Annie had worried a little, when she moved in, that she needed to start looking for another place to live immediately. But in the weeks since she'd come to Boston (well, not Boston, Cambridge) (well, not Cambridge, Somerville) Vicki had warmed to her considerably, a result Annie attributed to several factors working in concert.

Factor one: Cleanliness. Vicki was a stickler for cleanliness whose enthusiasm for disinfectant and lack of grime approached Annie's own. Annie had gotten used to being the de facto cleaning lady at her old apartment; living with Vicki made for a refreshing change. Yes, Abed and Troy and later Britta would all tidy up, with varying degrees of foot-dragging and passive-aggression, when she'd pressed them, but Vicki actually cleaned up after herself without being asked and seemed just as pleased that Annie did the same. Vicki's standard for what constituted 'clean' was a little lower than Annie's, but not so much so as to lead to problems.

Factor two: Friendliness. Annie Edison was a bright ray of sunshine, dammit, and she wasn't going to let a bad first impression get the better of her, even if it was a first impression that Vicki had gotten of her gradually over a six-year period. It's not like Vicki had ever actively hated Annie; she'd only ever hated the study group in general and Pierce in particular. Annie had been splash-damage; she hadn't even remembered Annie's name. So Annie was bound and determined to laugh at Vicki's jokes, cluck her tongue sympathetically at Vicki's complaints, marvel at Vicki's triumphs, and pretend to enjoy whatever Vicki's favorite television was. That last strategy had been especially key with Abed, and she was confident she could adapt it here. Also, most television was pretty okay if you gave it a chance; it had taken the better part of a year but eventually she'd enjoyed Inspector Spacetime.

Factor three: Gossip. For someone who claimed to have only a distant disdain for the Greendale Seven (aka the the Spanish study group, aka the Anthropology study group, aka the Biology study group, aka the History study group, aka the Save Greendale Committee, aka the Activities Committee, aka the Nipple-Dippers), Vicki never tired of hearing stories about what idiots they'd been. Annie couched her badmouthing of her friends in only the most affectionate of terms, but Vicki was insatiable. She especially enjoyed any story that featured Pierce suffering, which to be fair was a decent number of them. She also staunchly agreed with Annie that Jeff Winger was a real piece of work — she'd always thought so, she'd said, but especially now that she had the inside scoop.

Factor four: Patience.

"Settle an argument," Vicki demanded as soon as Annie came home one day. "Which of these is better?" She pointed to two pound cakes on the kitchen counter.

"Uh, okay," Annie said cautiously as she approached the cakes. "Am I judging based on appearance, smell, taste, nutritional content, or… do you have nutritional information?"

Vicki shook her head. "One of them is the way we make pound cake now. The other is the way my idiot cousin wants to start making it."

Annie tried to deflect. "I'm really not a pound cake person…"

"Ugh! Of course you're a tiny little princess who doesn't eat cake, we all get it!" snapped Vicki. "One bite of each won't kill you. Come on."

"You know, speaking of baking, I wanted to ask you about the stuff in the fridge." Annie glanced at Vicki, then back at the cakes, trying to guess which was the one Vicki wanted her to endorse. "You know the six boxes of muffins in there?"

"They're not muffins, they're chuffins. What about them?" Vicki stood, arms folded, ready to judge Annie's complaints as meaningless.

"Well, they take up a lot of space."

"It's not like there's anything else in there."

"That's true," Annie said, "but only because I haven't bought any groceries because there isn't any space. Maybe the chuffins could be in a refrigerator at the bakery, or…?"

Vicki scoffed. "Yeah, no. There's no room over there — have you even been? It's like the size of a closet… c'mon. Try the cake." She thrust a fork in Annie's direction, then stared at Annie as she reluctantly ate one bite of each pound cake. "Well?"

Annie shrugged helplessly. "Well, um. One is kind of lemony and one isn't."

Vicki waited for her to provide more of an opinion. "And?"

Just then the toilet flushed. Annie turned, confused. "Who's in the bathroom?"

"My stupid cousin," said Vicki. "You remember, from Greendale?"

"You had a cousin?"

"Uh, yeah," Vicki said in a duh sort of way. "You must have seen us together."

"Okay."

