The announcer, in a lugubrious voice, was progressing through a slow drumbeat of detail, Dallas, 12:30 P.M. Central time, motorcade, shots fired, which didn’t make sense at all. The president dead? But no, that couldn’t be—he’d been shot, that was all, and they’d just patch him up like in the westerns, where the heroes got shot all the time. Then somebody, one of the kids, said, “Turn on the TV,” which didn’t make any sense either. Nobody had a television here. They’d come to Millbrook for the inner life, not commercials for potato peelers and Oscar Mayer wieners. She looked wildly around her. “TV? What are you talking about?”

In the next moment, everybody was filing out of the kitchen in solemn procession and heading down the corridor to Royce and Susannah’s room, where Royce was already bent over the rabbit ears of a big maple TV cabinet that must have been buried in the trailer they’d towed behind them when they left Boston and had sat there all these weeks awaiting just this moment. But it was on now, humming to life: a flicker, an adjustment of the dial, a new announcer, his voice shaken and hollow. Then the first image appeared, and it was devastating, the real world, the world of hate and pain and horror, slamming right into her like a clenched fist. She saw a casket being lowered from an airplane, and behind it, the president’s wife—Jackie—in her pastel suit, which was steeped in her husband’s blood, following numbly in its wake.

No one said a word. She squeezed in beside Fitz, who was pressed up against the wall, one arm around Corey, and for the longest time she held on to them both, her eyes fixed on the screen and the figures moving there in shadowy procession. Jackie Kennedy, right? Lori had said. As a goof, right? All at once she was crying too. It was her fault. All her fault—if she’d only dressed as somebody else, a witch, a cabaret dancer, a sea hag, this would never have happened. It was karma, all karma, and she’d been wrong, she was deluded, and she was guilty, guilty, guilty, of this and everything else.

She glanced round the room and saw that everybody was huddled in separate groups, husbands and wives and children together, Tim, Peggy, Suzie and Jackie, the Nestlings, the Robertses, the Eggerses, the Sensabaughs, as if everything to this point had just been playacting and once the world sank its talons into them, they were ready to give up the pretense. This was no family. This was just a collection of strangers united by one thing only and that thing was a drug, just a drug . . .