breaking into a sprint.
âHold it, please!â
Turning, he glanced over his shoulder and then disappeared into the elevator.
âMotherfucker!â 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.
âCareful,â he murmured, eyes on his phone as he stepped around her, continuing down the hall.
But Jess had reached the boiling point: âAmericano!â
Hesitating only briefly, he turned. His dark hair fell over one eye and he brushed it aside. âIâm sorry?â
âApology not accepted. You took my parking spot.â
âI took yourâ?â
âAnd you didnât hold the elevator,â she said. âIâm running late, you saw me, and you didnât bother to hold the door.â
âI didnât see you.â He let out a short, incredulous laugh. âMaybe you should leave a little earlier next time.â
âWow. You really are an asshole.â
He frowned, studying her. âDo we know each other?â
âAre you kidding?â She pointed to her chest. âTwiggs? Spit in a vial? Entirely average? Any of that ring a bell?â
Comprehension was a weather front that moved across his face. Surprise, recognition, embarrassment.
âIâ¦â His eyes flickered over her and then down the hall as if there might be reinforcements coming at any moment. âYou were⦠completely unrecognizable. I didnât know it was you.â
For the life of her, Jess couldnât figure out if that was a sick burn or a backhanded compliment.
âIâm sorry, I donât recall your name, Ms.â¦?â he asked evenly.
âYouâve never known it.â
And there was the look that delighted herâthe one that said he was barely tolerating the conversation. Breaking eye contact, he finally glanced down at his watch. âYou said something about running late?â
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 couplesâ party. Minus the wine. If Nana or Pops wasnât with her, Jess was made intensely aware that the other parents had no idea how to interact with a single mom. The longest conversation sheâd had with someone there had been at the first-grade holiday recital when a mom had asked if Jessâs husband was going to be sitting in the empty seat next to her. When sheâd said, âNo husband, free chair,â the other woman smiled awkwardly for a few beats before rolling on breathlessly for five minutes about how sorry she was that she didnât 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 wouldnât have to small-talk. She wasnât sure sheâd be able to do that tonight; every meeting sheâd 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-pickingâchoosing which data sets to include in analysis after the study is finished. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to drop outliers: the data isnât collected correctly, etc. But if a data point affects both results and assumptions, it must be included. And just as Jess suspected, Jennings Grocery didnât just want to exclude a few data points in the set they sent her; they wanted to eliminate enormous territoriesentirely in