"Plus we look a lot alike."

"I don't…" Annie trailed off as the woman in the bathroom came into the kitchen. "Quendra?"

The blonde smiled, as though it brought her pleasure to hear her own name. "Hi? You must be Vicki's new roommate?"

"Annie's from Greendale, too," Vicki announced.

"Do you not remember me?" Annie asked, surprised. "We…" She tried to remember an appropriate occasion. "My friend Jeff tried to get you into our Anthropology study group sophomore year?"

"Um…" Quendra wrinkled her nose, concentrating. "Oh!" she cried, her face lighting up. "You're his girlfriend he wanted to make jealous!"

Annie let out a nervous laugh. "What? No! I'm not — wasn't… did he say that? Is that what he said? Did he say that? Did he say he wanted to make me jealous?" She took a deep breath and tried to focus on the matter at hand. It was years ago and he was sleeping with Britta at the time and he wouldn't give you a straight answer then either so what do you care? "Did he?"

"I dunno, it was years ago… wow!" Quendra's response to Annie was one of dull surprise. "So how have you been? Are you and Jeb still together?"

"Jeff," Vicki said. "And she's weird about it. Says they weren't together."

Quendra tried to make a wow, that's so interesting noise but it came out as a wow, I'm pretending that I care noise.

"Okay, well, first of all, Jeff and I…" Annie screwed her eyes shut and shook her head. "Wait. Back it up. You're cousins?"

"Uh, yeah," Vicki said as if it were obvious. "We look basically identical."

Annie looked at Vicki, then at Quendra, and then back to Vicki. "Absolutely."

"Our great-aunt Myrtle died and left us each half of her business," Quendra said. "So we moved out here from Greendale. I lived here for the first few months." She gestured vaguely around the apartment. "But Vicki's terrible and I couldn't stand living with her for one single second longer, I mean she is awful and I can barely handle working with her also we're kind of running the bakery into the ground."

"Shut up, Quendra," muttered Vicki.

"Oh, come on, it's Annie!" cried Quendra. "I remember you now!" she told Annie. "You were always playing crazy games with your hot boyfriend and your weird roommates —"

"He wasn't my boyfriend," Annie protested weakly. "Is that really how people outside the study group saw us?" No wonder I went on four dates in six years.

"Let's get the subject shifted off of your problems and back onto our much more interesting problems," suggested Vicki. "Pick a pound cake."

"Ooh, yeah," said Quendra.

"I don't… this one is lemony, and this one isn't." Annie pointed at each cake in turn. "Which one is better depends on what you're feeling up for, you know?"

"Yeah, yeah," grumbled Vicki. "But which one are you feeling up for, right now? And don't say neither because you don't like cake. Everybody likes cake, you're lying if you say you don't like cake."

"She could have an allergy," pointed out Quendra.

"She doesn't, though," Vicki said confidently. "You don't, do you? Lactose and gluten and stuff, those are all cool, right?"

"Yes! No! I mean…" Annie flailed about for an escape. "Did I ever tell you about the time Pierce probably broke a frozen yogurt machine at the mall?"

"Yeah, it wasn't actually much of a story."

Annie gave up. "If I had to pick one I'd pick the not-lemony one. Which is not to say the lemon-flavored cake isn't good. It's just as good! Better, maybe! Or not! It's really close. I just don't care for the lemon as much…"

"Hah!" Vicki waved her finger in Quendra's face. "I told you! Lemon is for losers!"

"Aw, man," mumbled Quendra.

"I'm just going to come right out and ask," Jeff said. "Does the name Pierce Hawthorne mean anything to you?" He sat in Mark's office, leaning back and sipping coffee.

Mark had his feet up on his own desk, which was a little precarious, but he liked the way it made him feel cool, he said. "Pierce Hawthorne? Hawthorne Wipes, Hawthorne Napkins, Hawthorne Paper Products?"

Jeff nodded. "That's him."

"Why do you ask?"

"I used to take classes at the community college with him."

"Not an answer to my question, Tango. Why are you suddenly all up on school chums?"

Jeff considered several possible answers before replying. "I really need something to distract me from my own head right now, and the Schmidt case isn't cutting it."

