Jack. After a couple of drinks, he finally seemed to be getting tipsy, leaning in toward her over the table, his grin going lopsided.
    “Is it the usual ‘they grew apart,’ or did something juicy happen?”
    “I bet it’s juicy,” laughed Houston. “I think that’s the kind of divorce people go to Vegas to celebrate.”
    Kirsten nodded.
    Tell them everything and just don’t put your name on it , she thought. She poked at the ice in her drink with the cocktail straw, then looked at Houston and Jack.
    Make it dramatic, she thought.
    “His name is Bruce,” she began, as if she’d said It was a dark and stormy night . “And Bruce is a narcissist.”
    “Everyone says that about their exes,” Houston said.
    Kirsten simply held up one finger, and both men hushed.
    “This time it was true,” she said. “He married my friend, uh, Katie , when she was kind of young, twenty-four, and he was thirty-one, because he thought he’d have an easier time controlling a young woman. And at first, he did.”
    You just named your fake self after the dog? she thought. Great.
    Both men were listening intently, one on either side of Kirsten.
    “When they got married, she thought they were going to have one of those relationships of equals, and they were both going to have careers and dreams and hopes and they were going to support each other, that kind of thing. But about a year in, Bruce has this sudden revelation—” Kirsten made air quotes around the word sudden , “that he wanted to have a bunch of kids, and thought that Katie should quit her job,   stay at home, and raise them all.”
    She took another sip.
    “Which is totally fine and great. Being a stay-at-home parent looks fucking hard . I mean, hell, I’m not doing it, you know? But Katie had been really clear with Bruce, that she wanted a career — Katie’s a graphic designer — and that she wanted to wait to have kids. Oh, and she only wanted one or two.”
    “This is headin’ for a crash,” said Jack.
    Houston shot the other man a well, duh look, and Kirsten started giggling.
    “Tell us more, Captain Obvious,” she said to Jack.
    He held up his hands in front of him, grinning.
    “Okay, okay,” he said. “You’re here for a divorce party, of course it’s not gonna work out.”
    “This is where the narcissism thing comes into play,” said Katie. “Bruce pretty much thinks that he shits rainbows, so he’s furious that his wife would dare have a different opinion about how she wants her life to go, like how could a woman in her twenties not want to throw everything aside and just have kids, right there and then? Anyway,” Kirsten said, taking another drink, draining the whiskey sour from the ice cubes, “they’re not getting along too well now. He tries to sweet talk her out of taking birth control, refuses to wear rubbers, that kind of thing. She still doesn’t want to admit that things might be on the rocks, so she goes and gets an IUD without telling him, so she doesn’t have to worry about that stuff.”
    Houston whistled.
    “Yeah, that was a low point,” Kirsten said. “She felt pretty bad about it, I think, but she didn’t really know what else to do. Anyway, after a while, he lays off the baby thing a little but he starts getting weird and controlling around the house. Like insisting that she makes dinner, or wears dresses, or does her hair a certain way. Stupid, little things like that, but all the time .”
    She shook the glass into her mouth again, starting to feel her hands tremble a little. Somehow, pretending that this had all happened to someone else, she was less angry about it than usual. A little more able to see that maybe, maybe , she wasn’t a failure and it wasn’t her fault.
    “Through all this, she wants to stay married. Tries to get him to go to counseling, and he refuses — after all, Bruce thinks Bruce is