Purity

Too Much Information

Ordinarily, Leila looked forward to traveling on assignment. She was never more of a professional, never more defensibly excused from her caretaking duties in Denver, than when she was locked in a hotel room with her green-tea bags, her anonymized Wi-Fi connection, her two colors of ballpoint, her Ambien stash. But from the moment she arrived in Amarillo, on a commuter jet from Denver, something felt different. It was as if she didn’t even want to be in Amarillo. The normally pleasurable economies of her competence, the preferred-customer getaway from the rental-car lot, the optimal route she took to the small house of Janelle Flayner, the swiftness with which she secured Flayner’s trust and got her talking, weren’t pleasurable. Late in the afternoon, she stopped at a Toot’n Totum convenience mart and bought a chef salad in a polyethylene box. In her hotel room, which a recent occupant had smoked in, she uncapped the cup of salad dressing and felt nailed by the product’s targeting of her demographic: the solitary 50+ female looking for something sensible to eat. It occurred to her that what she was feeling wasn’t generic loneliness. She had a new research assistant, Pip Tyler, and she was wishing she could have brought the girl along.

With a little ache in her throat, for which only work was a remedy, she set out after dinner to meet the former girlfriend of Cody Flayner. She left her room lights burning and the privacy card on her doorknob. Outside, the sky was cloudless and nicked with random dull stars, their contextualizing constellations obscured by light and dust pollution. The Texas Panhandle was in year five of a drought that might soon be upgraded to permanent climate change. Instead of April snowmelt, dust.

While she drove, she Bluetoothed her phone into the car stereo and listened uncomfortably to her interview of Cody Flayner’s ex-wife. She considered herself a good-hearted person, an empathetic listener, but in playback she could hear herself manipulating.

Helou — what kind of last name is that?

It’s Lebanese … Christian. I grew up in San Antonio.

You know, I was just sitting here thinking you sound Texan.

But Leila no longer sounded Texan, except when she was interviewing Texans.

Layla, if you don’t mind my saying, you don’t strike me as the kind of gal who picks wrong.

Ha. Take a closer look.

So you know what cheated-on feels like.

Anything that’s unhappy and has to do with marriage — yes.

It’s a sisterhood, all right. That phone of yours close enough?

We don’t have to use it if—

I told you, I want it on. It’s about time somebody listened to me — I’d started thinking nobody cared. If you want to put me on the Internet saying Cody Flayner is a DEADBEAT CHEATER MORON, you be my guest.

I hear he’s become very active in a Baptist church.

Cody? Gimme a break. The Ten Commandments is like his personal to-do list. I know for a fact he’s having relations with a nineteen-year-old girl in that congregation. He only joined that church because his daddy made him.

Tell me about that.

Well, you know. We wouldn’t be talking if you didn’t know. They caught him with his pants down. He could of started World War Three, taking that thing home on his precious Ram truck. And the plant didn’t even fire him! Fired his boss, but all Cody got was “reassignment.” It sure helps when your dad’s a muckety-muck at the plant. And I’ll say this for the old man, he drove a good bargain. First time I been getting my payments since the day Cody walked out on us.

He’s started paying child support.

For now. We’ll see how long his newfound faith’ll last. I reckon about as long as his little buddy in Christ don’t completely blimp out.

Does this girl have a name?

Porky Bonehead.

But on her driver’s license?

Marli Copeland. Just an “i” at the end. You’re probably thinking it’s bad of me to even have that information.

No, I totally get it. He’s the father of your children.

But that girl won’t talk to you, no way. Not if Cody don’t.

To drive east on Amarillo Boulevard was to pass, in quick succession, the high-security Clements Unit prison complex, the McCaskill meat-processing facility, and the Pantex nuclear-weapons plant, three massive installations more alike than different in their brute utility and sodium-vapor lighting. In the rearview mirror were the evangelical churches, the Tea Party precincts, the Whataburgers. Ahead, the gas and oil wells, the fracking rigs, the overgrazed ranges, the feedlots, the depleted aquifer. Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. Whether American liberals liked it or not, Amarillo was how the rest of the world saw their country.

Leila liked it. She came from the blue part of Texas, and from a time when the blue part was larger, but she still loved the whole state, not just San Antonio and the Gulf-softened winters and the burning green of the mesquite in spring but the in-your-face ugliness of the red parts. The embrace of ugliness; the eager manufacture of it; the capacity of Texan pride to see beauty in it. And the exceptional courtesy of the drivers, the enduring apartness of the old republic, the assurance of being a shining example to the nation. Texans looked down on the other forty-nine states with a gracious kind of pity.

Phyllisha’s one of them girls that all she has to do is shake her goldy locks and the men all lose their mind. You know the expression “one-trick pony”? That’s her with her hair. Shakey-shakey-shakey. And Cody’s dumber than a post. A post knows it’s dumb and Cody don’t. And I suppose I’m the dumbest of all, because I married him.

So after Cody was “reassigned,” Phyllisha Babcock left him?

It was Mr. Flayner Senior made Cody break it off. That was part of their bargain if he wanted to keep working at the plant. That girl is some bad news. Not enough to wreck his home, she had to try and wreck his career.

No sources were more reliably forthcoming than ex-wives. The former Mrs. Flayner, a dyed redhead whose facial features were somehow concave, giving her a look of bashful apology, had baked a coffee cake for Leila and held her captive at her kitchen table until her kids came home from school.

Arranging to see Phyllisha Babcock had been harder. Since her break with Flayner, she’d shacked up with a controlling guy who screened her calls at the only number findable for her. All the boyfriend would say to Leila, the three times she called, was “I don’t know you, so good-bye.” (Even he was not without Texan courtesy; he could have said worse.) Phyllisha had also — another red flag of the controlling boyfriend — vanished from social media. But Pip Tyler was a very good researcher. By tedious trial and error, she’d located Phyllisha’s new place of work, a drive-in Sonic in the town of Pampa.

Two weeks before going to Amarillo, at the dead hour of eight on a Tuesday night, Leila had reached Phyllisha by phone at the drive-in. She’d asked if they might talk a little bit about Cody Flayner and the July Fourth incident.

“Maybe not,” Phyllisha had said, which was encouraging. The only words that truly meant no were fuck you. “Maybe, if you were from the Fox channel, but you’re not, so.”

Leila explained that her employer, Denver Independent, was a foundation-supported investigative news service. She mentioned that DI had partnered with many national news outlets, including Sixty Minutes, in breaking stories.

“I don’t look at Sixty Minutes,” Phyllisha said.

“Why don’t I just stop by the Sonic some weeknight. Nobody has to know we even spoke. I’m just trying to get the story right. It can be as off the record as you like.”

“I don’t like that you even know where I work. And my boyfriend doesn’t like me talking personal to people he doesn’t know.”

“Sure. I respect that. I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble with him.”

“No, I know, it’s kind of dumb. Like, what am I going to do, run off with you?”

“Rules are rules.”

“That’s for damned sure. For all I know, he’s sitting across the street right now, wondering who I’m on the phone with. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I won’t keep you, then. But if I come by some Tuesday, maybe this time of night?”

“What did you say the name of your magazine was?”

“Denver Independent. We’re online only, no print version.”

“I don’t know. Somebody ought to tell about the crazy shit that happens at that plant. But I got to worry about myself first. So I guess that’s a no.”

“I’ll stop by. You can decide when you see me. How’s that sound?”

“It’s nothing personal. I’m just kind of in a situation.”

The first Leila had seen of Phyllisha Babcock was in the Fourth of July pictures that Cody Flayner had posted on his Facebook page the previous summer. She was wearing a patriotically colored bikini and drinking beer. Her body looked to be only a healthy diet and some regular exercise away from greatness, but her face and hair were on the verge of confirming a wicked little dictum of Leila’s: Blondes don’t age well. (Leila saw middle age as the Revenge of the Brunettes.) Phyllisha was mostly in the foreground of the pictures and mostly in focus, but the autofocus had erred in one shot, clearly revealing that the large object on the bed of Flayner’s Dodge pickup, in the background, parked in the driveway, was a B61 thermonuclear warhead. In the blurred background of another shot, Phyllisha was straddling the warhead and appeared to be making a show of licking its tip.

Leila had been on assignment in Washington when Pip Tyler came to Denver to interview for a research internship, but word of the interview had quickly spread. Pip had brought screen shots of Flayner’s photos with her, as an example of a story she might like to pitch, and DI’s head of research had asked her how she’d come by them. Pip explained that she had friends in the Oakland nuclear-disarmament community who had hacker friends with access to object-recognition software and (illegally) to the inner workings of Facebook’s content delivery network. She said she’d already friended Cody Flayner through an antinuke friend who’d friended him under false pretenses. In response to her private query about the warhead pictures, which had long since been scrubbed from Flayner’s Facebook page, Pip had received a one-line answer: “It aint a real one, sugar.” Pip’s clips and her other credentials were excellent, and the head of research had hired her on the spot.

The following week, returning from Washington, Leila had gone straight to the corner office of Tom Aberant, the founder and executive editor of Denver Independent. It was no secret at DI that she and Tom had been a couple for more than a decade, but the two of them kept things professional at work. She really just wanted to say, “Hi, I’m back.” But as she approached the open door of Tom’s office she caught a strange vibe.

A girl with long and lustrous hair was sitting with her back to the doorway. Leila had the distinct impression that Tom was ill at ease with her; and the thing about Tom was that nothing scared him. Leila herself was afraid of death, but Tom wasn’t. The threat of lawsuits and injunctions didn’t scare him, corporate money didn’t scare him, firing employees didn’t scare him. He was Leila’s mighty fortress. But in his haste to stand up, before she was even through the doorway, she sensed a perturbation. Uncharacteristic also his fumbling for words: “Pip — Leila — Leila — Pip—”

The girl had a strikingly deep suntan. Tom hurried around his desk and did a herding thing with his arms, bringing the two women together while also moving them toward the doorway, as if eager to get Pip away from him. Or as if to underline that he wasn’t trying to hide her from Leila. The girl’s face was honest and friendly and less than threateningly beautiful, but she seemed discomfited herself.

“Pip’s already turned up more good stuff in Amarillo,” Tom said. “I know you’re slammed, but I thought maybe the two of you should work together.”

Leila queried him with a frown and caught something in his averted eyes.

“I’m very busy this week,” she said pleasantly, “but I’m happy to try to help.”

Tom herded them through his doorway. “Leila’s the best,” he said to Pip. “She’ll take good care of you.” He looked at Leila. “If you don’t mind?”

“I don’t mind.”

“Great.”

And he closed his door behind them. The door he almost never closed. A few minutes later, he came out to Leila’s work space for the exchange of greetings they ought to have had in his office. She knew she shouldn’t ask if he was OK, since she hated being asked this herself and had trained Tom never to do it: How about I just tell you if I’m ever not OK. But she couldn’t help doing it.

“Everything’s fine,” he said. His eyes were masked by the reflection of the overhead lighting on his wire-frame glasses. The glasses were of an awful seventies design and of a piece with the military buzz he gave to his remaining hair; another thing he wasn’t afraid of was anyone’s opinion of how he looked. “I think she’s going to be terrific.”

She. As if Leila’s question had referred to her.

“And … which of my other stories would you prefer that I neglect?”

“Your choice,” he said. “She says she owns the story, but we have no way of knowing who else knows about it. I don’t want us to be chasing it after it goes viral.”

“Broken Arrow II. That’s quite the first pitch from a research intern.”

Tom laughed. “Right? Not Strangelove—Broken Arrow. That’s our association now.” He laughed again, sounding more like his usual self.

“I’m just saying it seems a little too good to be true.”

“She’s Californian.”

“Hence the impressive suntan?”

“Bay Area,” Tom said. “It’s like the flu viruses coming out of China — pigs, people, and birds all living under one roof. The Bay Area is where you’d expect a story like this to come from. All that hacker capability mingling with the Occupy mentality.”

“I guess that makes sense. It’s just interesting that she came to us. She could have taken the story anywhere. ProPublica. California Watch. CIR.”

“Apparently she has a boyfriend she followed here.”

“Fifty years of feminism, and women are still following their boyfriends.”

“Who better than you to straighten her head out? If you really don’t mind.”

“I really don’t mind.”

“What’s one more person on the long list of people Leila’s nice to?”

“You’re absolutely right. It’s just one more person.”

And so the handoff to Leila had occurred. Had Tom been vaccinating himself against the girl by teaming her with his girlfriend? Pip was by no means the most attractive intern to have worked at DI, and Tom had often stated, in the hard-fact-stating voice he had, that his type was Leila’s type (slight, flat, Lebanese). What could it be about Pip that had required vaccination? Eventually it dawned on Leila that the girl might be a former type of Tom’s, a type like his ex-wife. And it wasn’t quite true that nothing scared him. Anything to do with his ex-wife made him nervous. He squirmed whenever someone on TV reminded him of her; he talked back at the screen. As soon as Leila understood that she was doing him a favor by assuming responsibility for Pip, she went ahead and took the girl under her care.

Did Cody talk about perimeter security when you were married? Were you surprised when you heard he’d taken a weapon home with him?

There’s nothing so dumb that Cody could do it and surprise me. One time he was stripping paint off our garage and tried to light a cigarette with the blowtorch — took him a while to notice he’d set his shirt collar on fire.

But the perimeter?

They had a lot of parameters that him and his dad used to talk about. Parameter is a word I definitely overheard. Exposure parameters, and … what else? Something with protocols?

But the gates, the fences.

Oh, my. Perimeter. You meant perimeter and here I’m talking about parameters. I don’t even know what a parameter is.

So did Cody ever talk about people sneaking things in or out?

Mostly in. They have enough bombs in there to turn the whole Panhandle into a smoking crater. You’d think they’d be a little nervous and alert, but it’s the opposite, because the whole point of the bomb is to make sure we never have to use it. The whole show is kind of a big huge nothing, and the people who work there know it. That’s why they have their safety competitions, their softball league, their canned-food drives — to keep it interesting. The work’s better than meat packer or prison guard, but it’s still boring and dead-end. So they’ve had some problems with contraband coming in.

Alcohol? Drugs?

No booze, they’d catch you. But certain illegal stimulants. Also clean pee for the drug tests.

And what about things coming out?

Well, Cody had a whole chest of nice tools with a little bit of radioactive in ’em, enough so OSHA said they couldn’t use ’em anymore. Perfectly good tools.

But no bombs going missing.

Lord, no. They have bar codes, they have GPS, they have all these sheets you have to sign. They know where every bomb is every minute. I know about that because that’s where Cody worked.

Inventory Control.

That’s right.

Leila turned off the recording as she approached the town of Pampa. This part of the Panhandle was so flat that it was paradoxically vertiginous, a two-dimensional planetary surface off which, having no trace of topography to hold on to, you felt you could fall or be swept. No relief in any sense of the word. The land so commercially and agriculturally marginal that Pampans thought nothing of wasting it by the half acre, so that each low and ugly building sat by itself. Dusty dead or dying halfheartedly planted trees floated by in Leila’s headlights. To her they were Texan and therefore lovely in their way.

The Sonic parking lot was empty. She’d decided not to risk spooking Phyllisha by calling her a second time; if she happened to be off work, Leila could come back tomorrow. But Phyllisha was not only there but was hanging halfway out the drive-in window, trying to touch the ground without falling all the way out.

As Leila approached the window, she saw the dollar bill below it. She picked it up and put it in Phyllisha’s hand.

“Thank you, ma’am.” Phyllisha levered herself back inside. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Leila Helou. Denver Independent.”

“Whoa. I would of sworn you’d be Texan.”

