Pammy doesn’t believe in outmoded social mundanities like “Hello.” Instead, she started right in with, “You’re at Selwick Hall, aren’t you!”

“Pammy! Hi! How are you?” I have the social mundanities on autopilot. They just come out, whether I mean them to or not. “It’s me, Eloise.”

Pammy made a noise that would have sounded suspiciously like “duh!” if “duh” hadn’t gone out several years ago. Pammy is nothing if not au courant. “Who else would be calling from your mobile?”

“Good point,” I admitted.

“So?” piped Pammy. “How is it? Which flavor is he?”

As I so often do with Pammy, I removed the phone from my ear, looked at it, and put it back. It never helps. “Huh?” I said.

“Which flavor ice cream is he? It’s the latest thing. You compare every man you know to his corresponding ice-cream flavor. Vanilla is your standard City bloke, presentable, but bland. Vanilla bean has a bit more potential, but it’s still no chocolate chip. . . . You get the idea.”

Hmm. I decided to try this out. “What’s moose tracks?”

Pammy answered without missing a beat. “Vaguely outdoorsy, from the Midwest in the States or the Midlands here, on the shaggy side.”

“Strawberry?” I asked.

“Super WASP-y, always wears pink Brooks Brothers shirts, on the borderline of gay.”

“Sorbet?”

“Definitely gay. So what’s Colin?”

“Mint chip,” I said, without even having to think about it. Cool on the outside, but with all sorts of dark depths. “Listen, Pams, do you ever remember Serena saying anything about what Colin does for a living?”

“Something in the City,” Pammy said promptly. In the background I could hear the whirr of an espresso machine. It takes a lot of coffee to maintain that level of constant exuberance.

“That’s what he used to do. Any idea what he does now?”

There was a long, happy exhalation of steam in the background as the espresso maker did its thing. “Shouldn’t you be asking him?”

“It seems kind of tacky,” I hedged. “And I feel like I should know already.” At least that much was true.

“Hmm.”

I could hear Pammy thinking — and texting on one of her three other phones, but I chose to ignore that bit. Pammy texts even in her sleep; her phones are so much a part of her fingers that they have no impact on her other activities or on her brain.

“I have this friend” — Uh-oh. Pammy always had these friends. Which was this one going to be? The astrologist? The feng shui expert? The Color-Me-Beautiful woman? — “who has an agency called Man-Trackers.”

“Man-Trackers,” I repeated flatly. I had an image of Xena: Warrior Princess stalking her man through the streets of London’s financial district. It was straight out of Monty Python. Did they bring back scalps, or just suit jackets?

“They run check-ups on new boyfriends, you know, like due diligence, making sure they are what they said and all that.”

“Due diligence?”

“Well, just think about it, Ellie,” Pammy said, as though it were all perfectly reasonable and I just a little bit slow, “you wouldn’t buy a flat or a business without first having it professionally checked out, so why expend less care on picking out a man? It never hurts to do your home-work.”

“That’s not homework — that’s stalking.”

“Don’t be silly, sweetie. Stalking is when you do it yourself.”

I love Pammy, I do. Most of the time. “I think I’ll hold off on the, er, Man-Trackers for a bit.”

“It’s your choice.” A bad choice, her tone said. I could practically hear her shrug. “But I’ll just shoot you their number, anyway, yah?”

“Yah,” I echoed absently. “I mean, yes.”

Easier to give in to Pammy than to argue with her. Disagreement is a form of discourse she does not understand. Not that I ever, ever intended to use this “Man-Tracking” madness. What in the hell had happened to romance? To trust?

“You don’t use them, do you?” I demanded incredulously.

It was hard to believe it, even of Pammy. Especially of Pammy, who went through enough men per year to form her own private army. I didn’t like to think what the bill for that would be if she was having each one checked out individually. Sufficient to put a down payment on a London flat, no doubt. Fortunately, Pammy had a very large trust fund from a very guilty father.

“Of course! If they were publicly traded, I would buy stock.”

That answered that, then.

“They’re really great,” said Pammy seriously. “They check out his financial records, whether he pays his bills promptly, his taxes, his properties, his exes. Total full service.”

