'I promised them before the shit hit the fan last week.' Part of him still regretted caving to their relentless pressure. Thanks to the divorce, it was a parental paradox Thomas knew well: it was hard not to be indulgent in times of family crisis, and harder still not to be stern. 'I figured with all the craziness it would be a good distraction.'

Mia nodded. 'Hear anything new about Nora?'

Thomas grimaced. 'Still refusing to talk. Still behind bars.' The nightmare triggered by Neil's visit had taken a couple of surreal turns in the following days, Nora's imprisonment the sharpest among them. Just thinking about it triggered a sense of disbelief similar to what he'd felt when the Twin Towers had imploded, the sense that someone had switched reels in the Great Projection Room, and now CGI and producer rewrites were running amok in the real world.

Nora refused to believe that Neil had anything to do with what was going on.

She loved him.

Neil and Nora.

'Pooor, pooor lass,' Mia said, mimicking Frankie's lame Scottish accent. He'd been squarely in the serves-the-bitch-right camp ever since Thomas had told him about her and Neil.

'I feel sorry for her,' Thomas admitted.

'You shouldn't. She's a back-stabbing slut.'

Thomas grinned, remembering an old tirade of Mia's on 'honest epitaphs'. 'I thought you wanted something like that chiseled on your tombstone…'

'So?'

'So, don't throw stones—'

'When you live in Israel. Yeah-yeah, so I'm a hypocrite. I've changed my mind about my epitaph, anyway.'

'So what's it now?'

He held up his hands marquee-style. '"Not so funny after all"'

Thomas laughed, though something about the joke mildly repelled him—like glimpsing Q-tips in someone else's garbage. 'You're such an ass.'

A smile cracked Mia's deadpan stare.

'Speaking of getting laid,' he said, 'what's going on with Special Agent Samantha Logan?'

Thomas chuckled. Just hearing her name tickled him. 'She just got back from Nashville. Apparently some televangelist named Jackie Forrest went missing a few days ago.' Hearing about Jackie Forrest's abduction had sent Thomas sifting through the bookcases in the basement, where he kept all the textbook wannabes sent by academic publishers and whatever else he had been too lazy to throw out. He found the book relatively quickly: it was hard to miss, not only because of its garish, gold-embossed spine, but because it had found its way beside a vagrant copy of his own book, Through the Brain Darkly. Coincidences could be so cruel.