“I am Texan. Can we talk?”

“I don’t know.” Phyllisha leaned out the window again and scanned the parking lot and the street. “I told you about my situation. He’s picking me up at ten, and sometimes he’s early.”

“It’s only eight thirty.”

“You’re not supposed to stand here anyway. This is for cars only.”

“Why don’t I come inside, then.”

Phyllisha shook her head pensively. “It’s one of those things that only makes sense when you’re inside it. I can’t explain it.”

“It’s like being a willing prisoner.”

“Prisoner? I don’t know. Maybe. The Prisoner of Pampa.” She giggled. “Somebody oughta write a novel about me and call it that.”

“How into him are you?”

“I’m kind of nuts about him, actually. Part of me doesn’t even mind the prisoner part.”

“I get that.”

Phyllisha looked into Leila’s eyes. “Do you?”

“I’ve been in situations myself.”

“Well, shit. I don’t care. You can sit on the floor, down out of sight. The manager won’t see you if you come in through the back. Everybody else back here is Mexican.”

The leading occupational hazard of Leila’s job was sources who wanted to be friends with her. The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who’d ever truly listened to them. These were always the single-story sources, the “amateurs” whom she seduced by appearing to be whomever they needed her to be. (She also dissembled with the professionals, the agency staffers, the congressional aides, but they used her as much as she used them.) Many of her colleagues, even some she liked, were brutal in betraying their sources afterward and severing all contact with them, adhering to the principle that it was actually kinder not to return a call from a person you’d slept with if you didn’t intend to sleep with him again. In reporting, as in sex, Leila had always been a caller-back. The only way she could morally tolerate her seductions was honestly to be, at some level, the person she was pretending to be. And then she felt obliged to return her sources’ calls and emails, even their Christmas cards, after she was done with them. She was still getting mail from the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, well over a decade after she’d written a sympathetic story about his legal plight. Kaczynski had been barred from serving as his own counsel at his trial, effectively muzzled from airing his radical opinions about the U.S. government, by reason of insanity. And the proof of his insanity? His belief that the U.S. government was a repressive conspiracy that muzzled radical opinion. Only an insane person would believe that! The Unabomber had really, really liked Leila.

What Phyllisha told her, while she sat on the floor amid ketchup smears and Mexican music, was that Cody Flayner was an all-hat loser she’d counted the days till she could get away from. Between his fine ass and his soft eyes and his droopy little puppy eyelashes, she hadn’t been able to resist getting in the sack with him. But she swore to Leila that she’d never meant for him to leave his wife and kids. He’d surprised her with that, and then, for a while, she was stuck with him. All she’d wanted was a good time, and here she’d wrecked people’s lives. She felt bad about it, and so she lived with Cody for six whole months.

“You stayed with him because you felt guilty?” Leila said.

“Kind of! That and free rent and lack of immediate other options.”

“You know, I did the same thing when I was your age. Wrecked a marriage.”

“Maybe if it can be wrecked, it oughta be wrecked.”

“There are different schools of thought on that.”

“So how long’d you stick around? Or did you not even feel guilty?”

“That’s the thing.” Leila smiled. “I’m still married to him.”

“Well, that’s a happy ending.”

“Safe to say there’s been some guilt along the way.”

“You know, you seem OK to me. I never met a reporter before. You’re not what I expected.”

That’s because I’m freaking good at getting people to open up, Leila thought.

Phyllisha interrupted herself to serve a carload of teenagers and then to scold her co-workers. “Hey fellas, no quiero la musica. Menos loud-o, por favor?”

That Cody was the best thing that ever happened to Phyllisha was a conviction of his that she did not reciprocate. The more he tried to impress her, the less impressed she got. He picked a bar fight in her presence to show her how well he could take getting the crap beaten out of him. His wife, the baboon face, hadn’t managed to get his wages garnished for child support — count on Big Government to screw things up — and he bought Phyllisha piles of bling and other stuff, including a brand-new iPad, to impress her. The whole idea behind his July Fourth surprise was to impress her. She knew that he worked at the bomb plant and had the most boring of all the jobs there. He could jaw for hours about variable yields and bunker busters and kilotonnage, making himself out to be personally responsible for keeping the nation safe. She finally got fed up and told him the truth, namely, that he was a nobody and she wasn’t impressed with these bombs that he didn’t actually have anything to do with. She hurt his feelings, but she didn’t care. She’d already exchanged meaningful eye contact with his friend Kyle, who lived over in Pampa.

On the night of July 3, coming home late from drinking with her girlfriends, she found Cody waiting for her on the front steps. He said he had another present for her. He took her around to the back yard, where something big and cylindrical was lying on a blanket. Cody said it was a fully armed B61 thermonuclear warhead, and what did she think of that?

Well, she was afraid, was what.

Cody said, “I want you to touch it. I want you to get buck-naked and lay on it, and then I’m gonna do you like you never been done in your whole life.”

She hedged by saying she didn’t want to get radiation poisoning or whatnot.

Cody said the warhead was totally safe to handle and be around. He made her touch it with her hand and explained to her about one-point safety and permission action links. It was the usual all-hat routine, talking about stuff he didn’t really understand and had nothing to do with, except that this time there was an actual thermonuclear warhead on a blanket in his yard.

“And I know how to set it off,” he said.

You do not, Phyllisha said.

“There’s a way if you got the codes, and I got the codes. I can wipe old Amarillo right off the map. Right now.”

Why would you do that, Phyllisha wanted to know. She half believed him and two-thirds didn’t.

“To make you see how much I love you,” Cody said.

Phyllisha said she didn’t see the connection between loving her and blowing up Amarillo. She thought that, conceivably, by saying this, by buying time, she was saving tens of thousands of innocent Amarillo lives, her own not least among them. She was listening out of one ear for police sirens.

Cody then assured her that he wasn’t going to do it. He just wanted her to know that he could do it. He, Cody Flayner. He wanted her to feel the kind of power he had at his disposal. He wanted her to take off all her clothes and put her arms around the bomb and stick her little tail up in the air for him. Didn’t the bomb’s terrible, dangerous power make her want that?

It did, actually, when he put it like that. She went ahead and did what he’d said, and they hadn’t had such a good time since before he’d surprised her by moving out on his wife. To be that close to so much potential death and devastation, to have her sweaty skin against the cool skin of a death-bomb, to imagine the whole city going up in a mushroom cloud when she orgasmed. It was pretty great, she had to say.

At the same time, it was obviously a one-night-only thing. Either Cody would be hauled off to jail or he’d have to take the B61 back to where it belonged, and that would be the end of them having orgasmic sex with her face mashed up against the casing of a 300-kiloton death-bomb. To enjoy it while it lasted, they went at it a second time. Cody got her all wound up but afterward she felt sad for him. He wasn’t very bright, and she’d already made up her mind to go with Kyle.

Baby, she said, they’re going to put you in jail.

“No they ain’t,” Cody said. “Not for borrowing a fake.”

A fake?

“Yeah, for training purposes. It’s a perfect replica, except for the fissile core.”

She got upset then. Was he trying to make her feel stupid now, or what? He’d told her it was a fully armed death-bomb!

“Nobody takes out a real bomb on their pickup, sweetheart.”

So the bomb was just a fake? Well, that was just like him.

“Yeah, and what difference did it make?” he said. “You sure didn’t seem like you were fakin’ it. Talk about Fourth of July fireworks — whoo hee!”

Leila was writing furiously in her notebook. “And how long did he keep the replica? We have pictures of it from the Fourth of July.”

“He took it back the next night,” Phyllisha said. “The plant’s real quiet on the Fourth, and he knew the people at the gate. But first he had to show the thing off to his friends, at the barbecue. Kyle says Cody’s always been like a little dog that follows you around, doing stuff on dares to try to make people respect him.”

“And were his friends impressed?”

“Kyle wasn’t. He had a notion of what Cody and me had done the night before, because Cody was all but bragging about it. Calling it the afrodizziac bomb.”

“Lovely. But, just so we’re clear, in one of the pictures, you seem to be…”

Phyllisha blushed. “I know the picture. I was doing that on Kyle’s account. Looking him right in the eye.”

“Cody couldn’t have been happy about that.”

“I can’t say I’m proud of my behavior. But I was scared Kyle might think Cody and I were A-OK again. I did what I had to do.”

“And that’s why Cody broke up with you?”

“Who the heck told you that? Kyle helped me pack up while Cody was taking the bomb back. That very same night. I’ve been in Pampa ever since. I still feel bad about it, but at least Cody’s last memories of me are good ones. Neither of us will ever forget the night with the death-bomb. It’s like a memory we can always treasure.”

“Do you have any idea how the plant found out about it?”

“Well, you can’t pull a stunt like that without word getting around. Plus it was on Facebook. Can you imagine?”

Taking leave of Phyllisha, her short-term memory aching like an unmilked cow, Leila moved her car out of the Sonic lot and parked it farther down the street. Using a red ballpoint, she filled out and clarified the scribbles in her notebook. The work couldn’t wait until she returned to Amarillo; her precise recall of interviews lasted less than an hour. Before she was finished, a vintage pickup rumbled into the Sonic lot and then out again. As it passed by Leila, she saw Phyllisha, not on the passenger side of the bench but scooched toward the middle, with her arm around the driver’s neck.

* * *

Leila was just old enough to have lived through the Watergate hearings at an age where she could understand them. Of her mother she could remember little more than a jumble of fear and sadness, hospital rooms, her father’s sobbing, a funeral that seemed to last for days. Only in the summer of Sam Ervin and John Dean and Bob Haldeman did she become a fully remembering person. She’d begun watching the hearings as a way to escape interaction with her father’s crone cousin Marie. Her father, who had a busy practice and was also on the research faculty at the dental school, had brought Marie over from the old country to keep house for him and care for Leila. Marie frightened Leila’s friends, licked her knife at the dinner table, wore clicking dentures that she refused to exchange for better ones, complained incessantly about the air-conditioning, and was unacquainted with the concept of letting a child win at games. Summers with her were long, and Leila never forgot the thrill of realizing that everything the adults in Washington were saying on TV made sense to her; that she could follow the conspiracy. A few years later, when her father took her to see All the President’s Men, she made him leave her at the theater so she could sneak back in to watch the next screening.

Her father had approved of her sneaking. He operated by Old World rules, the blurring of right and wrong into whatever you could get away with; he stole hotel towels and bought a radar detector for his Cadillac and was merely annoyed, not embarrassed, when the IRS caught him cheating on his taxes. But he could also seem New World. When Leila, under the spell of All the President’s Men, declared her ambition to be an investigative reporter, her father replied that journalism was a male business and that she should therefore go into it, to show what a Helou woman was capable of. He said that America was a butter the hot knife of her mind was made to cut through, America the place where a woman didn’t have to live like Marie, on a cousin’s charity.

His message was feminist, and yet he wasn’t a feminist. As Leila proceeded through college and into newspaper work, she couldn’t shake the sense that she was proving something for him, not for herself. When she landed a real reporting job, at the Miami Herald, and her father was disabled by a stroke, she knew it was his wish and expectation that she quit the job and return to San Antonio. Marie was dead by then, but her father had two sons from his first marriage, in Houston and Memphis. They could have taken him in, if they hadn’t been men.

To fill her evenings in San Antonio, while her father languished, she began to write short stories. She later felt so mortified to have imagined herself as a fiction writer that she recalled these stories with revulsion, as scabs that she couldn’t stop picking but was too ashamed to make bleed. She couldn’t reconstruct her reasons for writing them, apart from a wish to rebel against her father’s ambitions for her and to punish him for getting in their way. But after he died, of a second stroke, she decided to spend a good chunk of her inheritance — from an estate heftily diminished by delinquent taxes and shared with her half brothers and two women she’d scarcely known, one of them a dental hygienist her father had long employed — to pursue a degree in creative writing at a program in Denver.

She was already older than most of the other students in Denver and not only had more real-world experience but was sitting on more family unhappiness and immigrant lore. She also considered herself more attractive than the quality of her past boyfriends would suggest. When one of her first-semester teachers, Charles Blenheim, singled out and praised the work of a younger “experimental” female writer in the workshop, it activated a hereditary competitive streak in Leila. Among the Helous, the main form of family interaction was playing cards and board games, at which it was assumed that everyone was trying to cheat. Leila worked hard on her fiction and even harder on her comments on her younger rival’s work. She learned exactly where to stick the needle, and soon she had Charles’s attention.

Charles was at the apex of his career, coming off a Lannan Fellowship year and a front-page Times review that had anointed him as the heir of John Barth and Stanley Elkin, but he didn’t know it was the apex. In the bright light of his prospects, his marriage of fifteen years was seeming lackluster and unbecoming to him, a contract entered into when Blenheim stock was undervalued. Leila had come along at just the right time to put an end to it. While she was at it, she permanently turned his two daughters against him. She understood how she must have looked to them, and to his wife, and she was sorry about it — she hated being hated — but she didn’t feel especially guilty. It simply wasn’t her fault that Charles was happier with her. Not to choose his happiness and her own happiness over his family’s would have required very strict principles. At the crucial moment, when she’d looked into herself for a clear understanding of right and wrong, she’d instead found the mess her father had bequeathed her.

She was wild about Charles, for a while. Among all his female students, he’d chosen her. His older man’s bulk made her own slightness agreeable to her; made her feel amazingly sexy. He rode a Harley-Davidson to class, he wore his corn-silk hair down to the shoulders of his leather jacket, he referred to literary giants by their first names. To spare him from institutional embarrassment, she quit the writing program. A week after his divorce went through, she rode on the back of his Harley to New Mexico and married him in Taos. She went to conferences with him and performed what she was slow to realize was her function at them: to be younger and fresh and somewhat exotic, to excite the envy of male writers who hadn’t traded in their wives yet or hadn’t done so recently. She’d published enough of her scratchings, in small journals where a word from Charles carried weight, to introduce herself as a fiction writer.

When Charles’s several honeymoons had ended, he settled down to write the big book, the novel that would secure him his place in the modern American canon. Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write The Sound and the Fury or The Sun Also Rises. But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length. Leila would have been well advised, before marrying a novelist or imagining herself as one, to wait and sample life in a house where a big book was being contemplated. A day of frustration was mourned with three large bourbons. A day of conceptual breakthrough and euphoria was celebrated with four large bourbons. To dilate his mind to the requisite bigness, Charles needed to spend weeks on end doing nothing. Although the university asked very little of him, it asked for more than nothing, and the tiniest unperformed tasks became torments to him. Leila took over every task she could and many that she shouldn’t have, but she couldn’t, for example, teach his workshops. For hours, their three-story Craftsman echoed with his groans at the prospect of teaching. The groans came from every floor of it and were at once heartfelt and intended as humor.

It was Charles’s saving grace, and the heart of Leila’s weakness for him, to be funny. On a rare good day, he might produce a long paragraph — disconnected, like all its fellows, from any other paragraph — that made her hoot with laughter. Much more often, there was no paragraph. Instead, during the small scrap of time when she was free to toil on her scratchings, at the child-size desk of his older daughter, in what had been the daughter’s bedroom, and to self-hatingly contrast her flat reportorial style with the “twinned muscularity and febrility” (New York Times Book Review, front page) of her husband’s paragraphs, even though he’d failed to string together two of them since before she’d married him, she heard the door of his book-lined third-floor study open, followed by the Trudge. He retarded this Trudge, knowing she could hear it, to make the very sound of it funny. Finally he stopped outside her closed door and — as if it could be imagined that she hadn’t heard the Trudge approaching — hesitated for some minute or minutes before knocking. Even after he’d opened the door, he didn’t enter the room immediately but stood and slowly turned his gaze on every corner of it, as if wondering whether he might write bigger in a child’s bedroom, or as if to refamiliarize himself with the strange little world of being Leila. Then suddenly — his timing always comic — he looked at her and said, “You busy?” She never said she was. He entered the room and fell onto the dust-ruffled single bed and groaned cartoonishly. He was good about apologizing for disturbing her, but she detected, in his apologies, an undercurrent of resentment at her ability to perform household tasks while managing, in her flat reportorial way, to string a few paragraphs together. Sometimes they discussed the etiology of his blockage, his obstacle du jour, but only as a prelude to what he’d come downstairs for, which was to fuck her on the dust-ruffled bed, or on the Douglas-fir flooring, or on the child-size desk. She liked doing it with him. Liked it a lot.

