“That’s right.”

“He could be experimenting with the pilot some more.”

“Pilot may not even know it.”

“But nobody died here!”

“So the pilot—was it a he or a she?—okay, she. She. She never signed off on the program?”

“So what does this prove about covert operations?”

“In all honesty, my wife has never had anything leaked to her.”

“Vera hasn’t either. She got it from her editor.”

“I did not give her the report,” said Vera’s new editor. “I had nothing to do with that.”

“Stanley,” Vera said, taking his arm. From the fear of being wronged.

“Stanley?” Gordon asked.

“This is not the time or place,” Adam was saying to Stanley.

Gordon Bray studied Vera. She studied him too.

“They’re just girls,” Stanley said. Until this moment he’d forgotten Winnow’s peanut-butter kisses, how she spooned Jiffy on top of Hershey’s and lined them up like frosted brown hats on his back-porch window.

“They’re teenagers,” Adam said. “I mean, really, Stanley. I—”

“They’re fourteen at most,” Stanley said. “They say they’re fourteen. That means they’re probably thirteen, or twelve.”

Vera knew Winnow was fourteen. Baby—she was twelve. Vera had ordered her Maryland birth certificate. It was sitting on Vera’s desk.

“There was a misunderstanding,” Adam was saying. Vera couldn’t tell if he was talking to Don or to Gordon.

“Baby.”

“Baby what? Does she have a last name?”

“This other one, the one who saw the Virginia plate. How old is she?”

“Stanley, these are streetwise, worldly-wise—”

From the fear of being suspected.

“How old is your youngest?”

“My daughter Rebecca?” Adam said. “She’s thirteen.”

“Okay,” Stanley said.

“You know how old I was when I lost my virginity? The ripe old age of fourteen. Now, that really isn’t the point. The point is, these are street-smart, calculating individuals. They have seen it all and then some. This is not anyone corrupting some tender blossoms.”

Mabel looked over at Don. He’d come back from a meeting at the paper ruing the demise of journalism. He said the Room was filled with young reporters, unfortunately too many of them hired to fill quotas, who had no understanding of the mechanics. Here he was in bed now, cross-laced with the mechanicals for apnea. Black straps under his chin and above his forehead kept a mask over his mouth and nose. A tube from his mouth pronged to a machine on the nightstand. Its motor and electronics combined to make a noise equal in decibels to his snoring. The difference was forcing air through his pathways. Unaided, a flap at the back of his throat blocked his breathing once the relaxation of sleep began. He would gasp. He would struggle. He would bat around the bed. The few times he hit her, she got bruises. After a while, he went to the sleep clinic and came home with the REMstar.