Mr. Jessup runs his eyes around the vast room. “You’ve chosen some fancy digs for a”—he searches the options and seems to settle on a phrase that is far from his first choice—“rugged type. What is this book about?”

“It’s about you.”

Consumed with what she shouldn’t be doing, preoccupied with the running list in her head of every action she’s taken in the last eight hours that she shouldn’t have taken, Karen is, at best, half in the room when she hears the boy say this. She pulls out of herself long enough to wonder what sort of book might be written about Mr. Landon Jessup, and how he might react to the writing of it. But then she finds Todd looking directly into her eyes, and hears him say, “You too.”

“Well,” Mr. Jessup says, “this is exciting. If it’s a romance you’re writing, let me be the first to say, I’ll need some pointers. Not that you,” he tells Karen, “wouldn’t be motivation enough for a romantic adventure, but I wouldn’t exactly call myself the best man for the job. Mr. Gladbach, would you be willing to give me pointers?”

“It’s about real people,” the boy clarifies, speaking directly to Karen. “It’s about post-9/11 insecurities that seem to have everything to do with the fear of terrorism but have nothing to do with terrorism at all. How they’ve purposefully broken down our systems of comfort, and how we’ve bought into the corporate myth of America and turned it into a psychological safety net. Have you ever read The Air Conditioned Nightmare? It’ll be like an extension of that; I might call it The Code Yellow Daydream. You know, Howdy Doody in the White House. Halliburton as puppeteer. And Mr. and Mrs. Average America just shoveling it all in like a trusty bowl of Wheaties. Tell me that doesn’t ring some bells.”

“Oh, it’ll ring some bells,” Mr. Jessup says, glancing up at the teardrop chandelier. “Though I think I liked it better when it was a romance.”

“It is a romance. It’s very sexual.” Todd dismounts from his chair and, with one fluid motion of his wiry body, lands himself in the vacant chair at Karen’s table, suddenly less than two feet away from her. “But not in a dirty way,” he tells her. “Well, okay, it’s dirty, but it’s tragic, too. It’s like Romeo and Juliet, only she knows she isn’t faking death and he doesn’t know he’s poisoning himself. It’ll be a good read.”