Whisper Network

The first-person plural narrator explores women’s need to constantly search for the perfect man or work on making the man they have into one.

Ardie, freshly divorced from her cheating husband, Tony, scrolls through an online dating site. She sees a promising message from a pursuer, but is disheartened when she looks up the acronyms at the bottom of the message: The person is fixated on larger women and doesn’t care about Ardie as a person. When Ardie first came to Truviv, she put more effort into her appearance. Now, the idea of dating again makes her tired. Ardie wishes she had a date to bring to her son Michael’s upcoming birthday party. Tony is bringing his new wife Braylee, who is annoyingly hard to trash-talk.

Katherine and Ames come in and talk about the bar they went to the night before. He asks Katherine to come to his office and half-jokes that she shouldn’t believe any bad things Ardie might say about him. Ardie invites Katherine to Michael’s birthday party, wanting to “lay claim to her before Ames did” (56).

The chapter ends with a deposition transcript, in which Ardie tells Ms. Sharpe that she knew Katherine for a month before the incident and believed they were becoming friends.