“Hold it, please!”

Turning, he glanced over his shoulder and then disappeared into the elevator.

“Motherfucker!” Jess mumbled.

Jennings Grocery headquarters was only three floors up, so instead of waiting, she took the stairs. Two at a time. Visibly out of breath when she jogged from the stairwell into the hallway, Jess immediately collided with a brick wall of a man. For the record, he smelled amazing. It was infuriating.

“Careful,” he murmured, eyes on his phone as he stepped around her, continuing down the hall.

But Jess had reached the boiling point: “Americano!”

Hesitating only briefly, he turned. His dark hair fell over one eye and he brushed it aside. “I’m sorry?”

“Apology not accepted. You took my parking spot.”

“I took your—?”

“And you didn’t hold the elevator,” she said. “I’m running late, you saw me, and you didn’t bother to hold the door.”

“I didn’t see you.” He let out a short, incredulous laugh. “Maybe you should leave a little earlier next time.”

“Wow. You really are an asshole.”

He frowned, studying her. “Do we know each other?”

“Are you kidding?” She pointed to her chest. “Twiggs? Spit in a vial? Entirely average? Any of that ring a bell?”

Comprehension was a weather front that moved across his face. Surprise, recognition, embarrassment.

“I …” His eyes flickered over her and then down the hall as if there might be reinforcements coming at any moment. “You were … completely unrecognizable. I didn’t know it was you.”

For the life of her, Jess couldn’t figure out if that was a sick burn or a backhanded compliment.

“I’m sorry, I don’t recall your name, Ms. … ?” he asked evenly.

“You’ve never known it.”

And there was the look that delighted her—the one that said he was barely tolerating the conversation. Breaking eye contact, he finally glanced down at his watch. “You said something about running late?”

Shit!

Jess pushed past him, jogging ten feet down the hall to Suite 303, the offices of Jennings Grocery.

THIRTY-ONE PERCENT OF California households are run by single parents, but Jess would never have guessed that from the people streaming into the Alice Birney Elementary Science-Art Fair meeting. Being a solo parent at a school event was like being a single person at a couples’ party. Minus the wine. If Nana or Pops wasn’t with her, Jess was made intensely aware that the other parents had no idea how to interact with a single mom. The longest conversation she’d had with someone there had been at the first-grade holiday recital when a mom had asked if Jess’s husband was going to be sitting in the empty seat next to her. When she’d said, “No husband, free chair,” the other woman smiled awkwardly for a few beats before rolling on breathlessly for five minutes about how sorry she was that she didn’t know any nice single men.

But for the first time at one of these events, she realized as she walked into the hall, Jess was relieved to be alone; she wouldn’t have to small-talk. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to do that tonight; every meeting she’d had today had been a dead end. Well, except the Jennings Grocery meeting. That was a complete disaster.

One of the biggest sins in statistics is cherry-picking—choosing which data sets to include in analysis after the study is finished. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to drop outliers: the data isn’t collected correctly, etc. But if a data point affects both results and assumptions, it must be included. And just as Jess suspected, Jennings Grocery didn’t just want to exclude a few data points in the set they sent her; they wanted to eliminate enormous territories entirely in their report to shareholders, because the numbers didn’t fit their projected sales targets.

She refused—even though she’d spent four months meticulously designing the analysis, writing the code, building the program. During the meeting, the executives had exchanged extended periods of silent eye contact, and eventually shooed Jess out of the room, saying they’d be in touch.

Was it stupid to be so inflexible with her biggest account? She couldn’t shake a sense of panic. If she lost Jennings, she would lose a third of her income for the year. Juno might need braces, and she’d be driving in eight years. What if she wanted to start doing dance competitions? What if she got sick? Nana and Pops weren’t getting any younger, either.

Movement in her peripheral vision pulled her attention, and Jess watched Juno’s second-grade teacher, Mrs. Klein, and the principal, Mr. Walker, come to the front of the room. Mrs. Klein was dressed as some hybrid of a scientist and artist: lab coat, goggles, beret, paint palette. Mr. Walker was dressed as, Jess supposed, a kid: baggy shorts, knee-high socks, and a Padres baseball cap. They sat in chairs facing the assembled parents.

The principal-child crossed his arms and pouted dramatically, and the room fell to a hush. “I don’t even get what a science-art fair is. Do I have to do it?”

“You don’t have to do the science-art fair,” Mrs. Klein said, hamming it up for the crowd, “you GET to do the science-art fair!”

The room rippled with polite laughter, and the rest of the second-grade team passed out handouts with information as the little play went on. Jess scanned the stapled pages, skimming instructions for helping the children find an art project that was based in some area of science: plant life, animal life, engineering, chemistry. A papier-mâché plant with various structures labeled. A painting of a dog skeleton. A house made out of Popsicle sticks. It was one of the things that Jess loved about this little school—the creative curriculum, the emphasis on integrated learning—but with the murmuring voices rising from the crowd, she was pulled out of her little bubble. In the seats all around her, heads came together in excited conversation. Husband-and-wife teams brainstormed fun projects for their kids, and the dread in Jess’s stomach curdled with loneliness. She was flanked by an empty seat on each side, a little buffer zone to protect the other parents from the infection of singlehood.

Mood still low despite—she had to admit—some pretty solid jokes from Mr. Walker and Mrs. Klein, Jess practically crawled across the parking lot. Her car was parked next to a pearl-white Porsche that made her red 2008 Corolla look like an old roller skate missing its mate. Jess couldn’t feel ashamed of the clunker, though; this car had driven her home from the maternity ward and then to her college graduation only a month later. It took them on various outings for Try Something New Sundays and road trips to Disneyland and—