“Of course, this leaves Frieda short someone once again,” Magnuson mused. “You were barely there long enough to warm a chair,” he said, looking at me. “But fortunately, I can solve her personnel problems immediately. Sarah, you can report to her tomorrow.”

Sarah was dumbstruck. “Sir?”

“Is that a problem?” he asked.

“Mr. Magnuson, with all due respect, not only do I not feel I should be punished for any of my husband’s alleged misbehaviors, but I’m in a different job classification. I’m an editor. You’re proposing moving me to a lower job classification, to a feature-writing position. You can’t do that.”

Magnuson said nothing for a moment, then a sense of calm came over him that was nothing short of chilling. “Ms. Walker,” he said, “I can do anything.”

He swiveled his chair around so that he could work on his computer, and it was clear that we’d been dismissed. Once outside his door, Sarah burst into tears.

“I can’t believe this,” she said. She stormed off toward the center of the newsroom. I almost had to run to keep up with her.

“Honey,” I said to her, “I’m so sorry. That was totally unfair. Not what he did to me, but what he did to you.” I reached out, touched her arm, but she yanked it away. There wasn’t anyone in the room who was still looking at their screens. “You should go to the guild, you should fight this—”

She shook her head and waved her hands at me in a fit of rage. “Shut up! Just shut up! Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone!”

The newsroom was dead silent. Sarah turned away from me and headed for the elevators. I took the stairs down to the parking lot. By the time I got there, Sarah’s car was gone.

“No, no, Candace, hold it like this,” Eldon said. He molded Miranda’s hand around the gun. “There, doesn’t that feel better?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

They were out in the country. He’d lined the top of a split-rail fence with half a dozen empty Campbell’s asparagus soup tins. Eldon liked asparagus soup. “Okay, just squeeze the trigger. Just look at your target and your arms will know what to do.”

She squeezed. Blam. God, what a feeling. Thrilling and terrifying at the same time. Would have been even better if she’d hit the can.

She glanced back at Eldon’s Toyota parked on the shoulder of the gravel township road, saw six-month-old Katie through the open back window, buckled into her safety seat, gnawing on a red plastic ring. Miranda waved.

“Okay, try again, but relax a bit this time. Don’t think so much about aiming, just look at your target, concentrate on it, don’t concentrate on your arms or your hands or anything. You’re just one with the gun.”