After a year of big book ignition failure, she’d had enough of fiction writing. As a feminist, she couldn’t imagine merely being Charles’s wife, so she went to work at the Denver Post and quickly thrived there, doing journalism for herself now, not for her father. Without her in the house, pages of the big book began to coalesce, albeit slowly and at the cost of stepped-up bourbon intake. After she won a prize for her reporting (Colorado State Fair mismanagement), she dared to excuse herself from the dinners that Charles was obliged to host for visiting writers. Oh, the drinking at those ghastly dinners, the inevitable slighting of Charles, the addition of yet another name to his hate list. Practically the only living American writers Charles didn’t hate now were his students and former students, and if any of the latter had some success it was only a matter of time before they slighted him, betrayed him, and he added them to his list.

Given his sinking confidence and rising self-pity levels, she might have worried that he’d do to her, with some fresh female student, what he’d done to his first wife. But he remained almost maniacally arousable by her. It was as if he were a big cat and she, with her slightness, her littleness, the mouse on which he compulsively pounced. Maybe it was a novelist thing or maybe just Charles, but he couldn’t leave her alone. Even when they weren’t having sex, he was forever poking and probing her, getting his fingers in her spirit, leaving nothing unsaid.

As if in self-defense, she reached the point of wanting him to make her pregnant. She had friends at the Post with babies, toddlers, six-year-olds. She’d held them in her arms and inwardly melted at the trust and innocence with which they put their hands on her face, their faces on her breast, their feet between her legs. Nothing, she came to think, was sweeter than a child, nothing more precious and worth having. But when — on a night carefully selected for having followed a day of thousand-word progress on his book — she took a deep breath and raised the subject of children with Charles, he became especially dramatic. He turned his head with comical slowness and gave her his glowering Look. The Look was supposed to be funny but it also scared her. The Look meant Think about what you just said. Or You must be joking. Or, more sinisterly, Do you realize you’re speaking to a major American novelist? The frequency with which she’d received the Look of late was making her wonder what she was to him. She’d thought he was attracted to her talent and toughness and maturity, but she worried that it was principally her slightness.

“What?” she said.

He squeezed his eyes shut so tightly that his whole face wrinkled. Then he blinked them open. “Sorry,” he said. “What was the question?”

“Whether we might talk about having a kid.”

“Not now.”

“OK. But do you mean ‘now’ as in ‘tonight,’ or ‘now’ as in ‘this decade’?”

He sighed dramatically. “What exactly is it about my profoundly non relationship with my existing children that makes you think I’m dad material? Did I not notice something?”

“But this is me. This isn’t her.”

“I’m aware of the distinction. Are you aware of the pressure I’m under?”

“It’s kind of hard to miss.”

“No, but can you conceive … can you imagine me, for one second, finishing the book with a baby in the house?”

“Obviously, it wouldn’t happen for at least nine months. Maybe a medium-term deadline would help you.”

“I’m already three years past one of those.”

“A real deadline. One you believed in. I’m saying this is something I want with you. I want you to finish the book and us to maybe have a kid. The two things don’t have to be opposed. Maybe they could be connected, in a good way.”

“Leila.” He barked the name sternly but also ironically: to be funny.

“What.”

“I love you more than anything in this world. Please tell me you know that.”

“I know that,” she said in a slight voice.

“So hear me, please. Please hear this: every further minute this particular conversation lasts is going to be a day of lost work in the coming week. One minute, one day; I can feel it. When you suffer, I suffer — you know that. So can we please just put an end to it right here?”

She nodded, and then cried, and then had sex with him, and then cried some more. A few months later, when the Post offered her a five-year stint as its Washington correspondent, she accepted. She hadn’t entirely stopped loving Charles, but there was only so long that she could stand to be around him with an ache in her chest. She felt loyal to a baby in her that hadn’t even been conceived yet. To a possibility.

It came along to Washington with her, the possibility, and it flew home with her to Denver once a month, for staff meetings and conjugal obligations. She didn’t want to think about being divorced in her early forties, working sixty and seventy hours a week and wanting a kid, and yet her trajectory was like a thing she had no control over, a hurtling into deeper space, a feeling of nearly achieved escape velocity. She knew but didn’t want to know where it was taking her. When she spoke on the phone with Charles, late at night, she could tell that he was lonely, because he’d never been so attentive to her reporting work, so eager to be of help. But when he came east in the summer, and again the next summer, her little apartment on Capitol Hill became the sour-smelling cage of a big cat too depressed to groom itself. Charles spent his days in his boxer shorts and bitched about the weather. For the first time, she felt physically averse to him. She invented reasons to stay out late, but he was always waiting for her, anxious, obsessive, when she came home. He’d finally delivered the big book, but his editor wanted revisions and he couldn’t make up his mind about the smallest change. He asked her the same editorial questions over and over, and it did no good for her to answer them, because he had the very same questions again the next night. Both of them were relieved when he returned to Denver, where a fresh crop of students was waiting to hang on his words.

She met Tom Aberant in February 2004. Tom was a well-regarded journalist and editor who’d come to Washington to poach talent for a nonprofit investigative news service he was starting, and Leila, who by now had won a shared Pulitzer (anthrax, 2002), was on his wish list. He took her to lunch and told her he had $20 million in seed money. He currently lived in New York, but he was divorced and childless and thinking of situating his nonprofit in Denver, his hometown, where the overhead would be lower. Having done his homework, he knew that Leila had a husband in Denver. Might she be interested in going home and working at a nonprofit, insulated from the impending collapse of print-ad revenues, freed from space constraints and daily deadlines, and paid a competitive salary?

The offer ought to have appealed to her. But Charles’s big book had been published just the week before and was getting slaughtered by reviewers (“bloated and immensely disagreeable,” Michiko Kakutani, New York Times), and Leila was in a state of medium-grade dread. She’d been calling Charles three and four times a day for pep talks, telling him how sorry she was that she couldn’t be with him. But it was clear, from the repugnance she felt toward Tom’s offer, that she wasn’t really sorry at all. She didn’t want to be the woman who abandoned her husband after his magnum opus tanked. But there was no hiding, from herself or from Tom, how unready she was to give up Washington.

“You’re pretty sure it has to be Denver,” she said.

Tom’s face was fleshy, his mouth somehow turtlish, his eyes narrow in a way that conveyed kindly amusement. The hair he still had farther back on his head was closely buzzed and mostly dark. The thing about men in their prime was that, within rather wide limits, it didn’t matter if they weren’t conventionally handsome. They could also get away with bellies and even with high-pitched voices, if they were scratchy high-pitched, as Tom’s was.

“Pretty sure, yeah,” he said. “I’ve got a sister and a niece there. I miss the West.”

“It sounds like an amazing project,” Leila said.

“Do you want to think it over? Or are you just going to say no right now.”

“I’m not saying no. I’m…”

She felt utterly exposed.

“Oh, this is terrible,” she said. “I know what you must be thinking.”

“What am I thinking?”

“Why wouldn’t I want to go home to Denver.”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Leila. You’d be a keystone hire for me. I thought Denver would be a selling point.”

“No, it’s great, and I think you’re absolutely right about the industry. We had a monopoly on classifieds for a hundred years. Roll the presses, print the money. And now we don’t. But…”

“But.”

“Well, this is coming at a bad moment for me.”

“Trouble at home.”

“Yeah.”

Tom put his hands behind his head and leaned back, straining the buttons of his dress shirt. “So tell me if this sounds familiar,” he said. “You love the person but you can’t live with him, the person is struggling, you think a separation will make it better, let the two of you recover. And then it finally comes time to get back together, because the separation was only supposed to be temporary, and you discover that, no, in fact, you were lying to yourself the whole time.”

“Actually,” Leila said, “I’ve suspected for quite a while that I’ve been lying to myself.”

“So women are smarter than men. Or you’re just smarter than I was. But to spin out the hypothetical scenario a little further—”

“I think we both know who we’re talking about.”

“I’m a fan of his,” Tom said. “Mad Sad Dad—great book. Hilarious. Gorgeous.”

“Super funny, definitely.”

“And yet now here you are in Washington. And his new book’s getting kicked in the head.”

“Yes.”

“Fuck the reviewers. I’m still going to buy it. But, speaking hypothetically, is there someone else in town here I should know about? If he’s good and does investigative, I’d be happy to look at his CV. I have nothing in principle against couple hires.”

She shook her head.

“No, there isn’t anybody?” Tom said. “Or no, he’s not a journalist?”

“Are you trying to ask if I’m available in some other way?”

He crumpled forward and covered his face with his hands. “I deserved that,” he said. “I was actually not asking that, but the question wasn’t straight, either. It’s just a thing with me — I’m kind of a connoisseur of guilt. I shouldn’t have asked you that.”

“If you could see my guilt levels, I think you’d find them quite appealingly high.”

The flirtation with which she made this statement made it true. It was appalling, an almost autonomic thing, the way she was warming to the first sweet, funny, successful, unmarried man she’d met since the wave of caustic adjectives (“stale,” “obese,” “exhausting”) had crashed over the big book. But no matter how guilty it made her, she couldn’t help it: she resented Charles for having failed. She resented that she now had to feel like a shallow, success-chasing woman just because she was liking Tom Aberant. If Charles’s book had been glowingly reviewed and short-listed for prizes, she could have continued on her outbound trajectory without feeling guilty. No one would have blamed her. To the contrary, it would have been blameworthy to go back to him — to have fled to Washington while he was suffering and then to swoop back in to enjoy his success. And so she couldn’t help wishing that Charles didn’t exist. In a world where he didn’t exist, she could have said yes to Tom’s extremely attractive job offer.

What she did instead was suggest that she and Tom get together again over drinks. She wore a short black dress to the bar. Later, from her apartment, she sent Tom a long and disclosive email. She delayed calling Charles that night. In her growing sense of guilt about delaying, in the guilt itself, she found the will and motive not to call him at all. (Even though the sufferer of guilt could stop the suffering whenever she chose, simply by doing the right thing, the suffering was still real while it lasted, and self-pity wasn’t picky about the kind of suffering it fed on.) The next day, she didn’t open Tom’s return email but went to work, called Charles three times, and ate a late dinner with a source. At home, she called Charles a fourth time and finally opened Tom’s email. It wasn’t disclosive, but it was invitational. She took a Friday-night train to Manhattan (somehow the guilt that should have followed infidelity not only existed before the infidelity but was hounding her into it) and spent the night at Tom’s apartment. She spent the whole weekend with him, leaving his side only to go to the bathroom to pee or call Charles. Her guilt was so large that it was gravitational, warping space and time, connecting through non-Euclidian geometry to the guilt she hadn’t felt while wrecking Charles’s marriage. This guilt turned out not to have been nonexistent but pre-forwarded, by way of time-and-space warp, to Manhattan in 2004.

She couldn’t have borne it without Tom. She felt safe with Tom. He was both the cause of her guilt and the balm for it, because he understood it and was living it himself. He was only six years older than Leila, younger than his hair loss made him look, but he’d started so early on his marriage that its ending, after twelve years, was in the fairly distant past. His wife, Anabel, had been an artist, a promising young painter and filmmaker, who came from one of the families that owned McCaskill, the biggest food-products company in the world. On paper, she was absurdly rich, but she was estranged from her family and refused on principle to take money from them. By the time Tom escaped from the marriage, her art career was going nowhere, she was in her late thirties, and she still wanted children.

“I was a coward,” he said to Leila. “I should have left her five years earlier.”

“Is it cowardly to stay with a person you love and who needs you?”

“You tell me.”

“Hmm. I’ll get back to you on that.”

“If she’d been thirty-one, she could have put her life together and met somebody else and had her baby. I waited just long enough to make that very difficult.”

“It wouldn’t have helped that she was rich?”

“She was insane about the money. She’d sooner have died than take it from her father.”

“But then that’s her choice. Why should you feel guilty for a choice she’s making?”

“Because I knew she’d make that choice.”

“And did you cheat on her?”

“Not until we’d separated.”

“Then, I’m sorry, but I think I’ve got you beat in the guilt race.”

But there was something else, Tom said. Anabel’s father had always liked him and tried to help him out financially. Tom couldn’t accept any help as long as he stayed with Anabel, but when the father had died, more than a decade after the divorce, he’d left Tom a bequest to the tune of $20 million, and Tom had taken it. It was the seed money for his nonprofit venture.

“And you feel guilty about that?”

“I could have said no.”

“But you’re doing an amazing thing with the money.”

“I’m enjoying money my wife could never take. Not just enjoying it, doing well with it professionally. Increasing my male professional advantage.”

Although Leila appreciated Tom’s company, his guilt seemed a little overwrought to her. She wondered if he might be exaggerating it (and downplaying the sexual hold that Anabel had had on him) for her sake. On her second weekend in New York, she asked him if she could flip through his box of old snapshots. There were pictures of a young man so skinny and boyish and thick-haired she barely recognized him. “You look like a completely different person.”

“I was a completely different person.”

“But, like, not the same DNA, even.”

“That’s how it feels.”

As soon as Leila saw Anabel, she understood Tom’s guilt better. The woman was intense—fiery-eyed, full-chestedly anorexic, Medusa-maned, mostly unsmiling. In the background of the pictures was student housing, slum housing, wintry pre-9/11 New York skyline.

“She does look a little scary,” Leila said.

“Terrifying. I’m having a PTSD thing just looking at these.”

“But you! You were so young and sweet.”

“That’s kind of my marriage in a nutshell.”

“And where is she now?”

“No idea. We didn’t have any friends in common, and we broke off all contact.”

“So maybe she took her money after all. Maybe she owns an island somewhere.”

“Anything’s possible. But I don’t think so.”

Leila wanted to ask if she could keep one snapshot of Tom, an especially sweet one taken by Anabel on the Staten Island Ferry, but it was too soon to ask for a picture. She closed the box and kissed his turtle mouth. Sex with him was not the drama it had always been with Charles, the pouncing, the bouncing, the screaming of the prey, but she already thought she might prefer this other way. It was quieter, slower, more like a meeting of minds via bodies.

She had a deep sense of rightness with Tom — it was the thing, among many things, that she felt guiltiest about, because it meant that Charles was not right, had never been right. Tom’s reserve, his willingness to leave her be, was soothing to her maritally poked and probed spirit. And he seemed to have the same sense of rightness with her. They were journalists and spoke a common language. But she couldn’t help wondering why a catch like him had never remarried. Before she burned any bridges with Charles, she asked Tom why.

He replied that he hadn’t stayed with any woman for longer than a year since his divorce. According to his ethics, one year was the limit, at least in New York, for any uncommitted relationship; and his bad marriage had made him commitment-shy.

“So what are you saying?” she said. “I’ve got ten months before you show me the door?”

“You’re already in a committed relationship,” he said.

“Right. Funny. Is this rule of yours something you led with on first dates?”

