“Adam, he’s on the desk,” Martina whispered. Adam had forgotten days ago in the two o’clock, and here he was, forgetting again.

“The desk?”

“Foreign Desk.”

“Right. Right.”

“I want him on this.”

“But there’s Anne—and Harriet.”

“He worked the Pentagon longer than anyone in this city. I want him on it.”

Martina wanted to ask why they’d hired Anne, in the midst of buyouts, with a special dispensation from the publisher, if Anne was not to be brought in on a drubbing like this. But she didn’t.

“I don’t want Harriet off the secret-prisons story,” Adam said.

Given that Harriet was in Poland, this was hardly visionary of Adam. Martina fumed into expressionless rancor.

“I will get with Mitch,” she said, trying to slow her clipped words into plain flat.

“I don’t want him on anything else but this report.”

Now the Foreign editor was coming for Adam.

“We’ve got an Iranian nuclear scientist committing suicide,” he said. “Wire has him doing it in the bathroom on board a flight to Dubai. Guardian says he hung himself in some hotel in southwestern Iran. Our stringer’s on vacation. Should we try to get Harriet in Dubai? Or run wire?”

“Harriet is in Poland,” Martina said. The Foreign editor refused to remember where she was. He’d been told twice this morning.

“Glenn in London,” Adam said crisply. “Have him make some calls, add in wire, leave it at that.”

•  •  •

Mabel was grateful to feel anything. So, when she did, she ran to the instigator. The man in question was not a type. She had no types. She did not have phases. She tasted from all cups. It was enough to find that falling for someone was always possible if one waited for the first sensations, if one was neither too picky nor too slattern. When it came to success, the stud had nothing on the woman who appeared restrained but had few compunctions, the she who could take to her bed the hopeless Brazilian with smoke eyes and Mabel’s garden to manage, or the black Marine with the thickest snake who placed an ad looking for his white damsel, or the married Methodist manufacturer closing on sixty who’d never fallen in love, not once, until Mabel. She took them, not for sport, and always one at a time—she was extravagantly monogamous, passionately attached. She never saw them as lovers. They were all serious candidates to be her undeniable love, the one for whom she would leave Don Grady. Their improbability only signified hope. Hope that she had turned wrong when she chose Don and that another way waited.