I didn’t like the answer to either question.

No doubt, it had been easier meeting her that first time. At work, a couple of days after the barbecue, my uncle said, “You got everybody nervous with your lousy grades and your reading material. Get yourself out to the Long Island Press in Garden City tomorrow and see the managing editor.”

His name was Mack Grunch, and he had the pallor and squinty eyes of a man who’d spent years underground running a tarantula farm.

“Nice to meet ya, Gordon Meyers,” Grunch said, handing me a slip of paper with a name and number. “Your Uncle Jerry tells me you got ability but no experience. Listen, here’s the play. There’s this organization of med students over at Columbia doing abortion lobbying. A few guys and lots of modern broads. Go talk to one of the bra burners, type me four pages, and you’ll make the double sawbuck. And don’t sweat it. Reporting ain’t like playin’ ball in the bigs. If you had to be that good, would there be so many papers?”

Armed with Grunch’s philosophy of excellence, I called the number he’d given me, and my interview turned out to be with Glenna.

The skaters were leaving the ice. Across the way, I looked at Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from Zeus and passed it along to humanity. For his trouble, Prometheus was shackled to a rock, where an eagle arrived to eat his liver, which would grow back every night so the eagle could eat it again.

Ever since reading that myth, I’d wondered why his statue was in Rockefeller Center.

Maybe it was a warning to the tourists.

And now, I wondered, if it was a warning to me.

Chapter 3

ACCORDING TO THE directory on the wall in the lobby, Glenna Rising, MD, occupied Suite 1515. I rode the elevator up, and my heart was pounding as I walked down the corridor to her office. When I reached the frosted-glass door with her name stenciled on it, I had to step back to let a UPS deliveryman out.

Having imagined seeing Glenna again for so long, I viewed myself as ready for anything—anything, that is, except entering the waiting room and actually seeing her with a UPS box in her hands, standing amid the tube-framed chairs and low, laminate-topped tables that made me think all doctors shopped at the same discount-furniture outlet.

“Can I help—” Glenna said, and then she went silent, gazing at me.

I was stunned, not quite believing it was her. From the looks of it, she had been getting ready to leave. She was wearing a wraparound, camel-hair coat and sheepskin boots. Her hair was shorter than I recalled, cut even along her shoulders, the soft, luminous brown highlighted by strands of silver. The age lines in her face were visible under the harsh gleam of the fluorescent ceiling panels, but she was still beautiful, the features softer now and just as lovely.