In the days following Detroit, Jenny and I had spoken as often as possible between her meetings and my deadlines. Mostly, though, we communicated by brief messages and emojis (mostly hearts, smiley faces, and an occasional “adult pleasure enhancer,” which looked more like a wired cucumber) just reminding each other we were breathing. But the story was unfolding quickly. The White House carefully controlled the news cycles, releasing just enough information every few hours to maintain momentum. Wrightman humbly refused to take personal credit for the success of the attack, doing so on every network, cable channel, and social media platform. The people inside the house were identified as members of an Al-Qaeda splinter group whose name translated as Children of the Sword. Nobody I knew had ever heard of them, but hey, terrorism obviously was a growth industry. DNA recovered from the charred remains was matched to that of relatives and friends of missing persons, and it was determined that at least eight people had been killed inside the house, possibly more. Two of them were identified as “illegal Somalian immigrants who had overstayed visas and settled undetected in the Detroit area.” The soldier “wounded” in the raid was awarded his Purple Heart in a private ceremony to protect his identity. The administration continued meeting regularly with members of Congress to discuss taking the necessary steps to defend the country while protecting individual rights—which to me sounded about as likely as gift wrapping a cloud.

Jenny Miller had come into my life at the Bernstein bar mitzvah. I had worked up a pretty good sweat doing the hora. When the band struck up the first bars of “Hava Nagila,” I was just another guy in a wheelchair; when it ended, I had become a legend at the Riviera catering hall. I had returned to my seat at the Climate Change table (Rachel Bernstein, Howie’s daughter, was always precocious; “Preparing for the Future” was her bat mitzvah theme) and was wiping my brow with my napkin when Jenny sat down in the empty chair next to me. The first thing she ever said to me was “Well, don’t you give new meaning to rock and roll.”

I gave her my practiced “aw, shucks” smile. “Just in case you’re wondering,” I said, “the only thing I can’t do is dance.”

Jenny Miller’s face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth. Okay, actually that was Jay Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan. The reality is most journalists aren’t very good at florid descriptions. That’s not what we do. Our focus are the police blotter details: height, weight, hair color, complexion, and distinguishing marks. Honestly, I’ve always had difficulty visualizing the heroine. I read that she has “an aquiline nose” or “succulent lips” and “piercing blue eyes,” and I still can’t create an image.

Raymond Chandler did it best when he described his femme fatale as simply “A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”