“No!” She pushed forward on her stuffed chair, her knees almost touching his. He realized with a thumping downturn he’d done something he’d never done before—share one of Adam’s confidences. He rarely spoke too long to anyone in the Room except Adam and whoever was his cherished night-cops reporter of the moment. The temptation to let slip had never come up before, and here, his first outing, he’d spilled in minutes.

“What does he say??” She was bouncing a fraction on the edge of her chair.

Stanley sank back in his and shrugged.

“That’s the most unconvincing performance I’ve ever seen,” she said, turning threatening, not even in a joking way.

He pulled in a long breath and looked around the porch.

“Stanley,” she said, drawing out the last syllable.

“Reminiscing about … earlier …”

Mabel’s jouncing stopped. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” She took a sip of wine, a ladylike one, and inched back into the easy chair. Then he saw her concluding, finishing the thought. She sighed and let down her shoulders. “He thinks I’m ludicrous. I knew that. Already.”

“He takes you seriously,” Stanley said. His eagerness to please her had taken over within seconds again, and now his sin was not betraying Adam but misleading her. Or had he? He tried to remember what Adam had said, instead of what he, Stanley, had felt about what Adam had said. But then he glanced her way and saw she didn’t believe his “seriously” claim anyway. She was back deep in the chair, staring into her wineglass.

“You know,” she said, “I had a little episode. With him.”

He leaned forward. “When?”

“Oh,” she said, despondent still, “it was last fall.”

“When you came in about the managing-editor job.”

“You know about that. God. What a fiasco. Don is such a buffoon. But it wasn’t when I came in that one day to let Adam know Don—how did he put it? Oh, ‘throwing my hat in the ring’—was off-base, that I knew, for Chrissakes, I wasn’t qualified. Jesus.”

“Wait. What wasn’t?”

“The episode. It wasn’t that day I told him no, I don’t want to be managing editor. The day I spoke to you. It was after that. I tried to come in, and I had, well, something I thought was important, to give him, and he, he wasn’t—he was busy, just understandably busy. He blew me off. Basically. He just left me down in the lobby. And I just, well, I left.”