“It’s a tacit rule in New York dating. I’m not the author of it. It’s a way to avoid chewing up five years of a woman’s life and then showing her the door.”

“As opposed to, say, getting over your commitment phobia.”

“I tried. More than once. But apparently I’m textbook PTSD. I had actual panic attacks.”

“Textbook toxic bachelor is what it sounds more like.”

“Leila, they were younger. I knew things they didn’t know, I knew what can happen. Even if you weren’t married, it wouldn’t be the same with you.”

“No, that’s right. Because I’m forty-one. I’m already past the sell-by date. You won’t have to feel so guilty when you dump me.”

“The difference is that you’ve been through a marriage.”

A light went on in Leila. “No, here’s what it is,” she said. “What’s different is that I’m older than your wife when you divorced her. You didn’t trade up to some twenty-eight-year-old. With me you’re trading down. You don’t have to feel so guilty.”

Tom said nothing.

“And you know how I know that? Because I make the same kind of calculations myself. Whatever it takes to get away from my guilt, even for five minutes, my mind will do it. There was a review of Charles’s book in The Adirondack Review, online. Glowing. He sent the link in an email blast to everyone in his address book, and I didn’t see it until I was on my way up here to sleep with you. He needed somebody to tell him not to send that email blast. He needed me, his wife, to tell him, ‘Better not to do that.’ But I was otherwise engaged, on the phone, talking to you. And where’s my little rule to help me out of that one? I don’t have a little rule.”

She was putting on clothes, repacking her overnight bag.

“I’m done with the rule,” Tom said. “I only mentioned it because I trusted you to understand it. But you’re right, it does help that you’re forty-one. I’m not going to deny it.”

His honesty seemed directed at the ghost of his ex-wife, not at Leila.

“I think I’m just going to leave before you make me cry,” she said.

What drove her away from his apartment that night was an instinct about Tom. If his reserve had simply been his fundamental nature, she could have relaxed and appreciated it. But he hadn’t always been reserved. He’d been open to intensity in his marriage, so open that he now felt traumatized by it, and Anabel clearly still had a grip on his conscience. He’d had something with Anabel that he didn’t intend to have with anyone else, and an instinct told Leila that she would always feel secondary — that here was a competition she could never win.

But Tom kept calling her that winter, updating her on the progress of his nonprofit, and she couldn’t pretend that she would rather have been talking to anyone else. In early May, three and a half months after they’d first met, he came down to Washington again. When she went to Union Station and saw him ambling up the platform, in wrinkled khakis and an old fifties sport shirt specifically chosen for its ugliness, as a private joke at the expense of good taste, a little chime sounded in her head, a single pure note, and she knew she was in love with him.

He’d booked a room at the George, so as not to presume that he could stay with her, but he never checked in. He spent a week in her apartment, using her Internet connection and reading on her sofa, his glasses perched upon his bald dome, his fingers curled over the spine of his book, holding it close to his bad eyes. She felt as if he’d always been there on the sofa; as if, when she came home and saw him sprawled on it, she was finally truly coming home, for the first time in her life. She agreed to leave the Post and go to work for his nonprofit. If there had been other things to agree to, she would have agreed to them. She wanted (but didn’t yet say she wanted) to try to have a baby with him. She loved him and wanted him to never leave. Now there was only the matter, much discussed but still not acted on, of having the conversation with Charles. And maybe, if she’d managed to have that conversation in time, she could have married Tom. But she was cowardly — as cowardly as Tom said he’d been in not ending his own marriage. She delayed having the conversation, delayed giving notice at the Post, and on a warm Colorado night in late June, on a foothill road behind Golden, Charles went over the front of the XLCR 1000 he’d bought with the last third of his U.K. advance and was paralyzed below the hips. He’d been drinking.

The fault was his but also undeniably hers. While falling in love with someone else, she’d allowed her husband’s life to spin out of control. She immediately had herself reassigned to Denver, and as long as Charles was in the hospital, and then in rehab, she couldn’t tell him about Tom; she needed to keep his spirits up. But suppressing the fact of Tom made the prospect of divulging it ever scarier. She performed the role of loving wife perfectly — she saw Charles briefly every morning and for hours every evening, she sold their three-story house and bought a more suitable one, she infused morale and sneaked him whiskey, she befriended his doctors and caregivers, she ran herself ragged — and meanwhile, at the pretty house that Tom had bought in Hilltop, in part with money from his former father-in-law, she had sex with someone else.

Charles’s accident ended up costing her a year of fertility. It was unthinkable, as long as he was recovering, to bring him the news that she was carrying someone else’s child. Unthinkable to add a baby to an already overstressed life. And then unthinkable not to live with Charles after she brought him home to his new house. But she still wanted a baby, and when, by and by, Tom asked her how long she intended to keep living with Charles, she found herself replying with a question of her own.

“No,” Tom said.

“That’s it?” she said. “No?”

He gave her many sensible reasons — their dedication to their work, their already overfull lives, the danger of birth defects for older couples, the global cataclysms that climate change and overpopulation would likely unleash in a child’s lifetime — but the reason that actually made him angry was that she was still living with Charles and hadn’t told him about their affair. How could he think of having a kid with a woman who couldn’t even leave her husband?

“The minute I got pregnant, I’d tell him everything,” she said.

“Why not tell him now?”

“He’s suffering. Would you have abandoned Anabel if she’d landed in a wheelchair? Charles needs me.”

“But can you not see how this looks to me? I’m ready to go, right now. I’m ready to marry you tomorrow. And you don’t even have a timeline for getting out of your marriage.”

“Well, and I’m telling you how you could help me with that.”

“And I’m telling you there’s something wrong if that’s what you need to help you.”

She was in a weak position, wanting a baby and running out of time. If it didn’t happen with Tom, it wouldn’t happen at all. She felt grief at the death of the possibility, pain at Tom’s refusal, and anger at him for not wanting what she wanted. He didn’t seem to understand the bind she was in. She was convinced that his avowed reasons for not wanting a kid were bogus — that his actual reason was to avoid the guilt of having the child he’d denied his ex-wife — but he refused to credit her own guilt about Charles.

And so they started fighting. Hotly on her side, coldly on his. Again and again the same impasse: she wouldn’t leave Charles, he wouldn’t try to have a baby. Tom never lost control, never even raised his voice, and his explanation for this — that he’d already done five lifetimes’ worth of fighting with Anabel and refused to do it anymore — made Leila lose control for both of them. Charles had never driven her to shriek with rage; nobody had; but competing with Anabel did. She detested the sound of her shrieking so much that she broke up with Tom. A week later, they reconciled. A week after that, they broke up again. She was right for him, he was right for her, but they couldn’t find a way to be together.

For nearly two months, they didn’t communicate in any way. Then one night, after she’d put Charles to bed and cleaned his errant shit off the toilet and found herself weeping, she yielded to an impulse to call Tom. She picked up the phone, but there was something wrong with it — no dial tone.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hello?”

“Tom?”

“Leila?”

Two months of no contact, and they’d picked up the phone at the same moment. She didn’t believe in signs, but this had to be a sign. She blurted out that she couldn’t divorce Charles but couldn’t live without Tom. He in turn said he didn’t care if she ever divorced Charles, he couldn’t live without her, either. It felt like coming home again.

The next morning, she told Charles that she was getting a place of her own and leaving the Post to work for a new nonprofit service. She didn’t say why, but Charles poked and probed and made her confession for her. She continued to spend every second weekend with him, but from then on she lived mainly at Tom’s, not as the co-keeper of his house, not as a person who made decorating decisions, but as a kind of permanent special guest. The two of them buried the fundamental conflict that their fighting had exposed; buried it deep. She never quite forgave him for not wanting a child with her, but in time it stopped mattering. They were both busy building DI into a nationally respected news service, and she was additionally busy taking care of Charles; sometimes she even found herself feeling grateful to be unburdened with children.

Her life with Tom was strange and ill-defined and permanently temporary but therefore all the more a life of true love, because it was freely chosen every day, every hour. It reminded her of a distinction she’d learned as a child in Sunday school. Their marriages had been Old Testament, hers a matter of honoring her covenant with Charles, Tom’s a matter of fearing Anabel’s wrath and judgment. In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.

* * *

Early in the morning after her visit with Phyllisha, she drove to the house that Earl Walker had bought, for a price publicly recorded at $372,000, after losing his job at the weapons plant. The house had a triple garage and a sprinkler system whose early-morning overshoot had left the street wet where she parked. Apparently, in Amarillo, when lawns dried out in a drought, the obvious thing to do was water them. On Walker’s driveway was a newspaper with a rubber band around it. After Leila had sat for a few minutes, a very heavy woman in her fifties came out and picked it up, gave Leila a hard look, and went back inside.

Walker had been Cody Flayner’s boss in Inventory Control. This information Leila had from Pip, who had also learned that Walker had sold his previous home for $230,000. People who’d lost their job didn’t typically turn around and buy a larger house, nor were they good candidates for a larger mortgage, and no probated will from the previous three years could account for the additional $142,000 Walker had paid. This amounted to a fact nearly as interesting as the Facebook pictures. Another fact, unearthed by Pip in an inspector general’s report from January, was that “a minor irregularity in Inventory Control” had occurred at the plant the previous summer; according to the report, the irregularity had been “satisfactorily addressed” and was “no longer an issue.” At Leila’s suggestion, Pip had shown the Facebook pictures to an auto mechanic and learned that, unless Flayner’s pickup had a custom suspension, the load on its bed had probably been less than the nine hundred pounds of a real B61. “It aint a real one, sugar” was still the only statement that Leila or Pip had gotten from Flayner directly. Leila’s one phone call to him had quickly ended with threats and curses.

Walker, too, had said no to her, but merely “no,” and merely “no” meant “maybe.” She sat in her car, drinking green tea and replying to emails about other stories, until Walker himself came out of his house and strode straight toward her, across his sodden lawn. He was Jack Sprat lean and wearing a sweat suit with the purple and white of Texas Christian University. The Horned Frogs. She powered down her window.

“Who are you?” Walker said. He had a whiskey drinker’s complexion not unlike her husband’s.

“Leila Helou. Denver Independent.”

“That’s what I thought, and I already told you I got nothing to say to you.”

With whiskey, the capillary bloom was more diffusely rosy than with gin and less purple than with wine. Every university dinner party was a study in blooms.

“I have just a couple of very quick and straightforward questions,” Leila said. “Nothing that’s going to cause you any trouble.”

“You’re already trouble. I don’t want you on my street.”

“But if we could meet for a cup of coffee somewhere? Any time today is good for me.”

“You think I’m going to sit in public with you? I’m asking you politely to please go away. I couldn’t talk to you even if I wanted to.”

Not on my street. Not in public. Not allowed to talk.

“You’ve got a beautiful house,” she said. “I’ve been admiring it.”

She gave him a pleasant smile and touched the hair at her temple for no other reason than to let him see her fingers in her hair.

“Listen,” he said. “You seem like a nice lady, so I’m going to spare you a deal of trouble here. There’s no story. You think there’s something but there’s not. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“Easy, then,” she said. “Let’s clear it up. I’ll tell you why I think there’s something, you can explain to me why there’s not, and I can be home tonight in Denver, sleeping in my own bed.”

“I’d prefer you just start up your car and move it off this street.”

“Or not explain, if you don’t want to. You can just nod or shake your head. There’s no law against shaking your head, is there?”

She smiled again and demonstrated how to shake a head. Walker sighed as if unsure what to do.

“Here, I’m starting my car,” she said, starting it. “See? I’m going to leave your street.”

“Thank you.”

“But maybe there’s someplace you need to be? I can give you a lift.”

“I don’t need a lift.”

She turned off the engine, and Walker sighed more heavily.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I wouldn’t be a responsible journalist if I didn’t hear your side of the story.”

“There is no story.”

“Well, see, but that’s a side itself. Because other sides are saying there is a story. And some of those sides are telling me that you were paid off not to talk about it. And I’m wondering why the money, if there’s no story. You see what I’m saying?”

Walker bent down closer to her. His face was like a stained map of somewhere densely populated. “Who you been talking to?”

“I don’t betray sources. That’s the first thing you need to know about me. When you talk to me, you’re safe.”

“You think you’re smart.”

“No, in fact, I’m fairly female-brained about this stuff. I could really use your help to understand it.”

“Smart lady from the big city.”

“Just tell me a time and a landmark. Somewhere I can meet you. Somewhere anonymous.”

Anonymous was a preferred word of hers with male sources. It had all the right connotations. Anonymous was the opposite of the wife in Walker’s house. Who, at that very moment, opened the front door and called out, “Earl, who is that?”

Leila bit her lip.

“Reporter lady,” Walker shouted back. “She needs directions out of town.”

“You tell her you got nothing to say to her?”

“What I just said to you.”

After the door had closed again, Walker spoke without looking at Leila. “Behind the Centergas depot on Cliffside. Be there at three. You don’t see me by four, you may as well head on home to that bed of yours in Denver.”

As Leila drove away from his house, on the rush of his yes, the kind of rush she lived for as a journalist, she had to tell herself not to speed. Who could have guessed that, of the ten tricks she’d tried, dropping the word bed would be the one that got to him?

Back in her hotel room, she speed-dialed with the letter P.

“This is Pip Tyler,” Pip said in Denver.

“Hello, hello. I just landed a date with Earl Walker.”

“Hey!”

“I also got Phyllisha Babcock’s story.”

“Nice.”

“The most hilarious thing you ever heard. Flayner borrowed the weapon as a sex aid.”

“She told you that?”

“It would have been TMI if there were such a thing in this business. But she did also confirm the weapon was a dummy.”

“Oh.”

“It’s still a good story, Pip. If a worker can take a dummy out, he could take a real one, too. It’s still a story.”

“I guess it’s good to know the world is safer than I thought.”

As Leila filled her in on the details, she was glad, as a person, if not as a boss, that Pip seemed in no hurry to get back to the research she was doing for another reporter on the credentialing of coroners.

“I should let you read your autopsy reports,” Leila said finally. “How’s that going?”

“Borink.”

“Well. You have to pay your dues.”

“I’m describing, not complaining.”

Leila resisted a surge of emotion. Then she surrendered to it. “I miss you.”

“Oh — thank you.”

She waited, hoping for more.

“I miss you, too,” Pip said.

“I wish I’d brought you with me.”

“It’s OK. I’m not going anywhere.”

Leila felt keenly, after the call, that she liked the girl too much. “I miss you” was already more than she had a right to elicit from a subordinate and still not as much as she wanted to hear. She felt dissatisfied and exposed and somewhat nuts. The tenderness she felt with children had always had a physical component, situated close in her body to the part that wanted intimacy and sex. But the reason she felt such tenderness was that, no matter how she warmed to a child in her arms, she knew she would never betray and exploit its innocence. This was why nothing could replace having kids — this structural insatiability, both painful and delicious, of parental love.

Uncannily enough, Pip’s actual name was Purity. (She called herself Pip Tyler on her résumé, but Leila had looked at her college transcript.) The name seemed apt to Leila without her being able to say exactly why. Certainly Pip was no innocent sexually. She was shacked up in Denver with a boyfriend about whom she’d been resolutely tight-lipped, saying only that he was a musician named Stephen. She’d also been living in serious squalor in Oakland, surrounded by dirty anarchists, and her pictures of Cody Flayner’s barbecue had been obtained by lawless hacking. Leila wondered if the innocence she sensed in Pip was actually her own innocence at the age of twenty-four. Back then, she’d had no concept of how little she knew, but she could see it clearly now in Pip.

