Tully sat back, sipping her wine. The truth was that she wanted to talk about this—it was, after all, part of the reason she’d flown all the way across the country—and yet, now that she was here with her best friend again, she didn’t know how to start. Worse than that, she felt like an idiot complaining about what was missing in her life. She had so much.

“I thought you were crazy to give up your career. For four years, every time I called you Marah was screaming in the background. I kept thinking I’d kill myself if that were my life, but you sounded frustrated and pissed off and amazingly happy. I could never quite get it.”

“Someday you’ll know what it’s like.”

“No, I won’t. I’m almost forty, Kate.” She finally looked at Kate. “I guess I was the crazy one, wanting nothing but the career.”

“It’s a hell of a career.”

“Yeah. But sometimes . . . it’s not enough. I know that’s a greedy thing to say, but I’m tired of working eighteen hours a day and coming home to an empty house.”

“You can change your life, you know. But you have to really want to.”

“Thank you, Obi-Wan.”

Kate stared out at the waves slapping the shore. “In the tabloids last week there was a sixty-year-old woman who gave birth.”

Tully laughed. “You are such a bitch.”

“I know. Now come on, poor little mega-rich girl, I’ll show you to your room.”

“I’m going to be sorry I complained, aren’t I?”

“Oh, yeah.”

They walked through the darkened house. At the guest bedroom door, Kate turned to her. “No more spoiling Marah, okay? She already thinks you hung the moon.”

“Come on, Katie. I made more than two million dollars last year, what am I supposed to do with it all?”

“Give it to charity. Just no more pink limos, okay?”

“You are no fun whatsoever, you know that?”

It wasn’t until much later, when Tully lay on the bumpy, sagging mattress of the hide-a-bed, staring out the window at the Big Dipper, that she realized she hadn’t asked Kate about her own life.

Kate stared at the calendar that hung on the wall by her refrigerator. It seemed impossible to believe that time was passing so quickly, but the proof was right there in front of her. It was November of 2002, and the past fourteen months had changed the world. In September of last year terrorists had flown airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands. Another plane had been hijacked and ultimately crashed, leaving no survivors. Car and suicide bombers had become part of the nightly news; the search for weapons of mass destruction had begun. Words like Al-Qaeda and Taliban and Pakistan came up in every conversation, were repeated on every broadcast.