“Rivera? I wanted to remind you about our appointment, sugar. We need to get started with the picnic baskets. I hope you’re still planning on coming over to help? I’m going to drag Harriet out of the hospital. She needs a little time away.”

“Of course,” Rivera said, pulling a face at Angie.

“We’ll be there,” Angie said. She leaned over and turned off the speaker.

For a long moment the only sound in the kitchen was the flutter of papers as the fan moved in its arc through the room.

“Did you know about Caroline and John going up to the lake?”

Angie busied herself with paper. “And if I did?”

“Angeline,” said Rivera, lowering her chin in a gesture that meant she was ready to go to war.

“Okay.” Angie let out a strangled laugh as she collapsed back to the floor. She looked around herself at the piles of file folders with their neat labels, photos clipped together by subject and year, a legal pad bristling with sticky notes, her index in a half dozen different colors, the logbook riffling in the breeze. She closed her eyes and counted to ten.

She had imagined John and Caroline deep in conversation as the countryside flashed by, but now she had to give that up. Instead she saw Miss Zula sitting straight backed beside John, the head of her cane between her gloved hands and Louie at her feet. Caroline would be in the backseat, and what could the three of them possibly talk about? English department business? Grant deadlines? Tab Darling’s medical condition? The fact that Harriet had left him?

She opened her eyes and saw that Rivera was still looking at her. She said, “You can’t make me disappear by closing your eyes, so you might as well tell me what’s going on.”

“Everything,” Angie said. “Nothing.” Then she took another deep breath, and told Rivera what there was to tell.

When she was finished, the story seemed outrageous, simplistic, laughable, but Rivera looked neither upset nor surprised. For a moment she rocked herself, her chin pressed to her chest, and then she looked up.

She said, “I suppose it was inevitable.”

Angie blinked. She had been expecting hard questions about John, and what Angie wanted from John, and why she thought she might be able to get those things. She was only half prepared to answer such questions, and that made her nervous, because if she couldn’t make Rivera understand, she was lost.