She wanted to be a good feminist role model and give Pip the direction she herself had lacked at that age. “The irony of the Internet,” she’d said to her at lunch one day, “is that it’s made the journalist’s job so much easier. You can research in five minutes what used to take five days. But the Internet is also killing journalism. There’s no substitute for the reporter who’s worked a beat for twenty years, who’s cultivated sources, who can see the difference between a story and a non-story. Google and Accurint can make you feel very smart, but the best stories come when you’re out in the field. Your source makes some offhand remark, and suddenly you see the real story. That’s when I feel most alive. When I’m sitting at the computer, I’m only half alive.”

Pip listened to Leila attentively but noncommittally. She had the modern college grad’s reluctance to express a strong opinion, for fear of being uncool or disrespectful. It did occur to Leila that Pip wasn’t actually innocent at all — that, to the contrary, she was wiser than Leila, that she and her peers were well aware of what a terminally fucked-up world they were inheriting, and that Leila herself was the innocent one. But she persisted in thinking that Pip’s coolness was merely a generational style, and looking for ways to break through it.

Pip seemed to drink either not at all or way too much. Leila had been treating her to dinners out, to make sure she got some good meals, and had drunk alone at them. But the previous week, on Thursday night, Pip had ordered a glass of wine and dispatched it in two minutes. After she’d done the same to a second glass, she asked if she could order a bottle; she offered, ridiculously, to pay for it. An hour later, the bottle empty, her dinner barely touched, she was crying. Leila reached across the table and put her hand on her flushed face. She said, “Oh, honey.”

Pip pushed away from the table and ran to the bathroom. When she returned, she asked if she might, this once, come home with Leila and sleep on her sofa or something.

“Oh, honey,” Leila said again. “Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Pip said. “I just feel so alone here. I miss my mom.”

Leila preferred not to think about the girl’s mother. “It’s fine if you want to come home with me,” she said. “There are just some things you need to know about my situation.”

Pip quickly nodded.

“Or maybe you’ve already heard about it.”

“Some of it.”

“Well, ordinarily I’d be at Tom’s tonight — I’m presuming that’s part of what you know. But I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“It’s OK. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“No! It’s lovely that you asked. But I’m sort of a guest at the other house. If you could live with a little bit of sneaking…”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“I wouldn’t offer if it weren’t all right with me.”

Charles’s house was three blocks from the creative-writing offices. He could have wheeled himself to and from work — could also have retired — but he preferred to conduct his workshops and office hours from home. The house was a lair that he did his best never to leave; he said he’d rather be the absolute ruler of a 2,000-square-foot kingdom than be that wheelchair dude in the outside world. He had fair control of his bowels, remarkable abdominal and shoulder strength, and great dexterity with his chair. He still drank too much, but he’d cut back because he intended to live a long time. His paraplegia had objectified his grievance with the literary world, which, he believed, wanted more than ever for him to simply go away, and he wasn’t going to give it that satisfaction.

Leila still spent half her weekends at Charles’s, but she didn’t sleep with him. She had her own — slight — room at the front of the hallway leading to the big cat’s bedroom. She would have liked to slip Pip into the house unobserved, but it was only ten o’clock and the living-room lights were on when they pulled into the driveway.

“Well,” she said. “It looks like you’ll meet my husband. Are you sure you’re up for that?”

“I’m curious, actually.”

“That’s the journalistic spirit.”

Leila knocked on the front door, unlocked it, and stuck her head in to warn Charles that he had two visitors. They found him lying on the sofa with a pile of student writing on his chest and a red pencil in his hand. He still had his looks and his long hair, which he wore in a nearly white ponytail. Near at hand was a whiskey bottle, stoppered. Books were shelved floor to ceiling and standing in stacks on the floor.

“This is one of our research interns, Pip Tyler,” Leila said.

“Pip,” Charles boomed, looking the girl up and down in open sexual appraisal. “I like your name. I have great expectations of you. Aieee — you must get that a lot.”

“Seldom so neatly put,” Pip said.

“Pip needs a place to sleep tonight,” Leila said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Are you not my wife? Is this not our house?” Charles laughed less than nicely.

“Anyway, so,” Leila said, edging toward the front hall.

“Are you a reader, Pip? Do you read books? Is the sight of so many books in one room at all frightening to you?”

“I like books,” Pip said.

“Good. Good. And are you a big fan of Jonathan Savoir Faire? So many of my students are.”

“You mean the book about animal welfare?”

“The very one. He’s a novelist, too, I’m told.”

“I read the animal book.”

“So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you’d think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.” He arched an eyebrow at Pip. “And what about Zadie Smith? Great stuff, right?”

“Charles,” Leila said.

“Sit with me. Have a drink.”

“A drink is more or less exactly what we don’t need. And you’ve got stories to read.”

“Before my long and restful night’s sleep.” He picked up a student story. “‘We were doing lines as long and fat as milk-shake straws.’ The flaw in this simile: can we spot it? Pip? Can you tell me what’s less than airtight about this simile?”

Pip seemed to be enjoying the show that Charles was putting on for her. “Is there a difference between milk-shake straws and other straws?”

“Good point, good point. The hobgoblin of spurious specificity. And the tubularity of a drinking straw, the dull sheen of its plastic — the suspicion creeps in that the author is personally unacquainted with the physical properties of powder cocaine. Or that he’s confused the substance with the tool for nasally delivering the substance.”

“Or he’s just trying too hard,” Pip said.

“Or trying too hard. Yes. I’m going to write those very words in the margin. Would you believe that I have colleagues who won’t make marginal notations? I actually care about this student. I think he could do better, if he could only see what he’s doing wrong. Tell me, do you believe in the soul?”

“I don’t like to think about it,” Pip said.

“Charles.”

He gave Leila a look of comically sorrowful reproach. Must she deny him, the wheelchair dude, his iota of pleasure? “The soul,” he said to Pip, “is a chemical sensation. What you see lying on this sofa is a glorified enzyme. Every enzyme has its special job to do. It spends its life looking for the specific molecule it’s designed to interact with. And can an enzyme be happy? Does it have a soul? I say yes to both questions! What the enzyme you see lying here was made to do is find bad prose, interact with it, and make it better. That’s what I’ve become, a bad-prose-correcting enzyme, floating in my cell here.” He nodded at Leila. “And she worries that I’m not happy.”

Pip’s eyes widened with swallowed comment.

“She’s still looking for her molecule,” Charles continued. “I already know mine. Do you know yours?”

“I’m going to set Pip up in the basement room,” Leila said.

“Safe, but not completely safe,” he said. “I’ve conquered those stairs more than once.”

In the basement, Leila put Pip to bed and then sat near her, under an afghan, drinking from a bottle of wine that she’d opened out of nervous agitation and shared with Pip against her better judgment. The wine and the bed and the girl’s proximity brought out something predatory in her, something ardent and greedy, the same inherited Helou thing that had once landed her Charles and, later, Tom. She told Pip how she’d ended up with two men, the husband whose care she managed and the boyfriend she loved. She didn’t mention having wanted children, because the story of her disappointment felt too personal and too relevant to what she was doing at this moment: sitting at the bedside of a daughter-aged girl. But she kept drinking and told Pip a lot. She told her that if she ever had to choose between men she’d probably choose Charles, because she’d made a vow to him and had arguably ruined his life, and that Charles was OK with this. That he still needed her and was still sometimes capable of sex. That he’d sussed out a lot about Tom and enjoyed baiting her about him, and that, although she did acknowledge that Tom existed, she never referred to him by name. That in more than a decade the two men had never met. That the molecule for which she was evidently the matching enzyme was the care of disabled older men. That, contrary to Charles’s theory, interacting with this molecule didn’t make her happy. That happy would have been a life entirely with Tom.

“The job is mine, though,” she said. “His children never forgave him for leaving their mother, and they’re pretty screwed up anyway. I’m all he’s got.”

Hearing this, Pip began to cry again. Leila took her wineglass away from her, obviously too late, and held her hand. “Won’t you tell me what’s upsetting you tonight?”

“I’ve just been feeling really alone.”

“It’s hard when the only person you know in a town is your boyfriend.”

Pip didn’t respond to this.

“Are things OK with you two?”

“I’m thinking I might have to go back to California soon.”

“Because things aren’t working out with your boyfriend?”

Pip shook her head and reluctantly divulged. Her student debt, she said, was so large that most of her small intern salary was going to payments on it; she couldn’t afford to be in Denver unless she lived rent-free. Her debt was from both college and the private high school she’d attended in Santa Cruz — her mother had kept telling her not to worry about the money. And her mother, though not technically disabled, was emotionally handicapped and had no support network. There was no one but Pip to look after her, and all Pip could see in her own future was nursing her. “It makes me feel like I’m already an old person myself,” she said.

“You’re the opposite of old.”

“But I feel so guilty being this far away from her. Like, what am I even doing here? It’s some kind of unsustainable fantasy.”

How Leila wished that she could offer to let Pip live with her. But even though she seemed to have two homes, she had none that was actually hers. Not the finest of feminist role-modeling. “It’s only been two months,” she said. “Surely you can be away from California for longer than two months.”

“You don’t understand,” Pip said. “What makes me feel so guilty is that I don’t want to go back there. I love working with you and learning from you. But when I think about not going back, it just breaks my heart to think of her alone in our cabin, missing me.”

“I do understand,” Leila said. “You’re describing my daily life.”

“But at least you’re in the same town. You had bad luck, but you found the right way to deal with it. Sometimes I wish…”

“What do you wish?”

Pip shook her head. “I’ve already kept you up way too late.”

“Not the other way around?”

“Sometimes I wish I’d gotten to have a parent more like you.”

The little basement room seemed to spin, and not just from the wine in Leila’s head.

“Well,” she said briskly, patting Pip’s hand and standing up, “I wouldn’t have minded having a daughter like you, either, so.”

“Thank you for the dinner and the wine.”

“You’re very welcome.”

“We’ll both be sorry tomorrow.”

“Just hungover. Not sorry, I hope.”

Leila gave a false little laugh for which she punished herself, as she climbed the basement stairs, by striking her forehead with the heel of her hand. Upstairs, Charles was snoring on the sofa, the student stories on the floor, the whiskey bottle damaged. She woke him with a kiss on his forehead. “Ready to go to bed?”

“Ready to piss.”

He didn’t require her help in getting into his chair, but he appreciated it. There was a narrow but deep way in which she was closer to him than she would ever be to anyone else. The two of them had no secrets. Over the years, being a novelist, Charles had guessed and gleefully trumpeted pretty much every feeling she’d ever had about Tom. If she still declined to speak Tom’s name, it was to protect his privacy, not hers. It was a little game that Charles was fine with playing.

The master-bedroom end of the house had a faint but inexpungible scent of skin lotions and fart. In the bathroom, she stood by the railinged toilet and watched Charles’s urine issue from his penis in a healthy stream. It did both of them good for her to witness his bodily functions. It was a way of doing something for each other. Even when she handled the penis to ejaculation, it wasn’t just for him. He was the baby she’d got.

“When I heard your car,” he said, “I thought, ‘Thursday! What a nice surprise.’”

“I appreciate your letting her stay here.”

“Then I thought, ‘Trouble on the Other Home Front?’”

“You weren’t kidding about needing to pee.”

“My continence speaks to the existence of a Deity for which evidence is otherwise scant.”

“I’m a little nuts about that girl.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You thinking of jumping the fence?”

“God, no. She’s more like a lost puppy that found its way to me.”

“You can keep her in the basement, but you’d have to do the house-training.”

“Where did Rosie put the clean pajamas?”

“They’re right in front of you.”

“Ah, yes. They’re right in front of me.”

The next morning, somewhat hungover, she went to Tom and told him he had to hire Pip as a full-fledged researcher, with a salary she could live on. Tom pointed out that Pip hadn’t finished her internship. Leila said, “She’s good, she’s worth it, and she needs the money right now.” And Tom, with a shrug, assented. Before he could change his mind, she went and found Pip and told her the good news.

“That’s great,” Pip said in a small voice.

For a moment, Leila wondered whether she was doing something selfish, something disturbed even, by trying to keep Pip in Denver. But the girl herself had said she didn’t want to leave.

“Now let’s find you a place to live,” Leila said cheerfully. “We can start by asking around the office.”

Pip nodded, seeming underjoyed.

* * *

The meeting with Earl Walker, behind the propane depot on Amarillo’s outskirts, lasted less than fifteen minutes. Walker stayed in his truck, speaking through the open window, and left the engine running. He admitted to having accepted a $250,000 severance payment after he’d remarked to plant management that everyone would be happier if he was happy. He further admitted to having been fired for cause, the cause being that he’d done some drinking, once, while on the job. One time, Cody Flayner had had to cover for him, and Flayner, having a taste for blackmail and being a generally nasty little shit, had made him pay for it by doing the egress paperwork on the mock B61, so that Flayner could play a prank on his girlfriend. Walker wasn’t proud of himself, but he insisted that he’d done nothing dangerous. The mock B61 had been shipped in error from Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, and a carload of Air Force investigators had come by to examine it, but Kirtland hadn’t yet dispatched a truck to repossess it. If Flayner hadn’t been so stupid as to show the thing off to his buddies, and post pictures of it, there would have been no harm, no foul.

“You did not hear any of this from me,” Walker said, shifting his truck into drive.

“Absolutely not,” Leila said. “Your wife can attest to the fact that you refused to talk to me.”

Her mind was already moving on to a story she was developing on mining-industry ties to the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. She still needed to interview plant management about the mock B61, but the smallness of the Flayner story was becoming apparent. It would disappoint Pip, the smallness, and Leila decided to let the girl write it and share the byline.

Back in her hotel room, she tried calling Pip and Tom and then texted them. That both texts went unanswered for some hours, while she plowed through the tax filings and COI disclosure statements that Pip had dug up for her, became noteworthy only when Tom returned her call, around ten thirty Denver time.

“Where you been?” she asked.

“Out to dinner,” he said. “I took your girl to dinner.”

Leila immediately had a bad feeling, as if she’d felt a tooth crack.

“I always take new hires to dinner,” Tom said.

“Right. Of course. And where’d you go?”

“Place That Used to Be the Corner Bistro.”

The Place That Used to Be the Corner Bistro was her and Tom’s place. They liked to reward it for its name.

“I have no imagination for restaurants,” he said. “My mind becomes a perfect blank.”

“It’s kind of funny to think of you there without me.” There was a tremor in Leila’s voice.

“I had the same thought. I don’t think I’ve ever been there without you.”

But he’d taken other new hires to dinner, and in each case he’d had enough imagination to think of restaurants other than the one where he and Leila went. Although the two of them never fought — hadn’t fought in so many years that she’d thought they never would again — she was remembering the foretaste now, the constriction of her chest.

“Maybe I was wrong,” she said, “but I had the sense you weren’t even comfortable around Pip.”

“Not wrong. You’re never wrong.”

“She reminds you of Anabel.”

“Of Anabel? No.”

“She’s the same type. If I can see it, you can definitely see it.”

“Completely different personality. And you were right — I’m glad we hired her.”

“Always Listen to Leila.”

“The words I live by. But I ran something by her. Tell me what you think of this. I said I’d run it by you, too.”

“Move her out of research and into reporting?”

“Ah, no. That’s worth discussing, but no. I asked her if she might want to live with you and me for a while. I gather she’s beyond broke.”

Fighting was like vomiting. The prospect grew more dreadful with each year that passed without her doing it. Even when she finally fell ill and needed to throw up, and even though she rationally knew that it would bring relief, she struggled to hold the vomit in as long as possible. And fighting was even worse, because fighting didn’t bring relief. Fighting was more like death in that regard: just keep postponing.

