He laughed. “You don’t get it, do you?”

She turned her back to him, and, walking toward her cottage, said over her shoulder, “I doubt I can help you. Thanks for your visit.”

“You’re welcome. You are an important member of our family.”

“Lulu is all the family I need.” Then she added, “I’m sorry I’ll miss New Year with you in Morocco. It sounded like such a great party.”

He walked toward her. “I’ve come here with an offer, and I’d like you to listen and give it serious thought.”

“Aren’t you tired of this?” With Lulu straddled on her hip, Nola kept her other hand on the door handle. “Whatever your offer is, it can’t possibly mesh with my plans. And just so you know, I’m planning to say a lot more about infanticide in China.”

He sighed. “When the insects take over the world, I hope they’ll remember with gratitude how I took them along on all my picnics.” He smiled benevolently. “Only a quote.”

She stared at him. In her arms, Lulu kicked as she strained to turn to look at Mauriello.

“Well, then,” he went on. “Not only will no visa be issued for Lulu, but, as they say, your career is not entirely in your hands. You forget that even if you own your music masters, you don’t own the rights to their recordings, and BRW has exclusive licensing to distribute your CDs. Oh, I’m forgetting about all the promotion dollars we allocate to stores and radio stations—as they say, those, too, are purely optional—”

“As they say,” she repeated, “go to hell.”

She watched the clock, and at eight in the evening she pushed Lulu's stroller into the press office.

Sharon turned away from a filing cabinet. “If you had called, I’d have picked you up in a golf cart,” she said.

“My knee is better.” Nola motioned with her chin toward the radio. Roberta was on, ranting about an earthquake in Turkey and about Hillary’s performance as a New York Senator.

“Has Roberta mentioned our chat?” Nola asked.

“Not yet.”

Nola tilted her head toward the radio, as though she could nudge things along. But her reappearance had already become old news; Roberta and her listeners assumed the ordeal was over. Or perhaps, true to Roberta’s real-life indifference to Lulu's fate, the on-air chat had given her an hour of entertainment before the topic had run its useful course.

Nola tapped her fingers. There was little time, and until she connected with another media host who could pick up the story immediately, she must throw Roberta a curve to stir up her interest. In the end, all that counted were the ratings, and they both understood this.

“I’d like to call her again,” Nola said. “Would you please have the switchboard connect me to CNB?”