“The boss wants to play up the mystery of the disappearance of FLOTUS.” Matt started imitating the Chief’s voice. “What if FLOTUS has been kidnapped? Let’s look at what happens if she’s held hostage and needs a rescue.”

“Has she been kidnapped?” Natalie asked, certain she’d missed a key development.

“No!” Matt said, exasperated. “No one knows where she is. But the boss thinks it’s a good narrative. Great characters. Real drama. Yada yada.”

She squinted at him. “Shouldn’t we be trying to figure out where FLOTUS really is, at least why she’s left?” Freed of her dinner trap, she felt invigorated. “Isn’t that the story we should be on? Or figuring out why Rigo and the Lystras are creating all this trouble?”

Matt flashed her a look of utter impatience.

“Okay. Okay.” Natalie relented. “So he wants us to dramatize a fake kidnapping?”

“Yes,” Matt said. “And you are doing it in a tank top.”

19

Anita Shrugged

Anita Crusoe stopped her hike and cast her eyes up the hill. It was a day of glittering sunshine and she marveled at the sight: blue sky, no clouds, a mountain alive with the sounds of spring coming to life.

She should be enjoying this, she knew. Holed up in the mountains with no commitments and all the time in the world to think. If only she could have calmed her mind. It was so noisy—replaying it all. Their history. Her blindness. Patrick’s empty promises.

How had she not seen it from the start?

Her early adulthood had been messy and uncertain and required constant vigilance, so it made sense, she reasoned, that she’d seek out the opposite in a husband. He was cool and contained and as rational and predictable as the laws of classical physics. She appreciated his logical approach to the world. He gathered data, analyzed circumstances before forming an opinion. Once formed, his confidence in his own correctness was almost awe-inspiring. He was the only politician she’d ever known who was free of bombast or hyperbole.

She’d met her husband at one of the excruciating dinners she was expected to attend with university donors. It wasn’t lost on her that she was included in these meals far more often than the others in her PhD program. She had no illusions it was because of her fine engineering skills. Inevitably she would be seated next to a wealthy older donor who’d bang on about his philanthropy or his tennis game, then confess that he’d heard she was once Miss Venezuela. How delightful! She’d sleepwalk through the dinners smiling, prompting, and pretending not to notice the way their gaze kept falling on her chest, or how they’d confide that their marriages were loveless, their bodies in need of attention. “How long will you be in the country?” they’d want to know.