“I don’t know,” he said. “Women say they want a nice guy but I don’t know, maybe they don’t.”

“I think some women do.”

“I quit drinking,” he said. “I quit chew, too. It saves me eighteen dollars a day. Even my dentist noticed. He said, your teeth look clean, did you quit chew? And I said yes. But she doesn’t care. I think women maybe, they just don’t like me.”

“What kind of women do you like?”

“You know,” he said. “Women who want to do things. Or just sit and talk. Like this, you know?”

“Blindfolded?”

He was confused.

“Never mind,” said Mara. “It was a joke.” She hoped that if she kept the man talking, he’d slip up and say something useful about the show. But instead he went on about his ex-wife for a while, and Mara stopped paying attention, listening just enough to agree at the right moments, to reassure him that he was better off.

The bustling in the distance had stilled. Eventually footsteps approached. Someone told her to stand, then guided her by the arm in a new direction. “Bye,” came a voice from behind her, but already it sounded far away.

Hands took off her blindfold. She was in a gravel pit, surrounded by evergreen forest. A few men stood around, talking into radios or checking clipboards. There was a gray helicopter with a red belly, just sitting, like some sort of poisonous frog or bug. Guys with cameras on their shoulders, big, so their faces were hidden. One of them led Mara to the helicopter, where he buckled her into the front seat, beside the pilot. Then came the blindfold again. The pinch and weight of a headset.

For the first time all day, Mara was grateful not to see. She had never loved heights. The rotors woke and soon the helicopter thundered and rose, and it felt like the blood in her veins was rumbling with it.

The air grew colder. She breathed slowly, deep breaths, trying not to shiver. She wondered if the crew was filming her now, somehow. They would probably film her every second of the next six weeks, and maybe then some. It gave her a strange feeling, as if everything she did belonged to someone else.

After what seemed like an hour, the rumbling changed, and a voice came through the headset. Shouting in Mara’s ears. The pilot.

“You can take off your blindfold.” She had a nice voice.

Mara untied the cloth, careful not to nudge the headset and let in more of the deafening noise. There was bright light. Stinging, blinking, until her eyes adjusted. She glanced down to her right and felt sick.

They hovered above a lake, deep blue. Dense forest in all directions—mostly fir, Mara thought, though already she felt uncertain; the evergreens mixed with bare, dense branches she didn’t know offhand. It was a clear day, and the pale, almost neon quality of green on the banks suggested late spring, new growth, a landscape not yet tipped into summer. Back in Washington it had been warm for a month.