“Your house,” she said, trying to steady her voice. “Pip living in your house.”

“Our house. Didn’t you tell me you wished you could take her in?”

“Actually, what I said was that I wished I had a place that I could offer her. I don’t think of your house as a place I can offer.”

“I think of it as our house.”

“I know you do. And you know I don’t. Which is a long discussion I don’t feel like having right now.”

“I didn’t promise her anything.”

“Well, I’m not loving the position that puts me in. Of being the one who nixed it, and her knowing it was me.”

“I can tell her I had second thoughts myself, so you’re not in that position. But help me understand why you’re nixing it? I thought you wanted her to live with you.”

“You didn’t even like being in the same room with the girl until tonight. It seems like a pretty fast one-eighty on your part.”

“Leila. Come on. You’re the one who’s smitten with her. I’m not going to take her from you. And she couldn’t take me from you if she made it her entire life’s mission. She’s a child.”

Leila didn’t know who to be more jealous of, Tom or Pip. But together the two jealousies made her feel like simply bowing out.

“It’s fine with me,” she said. “Do whatever you want.”

“When you say it like that?”

“What do you want me to say? That there’s something wrong with my head? That I’m smitten with a girl I’ve only known two months? That I’m jealous? I’m not going to fight about this. You just caught me by surprise.”

“She and I talked about you.”

“How nice.”

“She wants to be like you.”

“She must be out of her mind.”

“Well, there is one thing. Or rather, isn’t. She should probably tell you this herself, but she’s so in awe of you that she’s afraid to. There isn’t any boyfriend.”

“What?”

“She’s in a Lakewood share with two other girls. She made up the whole thing about a boyfriend. Or, to be precise, there is a guy, who is named Stephen. But he lives in California and has a wife.”

“She told you this?”

“I have some skill at eliciting things myself.”

Leila ought to have felt betrayed, but mostly she felt sorry for Pip. Happy people didn’t tell lies. “Why did she do that?”

“Didn’t want to seem overeager to be in Denver. Didn’t want you to know how alone she is. Didn’t want to seem pathetic to you. I gather the reason she wanted to get out of California was her situation with the married guy there. But this is part of why it occurred to me that she could live with us. She’s very talented but kind of a mess.”

“You’re not attracted to her.”

“I can’t even describe how far off the radar that is.”

The risk of a fight was waning. To talk about something else, Leila mentioned her meeting with Earl Walker and her idea of letting Pip write the story, since it was small.

“Why did Walker meet with you?” Tom said.

As soon as he said it, she saw it.

“Ah,” she said. “You’re good.”

“All I said was ‘Why did he meet with you?’”

“No, but that’s it. I was so fixated on Pip, on her being disappointed. It’s a good question.”

“Happy to help.”

“Because there was one thing Walker said. He said Albuquerque had sent over a car full of investigators. It just sailed right past me.”

“You were fixated on Pip.”

“OK, OK.”

“We’re the team, right? I’m not the enemy.”

“I said OK.”

“Reinterview.”

When she got off the phone, she saw that a text from Pip had come in: I have a confession to make. Good girl, Leila thought. Good for her.

She herself was off her game. She’d totally botched her meeting with Walker. He’d been rushed and flighty, but this didn’t excuse her not having asked the obvious question: Why did Kirtland AFB ship a dummy weapon to Amarillo in the first place? This was the question that Walker had met with her to be asked. The plant wouldn’t have paid a quarter-million dollars to shut him up about some harmless prank. But a weapon that had gone missing in Albuquerque? Swapped out for a training dummy?

Even more embarrassing was why she hadn’t thought to ask the question. She’d assumed that the reason that Walker was meeting with her was her self-presentation, her feminine wiles. She’d taken his allusion to her bed in Denver straight, when in fact it had been sarcastic. She was fifty-two. The hair she’d made a show of toying with was graying.

Ugh. Ugh.

Ambien normally knocked her right out, but on the nights when it didn’t she had no recourse; she’d heard too many somnambulism stories to take another dose. She lay and tossed on the drought-dry bed, which somehow smelled more strongly of cigarettes than it had the previous night, and considered the fact that Pip had lied to her. That Pip had fallen for somebody’s husband; had done or tried to do to a marriage what Leila herself had once done. That she herself was now the older, drier, pouchier-faced woman who once had been, as Pip was now, a mobile destabilizing menace, a kind of rogue warhead …

How terribly easy it had turned out to be to transform naturally occurring uranium into hollow spheres of plutonium, pack the spheres with tritium and surround them with explosives and deuterium, and do it all in such miniature that the capacity to incinerate a million people could fit on the bed of Cody Flayner’s pickup. So easy. Incomparably easier than winning the war on drugs or eliminating poverty or curing cancer or solving Palestine. Tom’s theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom. Leila neither liked this theory nor had a better one; her feeling about all doomsday scenarios was Please make me the first person killed; but she’d forced herself to read accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what it was like to have had your skin burned off entirely and still be staggering down a street, alive. Not just for Pip’s sake did she want the Amarillo story to be large. The world’s fear of nuclear weapons was unaccountably unlike her fear of fighting and vomiting: the longer the world lasted without ending in mushroom clouds, the less afraid people seemed to be. The Second World War was remembered more for the extermination of Jews, more even for the firebombing of Dresden or the siege of Leningrad, than for what had happened on two August mornings in Japan. Climate change got more ink in a day than nuclear arsenals did in a year. To say nothing of the NFL passing records that Peyton Manning had broken as a Denver Bronco. Leila was afraid and felt like the only one who was.

Or almost the only one. Pip was afraid, too. The mother who’d named her Purity appeared to have taught her very little about how the world worked, and this meant that Pip looked at things with eyes unclouded by preconception. She saw a planet on which there were still seventeen thousand nukes, probably enough to wipe vertebrate life off the face of it, and thought This can’t be good.

There had been a time when taking in a houseguest would have inhibited Leila and Tom; when they’d drawn the blinds and curtains and walked around his house naked for the pleasure of entrusting each other with the sight of their no longer so young bodies; when the refrigerator door and the living-room floor had been viable surfaces against which to brace herself for him. Although that time was long gone, they’d never formally acknowledged its passing — so much remained unspoken behind the glare on Tom’s glasses — and Leila couldn’t help feeling hurt that he’d unilaterally acknowledged it by inviting the girl to live with him.

Fusion chain reactions were natural, the source of a sun’s energy, but fission chain reactions weren’t. Fissile plutonium atoms were nature’s unicorns, and nowhere in the universe could a critical mass of them naturally assemble itself. People had to force it to occur, and to force the mass further, with explosives, into a superdense state in which the chain reaction could proceed through enough generations to ignite fusion. And how quickly it all happened. Jiggling atomic droplets of plutonium ingesting neutron newcomers, cleaving into smaller atomic droplets, spewing further neutrons. Skinless people staggering down the street with their entrails and eyeballs hanging out …

They should have had a baby. In a way, it was an immense relief not to have had one, not to have brought another life to a planet that would be incinerated quickly or baked to death slowly; not to have to worry about that. And yet they should have done it. Leila loved Tom and admired him beyond measure, she felt blessed by the ease of her life with him, but without a child it was a life of leaving things unspoken. Of cuddling in the evening, watching cable dramas together, inhabiting broad areas of agreement, avoiding the few hots spots of past disagreements, and drifting toward old age. Her sudden ardor for Pip was irrational but not senseless, not sexual but intense; compensatory. She didn’t know what exactly would come of permitting a newcomer into the nucleus of her and Tom, but she pictured a mushroom cloud.

* * *

Three and a half weeks after Pip moved in, Leila went to Washington. Along with the warhead story, she was reporting a statistics-driven piece about the lax enforcement of tax law in the tech industry. All the Washington hotels in her permitted price class were dispiriting, and she was staying in one of them. She would have liked to go home to Denver sooner, but her favorite senator, the most liberal member of the Armed Services Committee, had promised her fifteen Friday-afternoon minutes before he followed the rest of Congress out of town. She’d arranged the meeting in person, with his chief of staff, so as not to leave a phone or email trail. Since the advent of NSA dragnets, she’d operated more and more by Moscow Rules. Members of Congress were especially attractive sources, because they weren’t polygraphed.

Working her Pentagon contacts, some of whom she’d known since her Post days, she’d pieced together a sanitized version of what had happened in Albuquerque. Yes, ten B61 weapons had been trucked to Amarillo for scheduled refurbishment and circuitry upgrades. Yes, one of them had turned out to be an unarmed facsimile normally stored on the base near the real weapons, for use in training the accident-response team. Yes, bar coding and microchip self-identifiers had been tampered with. Yes, there had ensued eleven days when a real weapon was off the grid and presumably stored in a poorly secured shed. Yes, heads had rolled. Yes, the weapon was now “fully accounted for” and had never been less than fully safed. No, the Air Force would not provide any details of the theft or disclose the identity of the perpetrator(s).

“There’s no such thing as ‘fully safed,’” Ed Castro, a nukes expert at Georgetown, had told her. “Safe from detonating if you whack it with a hammer, sure. Safe from circumventing the code mechanisms, probably. We also suspect that later-generation bombs ‘poison’ their own cores if you tamper with them. But the thing about mid-period weapons like the B61 is that they’re sickeningly simple at heart. All the really high technology comes in prior to the assembly of the weapon. Creating and refining the plutonium and hydrogen isotopes: unbelievably difficult and costly. Designing the lens geometry of the high explosives: difficult. But putting the pieces together and making them go boom? Sadly, not so difficult. If you’ve got time and a couple of PhDs, reverse engineering the ignition circuitry is eminently doable. The result won’t be so elegant and miniature, and the yield might be reduced, but you’ll have a working thermonuclear weapon.”

“Who would want one?” Leila said, half rhetorically.

Castro was the kind of quote hound reporters loved. “The usual suspects,” he said. “Islamic terrorists. Rogue states. James Bond movie villains. Would-be extortionists. Conceivably antinuke activists hoping to prove a point. These are the end users, and thankfully they’re a fairly feckless lot. The more interesting thing to think about is who their potential suppliers would be. Who’s really good at getting and moving stuff they’re not supposed to have? Who goes around collecting that kind of stuff in case it comes in handy?”

“The Russian Mob, for example.”

“In the years before Putin took over, I used to wake up in the morning and marvel that I was still alive.”

“But then the Russian Mob became indistinguishable from the Russian government.”

“The kleptocracy has definitely improved nuclear security.”

Reporting was imitation life, imitation expertise, imitation worldliness, imitation intimacy; mastering a subject only to forget it, befriending people only to drop them. And yet, like so many imitative pleasures, it was highly addictive. Outside the Dirksen Building, on Friday afternoon, Leila saw other Hill reporters milling in little clouds of self-importance that she could discern because she was inhabiting one herself and was affronted by the sight of others. Had they, like her, removed the batteries from their smartphones, to hide their location from the dragnet? She doubted it.

The senator was only twenty-five minutes behind schedule. His staff chief, apparently preferring deniability, didn’t join him and Leila in his office.

“You’re annoying the Air Force,” the senator said when they were alone. “Nice work.”

“Thank you.”

“Obviously we’re strictly on background. I’m going to give you the names of other people who’ve been briefed, and you need to leave an electronic trail of contacting every one of them. I want this story told, but it’s not worth losing a committee seat over.”

“Is it that big a deal?”

“It’s not that big a deal. Medium-size, maybe. But the mania for secrecy is out of control. Are you aware that the agencies don’t just number and watermark the classified reports we get now? They do something with the spacing between the letters of each copy — the kerning?”

“Kerning, yes.”

“Apparently it creates a unique signature for each copy. In Technology We Trust. Need to put that on the new hundred-dollar bill.”

Over the years, Leila had come to believe that politicians were literally made of special stuff, chemically different stuff. The senator was flabby and bad-haired and acne-scarred and yet completely magnetic. His pores exuded some pheromone that made her want to look at him, keep hearing his voice, be liked by him. And she did feel liked. Everyone he wanted to be liked by did.

“So you could have heard this from any number of people,” he said when she’d written down the names. “The problem is we trust technology. We put our trust in the safing of the warheads, and we neglect the human side, because tech problems are easy and human problems are hard. That’s where the whole country is right now.”

“Easier to put journalists out of work than to find something to replace us with.”

“Drives me crazy. I don’t have to tell you what morale is like in the bomber and silo crews. We don’t trust technology quite enough to replace them with machines. We may yet reach that point, but in the meantime those postings are career suicide. You get the worst and the least bright, safeguarding our most terrible weapons and bored out of their minds. Cheating on their exams, breaking rules, flunking urine tests. Or not flunking them.”

“In Albuquerque?”

“If you’re thinking crystal meth, think again. These are career officers. Don’t even write down the name Richard Keneally, but remember it. The Man Who Can — apparently there’s at least one on every base. I hope you don’t mind that I’m summarizing many pages of a report that has a unique typographical signature, rather than letting you read it?”

“You have a plane to catch.”

“The drugs are almost all prescription stuff. Adderall, OxyContin. Drugs to help you pass the time while your classmates from the academy are flying actual missions or eating Lockheed’s shrimp. You know my feelings about the nation’s drug laws. Suffice it to say, we’re talking about officer drugs, not grunt drugs. But still, whatever the legal inequities, they’re a no-no in the armed services. They’ll still light up a tox screen. Which, if you’re the Man Who Can, is the real ceiling on the growth of your business. What to do about that?”

Leila shook her head.

“Have the friendly friends who supply you with the drugs quietly take over the lab that tests the urine.”

“Really,” Leila said.

“I wish I could show you the report,” the senator said. “Because it gets better, which is to say worse. Who are the friendly friends? I hate the word cartel, it’s completely wrong. We should call them DHLes Especiales or FedExes Extralegales, because that’s what they are. If you’re manufacturing fake cancer drugs in Wuhan and you need to get a container of your product to the American consumer, who are you going to call? DHL Especial. Same thing for weapons, designer knockoffs, underage prostitutes, and, obviously, drugs of all kinds. One call serves all. The American middle-class appetite for illegal drugs provided the capital to build some of the most sophisticated and effective companies on earth. Their business is delivering the goods, and their offices aren’t far south of the border. And our Man Who Can, Richard Keneally, whose name you’re remembering but not writing down, was doing business with them for several years, right under the noses of sundry inspectors general, and it only came to light because a training-replica B61 turned up where it shouldn’t have.”

“Did the real weapon leave the base?”

“Fortunately no. The story is extremely sad and disturbing but also funny in a way. DHL Especial may or may not have had a buyer for the weapon — we’ll never know. But before Richard Keneally could even try to get the ‘replica,’ which is to say the real weapon — before he could get it off the base, he tripped on a parking stop and fell on a bottle of tequila he was carrying. The broken glass severed an artery, he nearly bled out, and he was stuck in a hospital for a week. That’s the part that’s a little bit funny. The part that isn’t is that Keneally apparently couldn’t deliver the warhead as scheduled, and he had no way of letting the Especiales know why he hadn’t. His two sisters had both disappeared, one in Knoxville, one in Mississippi, around the time the warhead swap occurred. Apparently they were kidnapped as security for the deal. They both ended up dead behind a car dealership in Knoxville, with single gunshots to the back of the head. One of the sisters had three children. The only bright spot is that the children weren’t harmed.”

Leila was writing as fast as she could. “Good God,” she said.

“It’s terrible. But to me it’s as much a story about the utter failure of the war on drugs, about trusting in technology instead of taking care of people, as it is about our nuclear arsenal.”

“I see that,” Leila said, still writing.

“It was all going to come out even if you hadn’t come here with your questions. The WaPo’s already on the demotion and reassignment of the officers Keneally sold to. They know about the drug dealing. Only a matter of time before someone leaks the rest.”

