The name kept haunting her—she couldn’t get it out of her mind. Twice that afternoon she had turned and looked, imagining that someone had whispered the name behind her—but there was no one there.

Beulah.

She began to undress, then stopped and looked at herself in the closet mirror. She stood up a little straighter; she turned her head from side to side and looked at her cheekbones and jawline. She lifted her chin and patted the skin of her throat with the back of her hand.

She felt numb—the kind of aching emptiness you feel after fear and panic have left you dry. She kept thinking about Agnes—about her mother—and she couldn’t bear to put the two thoughts together. She thought about the scrapbook again—the photographs, the birth certificate, the adoption papers signed by the only parents she ever knew. She kept wondering if it could somehow be a mistake—a joke—a ploy—but the look on the old woman’s face told her it was all true. She tried to imagine her first six months of life in some trashy trailer park in Endor— she couldn’t do it. She remembered lying in bed as a little girl, feeling a proud sense of destiny as she imagined her noble ancestors—and it was all just a fiction compiled by a librarian with no husband and no future. She felt robbed—she felt raped—as though a part of her own soul had been stolen.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a soft knock on the bedroom door; she pulled on a robe and wrapped the belt around her waist. Halfway across the bedroom, the door opened slightly and her husband slipped his head inside.

“Darling? A word?”

“Come on in, John.”

The senator stepped into the bedroom and shut the door quietly behind him. He was dressed in a crisp cotton bathrobe with wide lapels and square-cut shoulders that looked good enough to hold a press conference in. He was clean shaven as always—the senator always shaved twice a day to avoid that incriminating Nixon shadow. His hair was neatly combed and fixed, and it occurred to her that she had almost never seen his hair mussed—as though the wind was somehow cooperating with his press agent. She glanced down at his legs and noticed a sharp crease in his pin-striped pajamas. Starched pajamas—something really bothered her about that, and she wasn’t quite sure what it was. She tried to remember if it had always bothered her, but she couldn’t.

“What’s this I hear about Endor?” the senator asked.

She felt a cold jolt in her gut. “What do you mean?”

“I hear you’re planning to move there.”

“What?”

He grinned. “From what they tell me, every living soul in town fell in love with you today—one man can’t hope to compete with that.”