"Because of Annie?" Mark asked sympathetically. In a moment of weakness — or rather, several moments of alcohol-lubricated weakness over the course of weeks — Jeff had confided in Mark about his ultimate reason for leaving Greendale.

"No, I just…" Jeff sighed. Mark was a lot of things but 'willing to let a subject drop' wasn't one of them. "Work with me."

"All right, all right… you know my view on it."

"Pierce Hawthorne," Jeff said firmly. "Did he ever hire you, or anyone at the firm, or…?"

"I don't think so, chief," Mark said. "For one thing, he's dead. I remember Will flew to Denver to handle his bequest."

"Right, so, William Stone worked for him, then."

Mark shook his head. "Will used to do trusts and estates at Marlon Finch. As I recall — you'd have to ask him to be sure — he assisted on the Hawthorne will seven, eight years back, when you and I were still associates. There was some kind of snafu at Marlon Finch and even though he didn't work there any more, he ended up executing the estate."

"Some kind of snafu? What kind of snafu would require him to go back to it like that?"

"I dunno, boss, I'm not an estate lawyer." Mark shrugged. "Again, what's this all about?"

"I met Stone at Pierce's bequest," Jeff explained. He figured if he could trust anyone, it was Mark. "We were… kind of friends. Pierce and me, I mean. Then in his will he called me gay and left me a bottle of single-malt." Jeff made a sour face. "He had messages for everybody in our old study group, because Pierce always had to get in the last word. Then afterwards we went out for drinks and Stone got falling-down drunk and claimed Pierce had died masturbating to death."

"Masturbating to death?" Mark repeated.

"There was also this whole thing with frozen sperm, it's not important." Jeff waved it off. "But now I find out that he recruited you to come out here, and now I'm out here, and the story of how Pierce died sounds kind of absurd…"

"I'm sorry, what are you suggesting?" Mark asked. "Because it sounds like you're suggesting something illegal."

"What if… I'm just laying this out there… what if Pierce faked his death?"

"If he faked his death would he pick such a ridiculous cause of death?" Mark mulled it over. "If I faked my death and I could pick any cause, if it didn't have to be an accident at sea where my body wasn't recovered… I'd go with rescuing orphans from a burning parochial school, or stepping in front of a bullet meant for Judi Dench, or… anything more heroic than masturbating to death."

"Ah-ah-ah!" Jeff raised a finger and grinned. "But isn't that what makes it the perfect cover story?"

"Well…" Mark had an expression his face Jeff recognized as I'm way too nice to tell you I think you're being crazy. "I guess you knew Hawthorne better than I did," he allowed, "but it sounds a little far-fetched."

"Hmmph."

"Of course, any story that involves someone faking their death is going to sound far-fetched," Mark said thoughtfully. "That's something that just doesn't happen outside bad crime dramas… well, Ken Kesey tried to fake his death. Didn't work out for him. Is your friend smarter than Ken Kesey?"

"I think Pierce claimed to have beaten Ken Kesey in a drinking contest once…" Jeff sighed. "I know, I know it sounds crazy. Stone's hiding something from me, though, I'm sure of it."

"Well, talk to him about it," Mark suggested. "I mean, you don't need me to. Do you?" His face lit up suddenly. "I could, if you want. We could arrange a dinner party with a surprise ambush interview —"

"That's all right," Jeff assured him. "I'll talk to him. You're right; I can just ask him. He probably thinks it's weird that I haven't."

"On another subject," Mark said, "have you given any more consideration to Eleanor's offer?"

"I really don't need to be set up with anyone," Jeff said with a scowl. "Annie — I mean, it's not a priority right now, and if it was, I wouldn't need to be set up."

"You can't keep mooning over Annie Edison forever," Mark chided him. "At least, not if you aren't going to head down to DC and visit her."

Jeff scoffed. "I can't —"

"Amtrak runs a train from Boston to DC close to twenty times a day," Mark declared. "You leave South Station at 9:30 on Friday night, you're in DC before seven o'clock Saturday morning. Coming back you could take the Acela up Sunday afternoon, leave at four and get in before midnight."

Jeff stared at him for a moment.

