Mick looked at the faces of the people seated around the dining room table in the Four Seasons Gotham suite. Family, he thought. This is what it’s like to have a family. They were having a quick bite of pizza before heading out to the New York premiere of Retribution. Last week, after the police had vacated her home, Jane had fallen apart. Sarah had decided that it would be too anxiety-producing for Jane to stay in the Westchester home. “You’ll come back to the hotel with us,” Sarah had declared. “Mick, honey, call the hotel and sort something out.” So he had. They’d packed the helicopter to the gills and returned to Manhattan with Sarah’s daughter, Lilly, and her aunt Jane in tow. The amount of luggage that was required for Sarah’s aunt and one small child boggled the mind. On the LA side, turned out, Bob the intern was a cat person and was happily ensconced on the pullout sofa bed in Sarah’s apartment so Charlie wouldn’t have to acclimate to a new person and a new place.

For the first few days Jane had clearly been in shock. Mick didn’t blame her. In the course of an afternoon, Jane not only had killed her husband of almost forty years but also learned he had murdered her best friend. Add to the mix the murder of her best friend’s husband, the attempted murder of Sarah, and the possible murder of his secretary and lover for the last twenty-eight years . . . It was a lot to take in. Jane’s elder son, Daniel, had flown in with his wife, Kendra, on Saturday. Stephan, the younger son, arrived on Monday, which had helped enormously. They had rallied around Jane, shored her up, and dealt with the funeral arrangements. Burial. No service. Just Jane, her sons, Sarah, and Mick. Jane had been quite adamant that Lilly not attend. So, Flora, Lilly’s devoted nanny, took her to the Transit Museum, which was followed by a visit to A La Mode Shoppe for an ice cream sundae with all the fixings. After Phillip had been laid to rest, Jane seemed much better, as if a burden had been lifted from her shoulders. The color returned to her face, she wasn’t weeping anymore, and Mick no longer had to keep a fat wad of clean tissues at the ready.