“You’ve talked to the Post?”

The senator shook his head. “Still being punished by this office for something unrelated.”

“Why did Keneally do it?”

“The speculation is partly money, partly fear for his life.”

“Are you saying he’s not in custody?”

“You’ll have to ask someone else.”

“That sounds like a no.”

“Draw your own conclusions. And let me reiterate that none of this goes on your site until you have independent confirmation.”

“We don’t like single-source stories. We’re old-fashioned that way.”

“This is known to us. It’s one reason you and I are sitting here. Or have been.” The senator stood up. “I actually do have a plane to catch.”

“How was Keneally going to get the weapon off the base?”

“That’s it, Leila. You already have more than you need to get the rest of it.”

He was right about that. One of the best stories of her career was in the bag. The rest would be routine triangulate-and-bluff—“I’m just confirming that I have my facts right”—while she endured the sick-making anxiety that the Post or someone else, someone less scrupulous about multiple-sourcing, would scoop her.

Leaving the Dirksen, she thought about canceling her trip home to Denver, but the work she had to do now, to confirm the senator’s story, could only be done with in-person meetings, and on a mild and sunny spring weekend nobody she needed to see would be staying in D.C. Better to spend the weekend in Denver, writing and lining up interviews, and fly back on Sunday night.

Or so she rationalized it. The unfortunate, unflattering fact was that she didn’t want to leave Tom and Pip alone together for a weekend. She’d already been feeling resentfully beleaguered by how much she had to do — too many stories, a caregiver crisis at Charles’s house, the usual email and social-media onslaught (the former Mrs. Cody Flayner was writing to her daily, sending recipes and pictures of her kids) — and the new urgency of the Albuquerque story only added to her workload. The story was demanding and she its single parent. Even going home, she wouldn’t have much time for Tom or Pip. Their unscheduled freedom on the weekend seemed sybaritic in comparison. She knew it was important to resist jealousy and resentment and self-pity, but she was having a hard time of it.

On the Metro, her hand shook so much that it was hard to fill out the scribbles in her notebook, hard to tap out texts to Tom and Pip. By the time she boarded her Denver flight, her anxiety about being scooped was nearly disabling. There wasn’t enough room between seats for her to work without being observed by the businessman next to her, and her mind was too jumpy to concentrate on tech-industry taxes, and so she bought a split of wine and stared uselessly at the crawl of the jet icon across the route map on the seat-back screen. She bought a second split and applied it to her anxiety.

She had no rational case against Pip as a houseguest. The girl had yet to leave an unwashed dish or spoon in the sink, a light burning in an empty room. She’d even offered to do Tom and Leila’s laundry for them. They’d recoiled at the thought of her handling their underwear, but she explained that she’d never lived in a house with a functioning washer and dryer (“Total luxury”) and so they let her do the sheets and towels. She had little of the unearned entitlement for which kids of her generation were laughed at, but she didn’t apologize for being in the house or thank them too profusely for letting her be there. During the week, at least on the nights when Leila was home, she prepared her own separate dinner, retreated to her room, and didn’t show herself again. Come Friday night, though, she plunked herself down on a stool in the kitchen, let Tom shake her one of his perfect Manhattans, chopped garlic for Leila, and opened up with funny tales of squatter life in Oakland.

Leila ought to have been pleased with the arrangement. But she had reason to believe that, on the nights she worked late or had to be at Charles’s, Pip wasn’t staying in her room all evening. Twice already in a month, Leila had learned of important news — the unofficial approval of a $7.5 million grant to DI from the Pew Foundation, the selection of an unfriendly judge for a First Amendment case that DI was co-defending — not directly from Tom but from Tom by way of Pip. Having herself once been the beneficiary of an older man’s experience, Leila knew how nice it felt to be specially apprised of things, and how unaware the girl was of what a privilege it was, how unaware that people might resent her for it. Leila wondered if the guilt she’d come to feel about what she’d done to Charles’s first wife wasn’t guilt at all but anger; anger at the younger Leila who’d been granted entrée to the literary world because she was attractive to Charles; an older woman’s feminist anger at her younger self. She felt some of this anger as she watched Pip absorbing Tom’s wisdom and basking in the pleasure he took in her young company.

This wasn’t just theoretical. Twice already in a month, Tom had pounced on Leila in Charles-like ways. Once while she was standing at the bathroom mirror, removing her makeup, and he’d come up behind her with his cock already escaping from his pajamas, and again just a few nights later, when she’d turned out her reading light and felt his hand on her collarbone, which he liked, and on her neck, which he liked even more. This had been Tom’s way only in the beginning. Other understandings had long since superseded that one, and very minimal paranoia was required to connect the sudden change in Tom to the radiating presence, two doors down the hallway, of a full-chested, creamy-skinned, regularly menstruating twenty-four-year-old. If Leila had lived alone with Pip, she might have been happy to see the girl making herself at home, going braless under her sweatshirt after showering, digging her bare feet between sofa cushions while she lay and worked with the tablet device DI had issued her, the shampoo fragrance of her damp hair filling the room. But with Tom in the mix, the spillage of Pip around the house made Leila feel merely old.

The girl was doing nothing wrong, just being herself, but Leila could feel herself turning against her, envying her time alone with Tom, envying that she, not Leila, was getting to enjoy him. She believed that both he and Pip liked her too much to betray her, but it didn’t matter. Scarcely more than minimal paranoia was needed to imagine that Pip’s physical resemblance to Tom’s ex-wife had reawakened something in him, was curing him of his post-traumatic aversion to Anabel’s type, making it possible for him to again be attracted to it, and that this type was more truly his type, and that his preference for Leila’s type had been, all along, a reaction against the awfulness of his marriage: that Pip was the perfect avatar of young Anabel, his fundamental type without any Anabel baggage. When he’d asked Leila if she would mind his taking Pip to One Night in Miami, since Leila was going to be in Washington, she’d felt pinioned by her circumstances. How could she object to Tom going out with Pip when she herself spent so much time at Charles’s? Still gave the man hand jobs from time to time! She was stuck with an embittered wheelchair dude and could buy herself free time only at the cost of sleeping fewer hours, while Pip, who had no other friends, and Tom, who left the office promptly at seven every night, had plenty of free time and could hardly be faulted for spending it with each other.

Her resentment would have been more demonstrably irrational if she hadn’t persisted in feeling secondary in Tom’s inner life. Guilt wasn’t the only reason she’d stayed married to Charles. She’d never quite got over her suspicion that, however much Tom loved her for her own sake, it mattered to him that she hadn’t been young when he met her; that Anabel couldn’t fault him for being with her. Just as Anabel couldn’t fault him for operating an impeccably worthy news service with the money her father had left him. These moral considerations were still operative in him, and so her commitment to Charles continued to be strategic, a way of ensuring that she, too, like Tom, had someone else. But she was ruing it now.

The girl seemed largely unaware of her jealousy. Midway through her second Manhattan, the night before Leila had left for Washington, Pip had gone so far as to declare that Tom and Leila gave her hope for humanity.

“Say more,” Tom had said. “I think I can speak for Leila in saying we’d both like to offer hope to humanity.”

“Well, the work you do, obviously,” Pip said, “and the way you go about it. But all I’ve ever seen of couples is bad things. Either it’s lies and misunderstanding and abusiveness, or it’s this stifling, I don’t know, niceness.”

“Leila can be stiflingly nice.”

“I know. You’re making fun of me. But it’s like, with the really close couples I know, there’s no room for anybody else. It’s all about their wonderfulness as a couple. There’s kind of an old-sock smell to them, a this-morning’s-pancakes smell. I’m trying to say it’s nice for me to see it doesn’t have to be that way.”

“You’re making us very proud of ourselves.”

“Don’t tease her for giving us a compliment,” Leila said crossly.

“Anyway,” Pip said.

They were in Tom’s kitchen, and Leila, sensitive to Pip’s vegetarian inclinations, was making a zucchini frittata for dinner. Both she and Tom had noticed that whenever food was about to be sautéed, Pip went upstairs and shut the door of her bedroom. “You seem to be very sensitive to smells,” Tom said now. “Pancake smells, sock smells…”

“Smell is hell,” Pip said. She raised her Manhattan glass as if toasting the sentiment.

“I used to be married to someone who felt that way,” Tom said.

“But smell is also heaven,” Pip said. “I found that—” She stopped herself.

“What?” Leila said.

Pip shook her head. “I was just thinking about my mother.”

“Is she a super-smeller, too?” Tom said.

“She’s super anything to do with sensitivity. And she tends to be depressed, so smell is always hell for her.”

“You’re missing her,” Leila said.

Pip nodded.

“Maybe she’d like to come out here and visit you.”

“She doesn’t travel. She doesn’t drive, and she’s never set foot on an airplane.”

“She’s afraid of flying?”

“It’s more like she’s one of those mountain people who never leaves the mountains. She said she’d come to my college graduation, but I could tell how nervous the idea made her, riding the bus or asking somebody to take her, and I finally told her she didn’t have to. She was incredibly apologetic, but I could tell she was also incredibly relieved. And Berkeley’s not even two hours away.”

“Ha,” Tom said. “I would have loved not having my mother at my college graduation. She herself described it as the worst day of her life.”

“What happened?” Pip said.

“She had to meet the person I ended up marrying. It was a very bad scene.”

He said more about the scene, and Leila could hardly listen to it, not because she’d heard the story before but because she hadn’t. He’d had a decade-plus to tell her the story of his college graduation, and she was hearing it only as he recounted it to Pip. She wondered what other interesting things he’d told the girl while she was not around.

“You know, the wine’s not working for me,” she said from the stove. “Will you make me a Manhattan?”

“I’ll do it,” Pip said eagerly.

Leila had been drinking more since she’d met Pip. At the dinner table that night, she found herself ranting about the false promise of the Internet and social media as substitutes for journalism — the idea that you didn’t need Washington journalists when you could read the tweets of congressmen, didn’t need news photographers when everyone carried a phone with a camera, didn’t need to pay professionals when you could crowdsource, didn’t need investigative reporting when giants like Assange and Wolf and Snowden walked the earth …

She could feel herself targeting Pip with her rant, losing her cool by way of attacking Pip’s noncommittal coolness, but there was an undercurrent of grievance with Tom as well. He’d told her, a long time ago, that he’d met Andreas Wolf in Berlin, back when he was still married. All he would say was that Wolf was a magnetic but troubled person, with secrets of his own. But the way he said it gave Leila the impression that Wolf had meant a great deal to Tom. Like Anabel, Wolf belonged to the dark core of Tom’s inner life, the pre-Leila history against which she contended. Because she appreciated that he didn’t poke and probe her, she didn’t poke or probe him. But she couldn’t help noticing how closely Tom guarded his memories of Wolf, and she felt some of the same competitive jealousy she did toward Anabel.

This had already come to the surface a year ago, when she’d been honored with an interview by the Columbia Journalism Review. In response to a question about leakers, she’d laid into the Sunlight Project rather viciously. Tom was unhappy with her when he read the interview. Why antagonize the true believers who had nothing better to do with their days than to mischaracterize the “Luddites” who disagreed with them? Wasn’t Denver Independent just as wedded to the Internet as the Sunlight Project was? Why expose herself to cheap criticism? Leila had thought but hadn’t said: Because you don’t tell me anything.

As she continued her Manhattan-fueled rant at the dinner table, extending it to male-dominated Silicon Valley and the way it exploited not only female freelancers but women more generally, seducing them with new technologies for chitchat, giving them the illusion of power and advancement while maintaining control of the means of production — phony liberation, phony feminism, phony Andreas Wolf — Pip stopped eating and stared unhappily at her plate. Finally Tom, himself quite drunk, interrupted.

“Leila,” he said. “You seem to think we don’t agree with you.”

“Do you agree with me? Does Pip agree with me?” She turned to Pip. “Do you have an actual opinion to offer on this?”

Pip’s eyes widened and stayed fixed on her plate. “I understand where you’re coming from,” she said. “But I guess I don’t see why there can’t be room for both journalists and leakers.”

“Exactly,” Tom said.

“You don’t think Wolf is competing with you?” Leila said to him. “Competing and winning?” She turned to Pip again. “Tom and Wolf have a history.”

“You do?” Pip asked.

“We met in Berlin,” Tom said. “After the Wall came down. But that has nothing to do with this.”

“Really?” Leila said. “You hate Assange, but somehow Wolf gets a free pass. Everyone gives him a free pass. He gets carried around on people’s shoulders and hailed as a hero and a savior and a mighty feminist. And I don’t buy it for one second. I especially don’t buy his feminism.”

“No other leaker in the last decade has broken a bigger and better variety of stories. You’re just annoyed because he has as good a record as we do.”

“Uploading some dentist’s selfies of his thingy in the face of a female patient on Propofol? I guess you could call that a feminist act. But maybe feminist isn’t the best word to describe an upload like that?”

“He does better things than that. The Blackwater and Halliburton leaks were game changers.”

“But always with the same flimflam. Shining his pure light on a world of corruption. Lecturing other men on their sexism. It’s like he wants there to be a world full of women and only one man who understands them. I know that kind of guy. They give me the creeps.”

“What happened in Berlin?” Pip said.

“Tom doesn’t talk about it.”

“That’s true,” Tom said. “I don’t talk about it. Do you want me to talk about it now?”

Leila could see that the only reason he was offering was that the girl was there.

“With you here,” she said to Pip with a wretched little laugh, “I’m learning all sorts of things I didn’t know about Tom.”

Pip, no dummy, sensed the danger. “I don’t need to hear about Berlin,” she said. She reached for her wineglass and managed to knock it over. “Shit! I’m so sorry!”

Tom was the one to jump up and get paper towels. Charles, even before his accident, would have let Leila mop up the wine — Charles who almost never taught books by women, while Tom hired more female journalists than male ones. Tom was a strange hybrid feminist, behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile. “I get feminism as an equal-rights issue,” he’d said to her once. “What I don’t get is the theory. Whether women are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men.” And he’d laughed the way he did at things he found silly, and Leila had remained angrily silent, because she was a hybrid the other way around: conceptually a feminist but one of those women whose primary relationships had always been with men and who had benefited professionally, all her life, from her intimacy with them. She’d felt attacked by Tom’s laughter, and the two of them had been careful never to discuss feminism again.

Another thing not spoken of, in a life of things unspoken, a life that Leila had enjoyed until the girl became a part of it. Pip seemed very happy to be with them and had stopped making noises about returning to California; it wouldn’t be so easy to get rid of her. But Leila, to her sorrow, had started wishing that they could.

When the plane touched down in Denver, she checked her work email and then her texts. There was one from Charles: Does Cesar exist?

As soon as she was off the plane, she called him. “Is César there yet?”

“Still not,” Charles said. “It’s a matter of indifference to me, but I know how you like to bite them people’s heads off. And nibble on they tiny feet.”

“Fuck these people. What is so hard about getting someone to show up?”

“Rowrr!”

César, the new aide, was supposed to have been at Charles’s at six to give him a bath, PT, and a hot dinner. It was now eight thirty. The trouble with Charles was that he didn’t like having aides but didn’t dislike it so much that he forbade Leila to employ them and oversee them. As a result, she did a lot of work for little thanks.

Striding down the concourse, she called Tom’s home number and was shunted straight to voice mail. Next she called the agency.

“People Who Need People, this is Emma,” said a girl who sounded about twelve.

“This is Leila Helou and I want to know why César isn’t at Charles Blenheim’s.”

“Oh hi, Mrs. Blenheim,” Emma said cheerfully. “César should have been there at six.”