"Just looking out for you, buddy," Mark said. "Also I found her on Facebook but everything's locked down." He pointed to his computer screen, but Jeff refused to turn his head. "Annie Edison, 24/F. Riverside High School class of 2009. Greendale Community College, blah blah blah. FBI. Location not given but it's definitely her. I could maybe get in if we had a friend in common — which of your friends is most likely to accept a random stranger's friend request?"

"I'm not too nice to tell you I think you're being crazy," Jeff said slowly.

"This wouldn't be necessary if you hadn't burned your social media presence to the ground in what someone who didn't care as much about your feelings as me might call a tantrum." Mark smiled. "Tango, I've known you for many years. There was an interruption, yes, but I'm impressed with the personal growth you've exhibited since then. And you have been off your feed about this girl for a long, long time."

"I haven't…" Jeff stopped, because he knew it was pointless. "Fine. I know."

"You've got to either call up this woman or else move on and let Eleanor introduce you to her spin class instructor." Mark tented his fingers. "She's probably moving on. Annie, not the spin instructor. Although, her too, eventually."

"Cash, I want her to move on. I hope she is." You don't mean that, part of Jeff insisted. You want her to pine for you the way you're pining for her. "I just want her to be happy."

"Good morning, Annie!" said the guy whose name Annie didn't know. He greeted her almost every morning on the way to work, when she came into Beans 'n Things, the coffee shop by her apartment. This was less creepy than it might have been: she and the guy had gotten into an involved conversation about the best sitcoms on Netflix, on one of her first days in Somerville. She'd mentioned her name at some point during that discussion and she was absolutely one hundred percent certain he'd given his, but she couldn't for the life of her remember it. He was sitting in the front window of the coffee shop with a laptop, nearly every morning. He was definitely working, there were spreadsheets on the screen of the laptop whenever she peeked — but he worked from home, apparently. Home meaning the coffee shop. It was possible he lived at the coffee shop.

"Good morning… buckaroo," Annie responded. Every morning she hoped she'd remember his name, or else that someone else would ask his name, or that he'd order something and give his name to the barista, or something so that she didn't have to ask his name. She'd taken to addressing him with a different vaguely uncool nickname each time, which hopefully made her seem like a moderately pathetically uncool girl instead of a really rude girl. It was way too late to ask him.

"Small americano, extra shot?" the barista — whose name was Jeanne, Annie knew that one — asked her.

She nodded absently, and paid. The pittance she was paid meant that a nice cup of coffee in the morning was basically the only luxury she could afford. "So, what's the good word?" she asked the guy whose name she didn't know.

The guy whose name she didn't know shrugged. "Unrest in the middle east, concern over climate change, the current crop of fall comedies are universally terrible. The usual. You?"

"My roommate has filled our fridge with chuffins," Annie confided.

"What's a chuffin?" the guy whose name Annie didn't know asked.

"I don't know. It looks like a muffin. There's six dozen of them in the fridge for some reason."

The guy whose name Annie didn't know frowned. "That's a lot… are they on an all-chuffin diet?"

"No." Annie frowned. "At least I don't think so."

"Are they any good? Did you try one?"

Annie shook her head no. "I'm on real thin ice with my roommate; she used to really hate this group that I was part of…"

"Let me guess: some kind of right-wing activist group," the guy whose name Annie didn't know said. "Probably anti-birth-control, because anti-abortion is too moderate for you."

Annie chuckled. "Yes, exactly."

"I was trying to be funny," the guy whose name Annie didn't know said, his tone suddenly turned serious.

"I got that."

"You're a woman in your twenties, you're in Somerville — it's a safe bet you fall on the left side of the spectrum."

"Uh huh."

"Hence the irony."

"You know, you explaining the joke makes it so much funnier…"

"Really?" the guy whose name Annie didn't know sounded skeptical. "I've been told the opposite."

"Those people are fools," Annie assured him.

"Small americano, extra shot," Jeanne the barista announced.

"See you, Annie," the cute guy whose name Annie didn't know who flirted with her every morning said, as she left the coffee shop.

"See you!" You see that? Annie told herself. A cute guy — a different cute guy — a cute guy who isn't Jeff Winger — being cute at you. That's good. That's a thing you should like.

It's like Inspector Spacetime. Act like you like it until you like it. This is moving on.