Free Mercury in Retrograde by Paula Froelich

sheepish. “It’s Bill. He and Evya are having problems and I’m just trying to help them.”
    â€œWhat?” Dana asked, incredulous. “Crab girl? Bill is still with her? She cost us five hundred dollars in cleaning bills—and you’re trying to help them stay together? You should help him by sending her a ticket back to Belarus!”
    â€œYou’re right, babe, I’m sorry,” Noah said and turned his BlackBerry off.
    A week later, on a Thursday evening, Dana was putting onher mascara in the hall mirror in preparation for meeting Sally and some other friends at the Soho House to celebrate Sally’s birthday and asked Noah if he wanted to come.
    â€œI have to take a client out to dinner,” he said. “See you at home later?” He kissed her on the cheek on her way out.
    As she was walking to the corner of Seventy-fifth and Columbus to catch a cab downtown, Dana realized she’d forgotten the cupcakes she had bought Sally at the new Magnolia Bakery on Columbus and Seventieth. She was about a block away from her house nearing the corner of Seventy-fourth and Amsterdam, by the concrete playground, when she saw Noah, hunkered down against the wind in his shearling coat, a black scarf, and matching cashmere hat thirty feet in front of her.
    I bet he’s coming to meet me. God, he’s great, Dana thought.
    She was about to run up behind him and playfully slap his butt when Noah walked up to a tall, striking, black-haired model type waiting by the bus stop, put his arms around her, and, whispering, “Evya…” he gave the woman a long, deep kiss.
    It turned out Noah had not been helping Bill, but rather, Evya—right into bed.
    Dana stood there, frozen, feeling the blood rush from her face. She couldn’t move for a good two minutes, long enough to watch Noah and Evya walk off, hand in hand, disappearing down West Seventy-fourth. When they were out of sight, Dana finally regained her senses enough to move and ran home sobbing across the playground. She called Sally—who made some excuses to her other friends at the Soho House, leaving a three-quarters-full bottle of wine, and came right over.
    Noah didn’t pick up the phone the twenty times Dana, imbued with the courage and hysteria that only a half bottle of Jack Daniels can give, tried calling. So, in a rage, she packed up all of his clothes, and Sally helped her carry them down thestairs to the vestibule by the trash on the first floor.
    Sally was still there three hours later with a red, puffy-eyed and sniffling Dana when, from the window, they spied Noah coming back from his “business dinner.” The friends sat on plastic garbage bags on the sofa (just in case Evya’s crabs were back now that Noah was officially having an affair with her), waiting to confront him.
    But Noah never came up, nor did he call. In the morning Dana went downstairs and saw that his bags were gone.
    â€œHe treated your two-year marriage like he’d treat a two-week hookup,” Sally said months later. “What a sociopath.”
    LIBRA:
    Your extravagance has led to unwanted attention, and the consequences will be severe.
    â€œWhat are you guys doing out here?” Lena said, dropping the knife onto a patio chair. “You scared the hell out of me! I was about to call the cops.”
    â€œDon’t talk to your mother that way,” her father, dressed in his usual navy suit and tie, said, trudging up the steps with her mother and striding past Lipstick into the kitchen. “We were just checking on our investment.”
    â€œWhat?” Lipstick asked, coming in from the cold and locking the door behind her. “Your investment?”
    â€œThe apartment. It’s ours, you know. We paid for it, and my name is on the deed, not yours.”
    â€œOh, right,” Lipstick sighed, rolling her eyes. Every couple of years her father got this way. Martin Lippencrass, the “King