“I’ll tell you what I think. I think, if it’s true and you’re right—and if Miss Zula does want the story told—that things are going to get really messy. In every way. At every level. I think the board of regents is going to look for somebody to blame, and it’s most likely to be me. I think we’re in for a couple years of major problems. Christ, Angie,” he said, pushing out a breath. “Is it really necessary?”

Angie looked at his face, at the expression that was half-angry, half-desperate, and she felt those same things rising up in herself. Anger that he should ask such a question, and desperate for a way out of this. “Is what necessary? The documentary? I think you know the answer to that.”

He ducked his head and looked at his shoes. “I’m wondering if you need to go into this whole business. Do you have to set out to prove that every woman who never married is a lesbian?”

“You jerk,” Angie said, her voice wobbling and cracking, but that was better than shouting, certainly, wasn’t it? The look on his face said it wasn’t, but she couldn’t keep the words from spilling out anyway. “That is the most ignorant thing I’ve ever heard you say, and the most insulting, to me as an individual and as a professional, to Rivera, to Miss Zula, to—”

John had the good sense to look guilty, but he didn’t sound that way. “I didn’t mean it like that, and you know it. You aren’t some third-rate shock journalist.”

“You’re right, we’re not. That’s not what we do. Miss Zula knows that. I assumed you did, too.”

John looked as miserable as she felt, but they stood on opposite sides of the kitchen and neither of them moved.

He said, “I’m just suggesting you don’t need to go looking for a scandal. I’m saying that not everything has to be about sex.”

“It is not about sex,” Angie said. “It’s about love. And what you are suggesting is that we look the other way.” She heard herself slide over into the realm of too far, too much but was unable to stop it. “You don’t like messy, John, you never did. You want pretty and presentable, but that’s not us. That’s not me. It wasn’t me five years ago and it isn’t me now, and guess what, it isn’t—”

She stopped herself. All the color had left his face, but his eyes were unnaturally bright. “Go on.”

Angie shook her head.

“Go on,” he said calmly. “Say it.”

“I don’t know what I was going to say,” she lied, near tears.

He was looking at her steadily, his expression unreadable. Angie turned and left, and he said not one word to stop her.