“I’m aware of that. But he was not there at six. He’s still not there.”

“OK, no problem. I’ll see if we can find out where he is.”

“‘No problem’? It is a problem! And this is not the first time.”

“I’ll find out where he is. It’s really no problem.”

“Please stop saying ‘no problem’ when we have a problem.”

“We’re a little shorthanded tonight. One sec … Oh, I see what happened. César had to fill in for another aide who got sick. He should be getting to Mr. Blenheim’s pretty soon.”

The agency couldn’t foresee a staff shortage? Thought it was OK to send someone three hours late and not notify them? Made a practice of pulling aides off scheduled visits and sending them to other clients? Didn’t even train its desk personnel to apologize?

Leila knew better than to ask these questions. She was halfway into the city when Emma called back. “OK, so, unfortunately it looks like César won’t be able to get away. But we do have someone else we can send out. She can’t do lifting, but she can help Mr. Blenheim with other things and keep him company.”

“Mr. Blenheim doesn’t need company. Mr. Blenheim only needs lifting.”

“OK, no problem. Let me reach out to César again.”

“Just forget the whole thing. Send a male aide out at nine tomorrow morning, and never mention the name César to me again. Can you do that for me? Is it no problem?”

Charles was perfectly capable of feeding himself and getting himself into bed, and Leila could feel that she was spiting herself by letting Tom and Pip enjoy an extra hour or two at home without her. But she did it anyway. She found Charles sitting in his chair in the hallway off his kitchen, where he’d randomly stopped. A smell of canned beef stew was in the air.

“God, you look depressing,” she said. “Why are you sitting in the hallway?”

“I’ve become kind of obsessed with this nonexistent César. There’s that great passage in Proust where Marcel talks about imagining the face of the girl you’ve only glimpsed from behind. How beautiful the unseen face always is. I have yet to experience the disappointing reality of César.”

“You must have been on your way somewhere when you stopped here. Maybe you want to go there?”

“It’s been nice getting better acquainted with the hallway.”

“What do you need?”

“A real bath, but that’s not going to happen. I suppose I could have a drink. Haven’t played the drink card yet.”

He wheeled himself into the living room, and she brought him his bottle and a glass.

“You should run along to your guy and your gamine,” he said.

“First tell me what else I can do for you.”

“You didn’t have to come here at all. In fact, it’s interesting that you did. Is everything OK on the other home front?”

“Things are fine.”

“You’ve got that parenthetical frown between your eyebrows.”

“I’m just really tired.”

“I don’t know your guy — haven’t had the pleasure. But the gamine has a daddy thing. Even the wheelchair dude was getting somewhere, in the few short minutes you gave me with her. I’ve always had a knack for bringing out daddy issues.”

“Huh. Thanks for that.”

“I didn’t mean you.” He frowned. “Was that what I was for you? Daddy?”

“No. But I probably did have issues.”

“None that I could smell the way I could with this girl. I’d advise keeping close watch.”

“Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?”

“I’m a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I’m poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.”

“It just seems like it must get very tiring.”

When she finally arrived at Tom’s, the only light she could see was from the kitchen. She loved his house and had made herself at home in it, but its very niceness was eternally a reminder that Anabel’s father’s money had paid for part of it. This may have been why she felt reluctant to so much as hang a picture of her own choosing in it, and why, for years, she’d tried to get Tom to accept rent checks from her. Since he refused them, she instead paid for Charles’s caregivers and sent large sums to EMILY’s List, to NARAL and NOW and Barbara Boxer, to ease her feminist conscience.

At the back door, before she went inside, she massaged the skin between her eyebrows, feeling grateful, not sore, that Charles had told her she was frowning. It occurred to her that she’d stayed married to him less for reasons of guilt or strategic balance than because she simply couldn’t bear to part with a person who still loved her.

The kitchen was empty. Water simmering in the pasta pot, an untossed salad on the island countertop. “Hell-o-oh,” she called with the silly lilt with which she and Tom announced arrivals.

“Hello,” Tom called from the living room, without the lilt.

She wheeled her suitcase out to the front hall. It took her a moment, in the semidarkness, to see Tom stretched out on the sofa.

“Where’s Pip?” she said.

“Pip is out with the interns tonight. I drank too much, waiting for you, and had to lie down.”

“I’m sorry I’m so late. We can eat right away.”

“No rush. There’s a drink for you in the freezer.”

“I won’t pretend I don’t want it.”

She took her suitcase upstairs and changed into jeans and a sweater. Maybe it was only because she’d expected to find Pip here, but the house seemed ominously sound-swallowing, the banalities of homecoming unreverberating. When she went back downstairs and claimed her drink, Tom was still on the sofa.

“You got my text,” she said.

“I did.”

“Two women are dead. The guy in the middle of it is probably dead, too. It’s a drug story as well as a nukes story. Really scary stuff.”

“That’s great, Leila.”

He sounded far away, but she drank her drink and gave him the details. He said the right things in response, but not in the right voice, and then a silence fell. The house was so quiet that she could hear the faint rattle of the pasta-pot lid.

“So what’s happening,” she said.

It was a while before Tom answered. “You must be very tired.”

“Not so bad. The drink is waking me up.”

A longer silence fell, a bad one. She felt as if she’d walked into someone else’s life, someone else’s house. She didn’t recognize it. Pip had done something to it. Suddenly the distant rattle of the pot lid was unbearable.

“I’m going to go turn the stove off,” she said.

When she came back, Tom was upright on the sofa, rubbing his eyes with one hand and holding his glasses in the other.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” she said.

“Always Listen to Leila.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means you were right. Having her here was a bad idea.”

“How so?”

“It’s making you unhappy.”

“A lot of things do. If that’s all it is, let’s move on.”

Silence.

“So, she’s uncannily like Anabel,” Tom said. “Not the personality but the voice, the gestures. When she yawns, it could be Anabel yawning. Same thing when she sneezes.”

“Not knowing Anabel, I’ll have to take your word for that. Do you want to have sex with her?”

He shook his head.

“You sure?”

To her dismay, he seemed to need to think about it.

“Oh, fuck,” Leila said. “Fuck.”

“It’s not what you think.”

It was as if, all of a sudden, with no warning, she were vomiting. The wave of rage, the old fighting feeling.

“Leila, there’s—”

“Do you have any idea how sick of this life I am? Do you have the foggiest fucking clue? What it’s like to live with a man still haunted by a woman he hasn’t seen in twenty-five years? To feel like the sum of what I mean to you is that I’m not her?”

He didn’t have to rise to this. He knew how to stay cool and to defuse. But he must have drunk quite a lot before she came home.

“Yeah, I do, a little bit,” he said unsteadily. “A little bit, yeah. I know what it’s like to sit around here waiting all evening while you stop and see your husband for no reason.”

“His caregiver didn’t show up.”

“That’s funny. Who could have foreseen such a thing? When has a thing like that ever happened before?”

“It’s unfortunate that it happened tonight.”

“Nothing I’m not used to.”

“Well, good, because it’s never going to change. Why would I change it now? Why did I even come home? Why didn’t I stay over with a person who’s never going to hurt me? Who never hurts me. A person I’m number one with.”

“Why not indeed?”

“Because I’m not in love with him! And you know it. This has nothing to do with Charles.”

“No, it does, a little bit, I think.”

“Nothing, nothing, nothing. I take care of Charles because he needs me. You hold on to Anabel because you never stopped loving her.”

“That is preposterous.”

“It’s preposterous to deny it. I could see it the first second I saw you and Pip in the same room. No one stays haunted by a person they’re not still in love with.”

“I’m not the one still giving my husband hand jobs.”

“God!”

“If indeed that’s all you give him.”

“God damn it! I knew I never should have told you!”

“Never mind the telling. I’m talking about the doing. You don’t think there’s a bit of a double standard here?”

“I told you because it didn’t matter. You yourself said it didn’t matter. You said it was no different than feeding him mashed peas with a spoon. Those were your exact words.”

“I’m just saying, Leila. Don’t talk to me about being haunted. You practically have to invent reasons to be over there with him.”

“He needs care.”

“He doesn’t even want half the things you do for him.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but you had your chance. You had your chance to give me someone more appropriate to take care of. And the only reason you didn’t—”

“Ah. Here we go.”

“The only reason you didn’t—”

“There were a lot of good reasons, and you know it.”

“The only reason you didn’t is Anabel. Anabel, Anabel, Anabel. What is so wonderful and amazing about Anabel? Please answer me. I’d like to know.”

He sighed heavily. “After the first couple of years, I was almost never happy with her. I’m almost always happy with you. You make me happy every time you walk into the room.”

“Like when I walked in just now? That made you happy?”

“Right now we seem to be having a fight.”

“Because Anabel’s in the house — you said it yourself. Same voice, same gestures. You can be happy with me as long as we’re alone, but put her in the same house with us—”

“I already said it was a mistake to bring Pip here.”

“So in other words: Yes. Yes, I’m only good enough as long as you’re not reminded of her.”

“Not true. Wholly wrong.”

“You know what I feel like doing? I feel like letting the two of you live here alone and work it out. I can live with my husband, she can have the daddy she never had, and you can have a nice fresh incarnation of the woman you never got over. You can listen to her yawns and imagine you’re with Anabel.”

“Leila.”

“I’m actually not kidding. I’m thinking that’s what I might do. It’s kind of refreshing to think of not having to be the boss’s mistress for a change. To not have that be the very first thing that every new intern learns about me. Maybe I can make some new female friends while I’m at it, so I don’t have to walk around feeling like such an embarrassing betrayal of the sisterhood. There are a whole lot of things I could do with five more nights and one less man in my week.”

“Leila.”

“In fact, I’ve already got my bag packed. You can wait up for Pip. I’ll go home—home.” She drained her drink and stood up. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not so into her anymore.”

“I’ve noticed. She’s noticed, too.”

“Oh, that’s great.”

“She went out tonight so you and I could be alone. Hence the irony and irritation of your important business at your husband’s. But she’s not stupid. She’s not insensitive.”

“No, she’s lovely in every way. Why not go ahead and fuck her brains out?”

“The last thing she wants is to come between us. She looks up to you—”

“Have a baby with her, now that you’ve expended all your guilt on me—”

“She looks up to you, and she can sense that you don’t want her here. It’s making her miserable.”

“You know, that’s very nice. But I don’t like hearing that you talk about me, and I like even less that you’re doing it. Maybe you can do me a favor and talk about Anabel instead.”

“You’re upset,” he said. “I’m upset. I got pissed off and jealous waiting for you. I’m sorry about that. You come home with huge news, you’re understandably exhausted, and what do we do? We fight.”

“Oh, I’ll be back. You know I will. It’s just, every once in a while, I come up against how much I hate this life, even though it’s a good life. Do you feel that, too?”

He shook his head.

“I’m worn out,” she said. “And I have to work all weekend. Right now, the only thing I can think is that there’s a little room that’s all mine, one hundred percent mine, and it’s not here. I’m sorry.”

He sighed again. “Before you go?”

“Yeah?”

“Try not to get angry when I say this.”

“Just hearing that, I start to get angry.”

He set his glasses on a cushion and covered his face with his hands, rubbing his eyes.

“You’re going to think I buried the lede,” he said. “You’re going to think I’m insane. But I think she might be my daughter.”

“Who might be your daughter?”

He put his glasses back on and stared straight ahead. A ghost was in the room with them. “It’s not possible,” he said. “I don’t have a daughter, and even if I somehow did, what are the chances of her living under my roof?”

“Zero.”

“Exactly.”

“And so?”

“She’s Anabel’s daughter,” he said. “Her mother is definitely Anabel. And I’m the father. I’m pretty sure of that, too.”

Leila had to sit down to steady the room. “That can’t be.”

“Now you see why I was so impatient for you to get home.”

Even sitting down, she could feel the floor tilting beneath her, as if it were trying to tumble her out of the house. Was it possible that everything was over? That she would go home to Charles and never come back? It seemed possible.

“It started with ‘Smell is hell,’” Tom said. “And the fact that her mother is nutty and living underground. And so, on Wednesday, after the theater, I asked her why her mother changed her identity. She said her mother’s afraid that her father will ‘take her away from her.’ Sound like Anabel? More than a little, right? And so I asked her if she had a picture of her mother—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Leila said.

“And she did, on her phone.”

“I really don’t need to hear this.” She was already thinking that if Tom had known that Anabel had a kid, he wouldn’t have been so averse to having one himself. Already thinking that this was the end of her and him.

“So who’s the father?” Tom said. “I’ll spare you the details, but there’s no way it could be me. And yet I’m pretty sure it’s me.”

“Why is that.”

“Because Pip is the right age, and because I know Anabel. The way she vanished makes more sense now, knowing she was pregnant—”

“I’ll say this one more time. It is a torture for me to hear about Anabel.”

Tom sighed. “I can’t tell you how strange it was to see her picture on Pip’s phone. I only looked for one second, but one second was enough. I don’t know what I said, but Pip was completely casual about it. She wasn’t trying to hide anything. I asked to see the picture, she showed it to me. Which makes me think—”

“She has no idea.”

“Exactly. Either that, or she’s a really good liar. Because I started to think about the boyfriend thing, the fact that she lied to us. It made me wonder if she does know who I am.”

“You didn’t ask her?”

“I wanted to talk to you first.”

Leila thought of the emergency cigarettes that she kept in the freezer. The drink had stunned her. Tom’s news had stunned her.

“This has nothing to do with me,” she said dully. “This is your life, your real life, the life that matters to you. I was always just a sideshow. Even if you didn’t want your real life back, it’s coming to get you. And you don’t have to worry about me — I know how to exit quietly.”

“I would like nothing better than to never see Anabel again.”

She gave a brittle laugh. “It sounds like you’ll be seeing quite a lot of her now.”

“Pip’s a good researcher. It’s possible she managed to figure out who Anabel is, which led her to me. But if she’s good enough to figure that out, she’s good enough to figure out that there’s a billion-dollar trust set up in Anabel’s name.”

“A billion dollars.”

“If Pip knew about it, she wouldn’t be here in Denver. She’d be trying to get her mother to pay off her miserable little student loan. Which tells me that she doesn’t know anything.”

“A billion dollars. Your ex-wife is worth a billion dollars.”

“I’ve told you that.”

“You told me it was a lot. You didn’t say a billion dollars.”

“That’s just a guess, based on McCaskill’s revenues. It was already pushing a billion when her father died.”

Leila was accustomed to feeling slight, but she didn’t think she’d ever felt slighter than she did at this moment.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said. “I know it’s a lot to hear.”

“A lot to hear? You have a child. You have a daughter you didn’t know about for twenty-five years. A daughter who’s living under your own roof now. I’d say, yes, that’s quite a lot for me to hear.”

“This doesn’t have to change anything.”

“It’s already changed everything,” Leila said. “And it’ll be good. You can normalize things with Anabel, have a nice relationship with Pip, stop being haunted. Spend your holidays together. It’ll be great.”

“Please. Leila. I need you to help me think about this. Why did she come to Denver?”

“I have no idea. Bizarre coincidence.”

“No way.”

“OK, so she knows, and she’s a good liar.”

“You really believe she’s that good?”

She shook her head.

“So she doesn’t know,” Tom said. “And if she doesn’t know … then how the fuck did she end up in our house?”

Leila shook her head again. Whenever the time came to vomit, it wasn’t just the thought of food that sickened her; it was the thought of wanting anything. Nausea the negation of all desire. And so, too, fighting. She was remembering the old desolation and feeling it again now, the conviction that love was impossible, that however deeply they buried their conflict it would never go away. The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.