“Great,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. At least, nothing positive. What next, going through their garbage to see if there were unexplained used condoms? That wasn’t the way it was supposed to work. You were supposed to grow to know someone through mutual interactions, communicating with them, not with some bizarre surveillance agency about them. What had happened to trust, for crying out loud?

I was a fine one to talk about trust. There I was scrounging around in Colin’s desk drawers in the middle of the night. How was that any different?

Because it wasn’t systematic, I told myself. Because I’d felt guilty doing it. Because I wasn’t paying someone else to do it.

“It’s a jungle out there,” Pammy said seriously. “You have to protect yourself, Eloise.”

She didn’t know the half of it. What would she say if I told her that I suspected Colin was a gun-toting, license-to-kill-carrying secret agent? Not much, actually. That wasn’t the sort of thing Pammy worried about.

Pammy’s voice was still streaming through the little holes in my mobile. “I mean, you’d be surprised by how many men say they’re single but really aren’t — and you can’t just tell by looking for a tan line on their ring fingers! And then there are a lot of them who lie about their financials, or who’ve cheated on their ex-wives, or — ”

I have to admit, I tuned out somewhere after ex-wives. I just didn’t want to know. Dating was hard enough. Why create more things to stress about? I was about to say, You don’t seriously worry about all these things, do you? when I remembered: Of course she did.

Pammy doesn’t just come from a broken home; she comes from broken homes, plural. In fact, her mother had practically made a career out of it, trading up husbands. Some of the trading had been done of her own accord. Husband One, a reasonably successful attorney, had been ditched for Pammy’s father, a wildly successful King of the Universe, Bonfire of the Vanities investment-banker type. Some of the trading had been thrust upon her. After Husband Two did his own trading up, Pammy’s mother had moved on to his English equivalent, Husband Three. I was still unclear as to what had happened with Husband Three, but Pammy’s mother had come out of it with a choice town house in London, and a “cottage” in Dorset with fifteen bedrooms and its own tennis courts. The Palm Beach house was courtesy of Pammy’s father, as were the various Monets and Renoirs that now decorated the London and Dorset properties.

It’s not like Pammy went around talking about it — other than in the most matter-of-fact of ways — and she had never, to my knowledge, sought psychological counseling, or ever, in any way, given anyone to believe that she was anything but perfectly well-adjusted. Mildly crazy, but perfectly well-adjusted. But sometimes even perfectly well-adjusted can cover a multitude of scars.

Maybe it wasn’t fair to call them scars. Call it a different worldview, then. Talking with Pammy could be like one of those Twilight Zone episodes where you get a peep into a universe that operates on laws entirely differently from your own. Visiting Pammy-land was like traveling through a totally foreign country, one where they didn’t take Visa and none of my own expectations applied. Which was funny, since we’d grown up together. We’d gone to the same private school together from kindergarten till her mother whisked her off to England in tenth grade, the same ballet classes, the same skating lessons, the same hideous middle school dances; but our home situations were different enough that we might as well have hailed from different planets.

It was true: I did take for granted having two parents who had met, fallen in love, married — and stayed married. Sure, they’d had their moments, but for the most part they were a united front, aligned against the world, two heads with the same brain, and on and on. My sister, Jillian, and I always joked that telling one something was tantamount to telling the other because after thirty years of marriage, information went back and forth between the two of them like some Discovery Channel program on osmosis.

Unlike Pammy’s mother, who had only learned that her second husband — Pammy’s father — was cheating on her when she came home from a trip to a spa in Arizona and found that all her clothes had been cleaned out of the closet and a younger model installed in her bed. When I say younger model, I mean that literally. Her replacement had been a runway model, all silky hair and exposed hipbones. The resulting divorce had been brutal and very, very bitter.

Pammy had her own reasons for her preoccupations.

It did say something about Pammy that she had always managed to stay on decent terms with her father. She handled him with the same casual insouciance with which she dealt with everything else in her life, never indicating by word or deed that she resented what he had done to her mother — but she had never had a boyfriend who had lasted more than three months. Most got the boot in fewer than two. Two weeks, that was.