“Anyone else?” said Emma. “Anyone I might want to know about, for instance?”

“Well, you’ve met Esme lots of times,” said Sophie. “And I know you’ve met Jack because you were the one who noticed about him and Prince Harry. And if you must have it all about you, she and I were thinking of coming to see you in North Dakota during the summer. But not before June because her parents have their silver wedding anniversary in May, and—”

“I think,” interrupted Emma, “that we have exhausted the subject of Esme, much as I love her. I was wondering whether you’d had any telephone calls about work lately.”

“No, Emma,” said Sophie after a moment. “I haven’t had any telephone calls about work lately, thanks for reminding me. If I had, I’d have told you about them.”

“Well, that’s odd,” said Emma. “You haven’t heard back from St. Luke’s?”

“No again, Emma,” said Sophie. “For the ninety-nine-and-three-quarter-millionth time, no, I have not heard back from St. Luke’s. It seems I need to explain to you that it seems they didn’t like me as much as I’d thought they did. What is this thing about you and St. Luke’s anyway? You keep on asking me about it, and it’s getting really annoying.”

“If you must know,” said Emma, “I happened to have coffee with Colin Hobbes three or four weeks ago. And he told me quite specifically that—”

“Wait a minute,” said Sophie. “You had coffee with Colin.”

“Well, not with him, as such,” said Emma. “I was having coffee with a friend, and we happened to bump into another friend who was with him, and we all had coffee together.”

“What friend?” said Sophie.

“Just a friend,” said Emma. “I do know people you don’t know about, strange as it may seem.”

“No, you don’t,” said Sophie. “We know everything about each other, Lulu’s always complaining about it.”

Emma sighed. “Do you seriously think,” she said, “that I have nothing better to do with my time but sit around inventing imaginary friends to impress … no offense, but … you?”

She had a point, thought Sophie.

“I wasn’t going to tell you about this,” continued Emma, “because I wanted it to come as a surprise. But I obviously mentioned you during my conversation with Colin, and when I first started to talk about you, I could see him doing that actor thing of preparing a diplomatic answer to brush me off without hurting my feelings, and then when he realized it was you I was talking about, he got genuinely interested, said he’d particularly asked for you to come back on the show, and had wondered why you hadn’t, and then he wrote your name down in his BlackBerry and said he was going to follow it up.”

There was a silence.

“Did he?” said Sophie, then.

“Yes,” said Emma. “So if you haven’t heard back from them four weeks later, I think there’s a little bit of a mystery here, don’t you?”