There were lots of updates, as usual.

Dakota’s French was good enough now that she got through an entire day in Paris speaking no English at all. Chloe had accidentally backhanded one of her ten-year-olds in the head with a tennis racket…but otherwise she was good. She had stopped dating the first guy and moved on to another, and already had eyes on a third. Hunter had gone to LA for the day and had gotten to go on the Paramount lot. Josh had about twenty new English friends, and they tended to spend their weekends partying in London or going off to the country to push each other off small boats called “punts” into shallow water.

Two weeks. That’s how long it had been. Two weeks, and they all had new lives and impressive achievements. And she’d been here with Mrs. Amberson, waiting for her to get one cohesive thought together for this book.

There had been plenty of writing preparation. They’d gone shopping at the Montblanc store on Madison Avenue, where Mrs. Amberson spent several hundred dollars on two pens—one fountain, one ballpoint—and a pot of ink. They’d gone and spent a few hundred more on notebooks from some imported Parisian papermaker. There was the ergonomic yoga support pillow that was supposed to induce creativity. The multiple trips to various health food and Asian grocery stores for teas, herbs, dried plums, some seaweed in a bag, organic coffee, special water…

In fact, Scarlett had never been so busy doing so much nothing. Between the shopping, the endless walks Mrs. Amberson needed to “feel out the city again,” the days spent in bookstores picking up books on how to write, the lunches, locating all of the services Mrs. Amberson required…Scarlett had had almost no time to herself.

“It’s hard to know where to begin,” Mrs. Amberson mused.

Scarlett could take it no more.

“What did you do?” she finally snapped.

“Do? What? For money?”

Scarlett nodded. That was a good start. This direct questioning was effective.

“My very first job was at the Round the Clock Diner,” Mrs. Amberson said. “I got that by lying and saying I had been a waitress for three years in Cleveland. I suppose that you could call that my first role. I played a New York waitress. I definitely didn’t know how to do the job when I started. I copied the walk, the way of speaking. After a few weeks, I was the toughest waitress they had. In fact, I was a little too good at being a New York waitress. I scared some people. So I refined it a bit and took the act uptown, to the All Hours Diner. And while I was there, I started picking up shifts at the Ticktock.”

Scarlett wasn’t sure if she was supposed to write down the names of all of these diners, but she had been sitting here for a long time, waiting for something to come out of Mrs. Amberson’s mouth. She typed a few of them out.