“Why?” Again she tries to look at me, but her pupils are so dilated it’s difficult to imagine that she can see much of anything.

Why would anyone like this woman? Pity her, maybe . . . the kind of pity you would feel for a woman in a horror movie, the one who is too stupid to hightail it out of the haunted house.

“I admire you” is what I settle on. “Wife, mother of two, philanthropist, fashion icon . . .”

“Fashion icon?” Jessica’s voice shows the first sign of real animation I’ve heard from her that morning.

“Yes,” I say with a smile. “Before I arrived for my interview I did my research. I’ve seen your features in the society pages. You always look perfect.” I drop my head as if deflated. “I’ve never been able to look as polished and put together as you. And I don’t have half as much on my plate as you do.”

Jessica gazes at me, her brow trying to crease through the Botox. “You’re not like the other assistants Travis hires,” she says. And then she gets up and teeters down the hall.

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to follow her, but I do. She leads me into what looks like a home office. On a desk there is a laptop and a large pile of mail, unsorted, unopened.

“I need you to deal with this,” she says, pointing down at the envelopes. “I can’t.”

She walks out of the room, leaving me to figure out what it means to “deal with this.”

I sit down at the desk, but it’s the computer I attend to before the mail, in hopes that there might be something interesting on it. When I look through Jessica’s email and browsing history, it becomes immediately evident that she likes forums. She’s commented in forums about weight loss and skin care, about plastic surgery and med spas—always under one alias or another, but her email account has a record of when people have replied to her.

I tiptoe to the doorway and look down the hall. “Mrs. Gable?” I say softly. There’s no answer. Quietly I walk down the hallway, peeking inside each room until I find her back on the sofa in the living room, sitting up but with her head lolling to the side, snoring softly. It’s actually more of a squeak than a snore, kinda like a mouse, which is appropriate considering how timid she is with her husband.

“Mrs. Gable?” I whisper. But she’s completely dead to the world.

So I return to the office . . .

. . . and open up a new email account for Jessica.