Her daughter, Ava, and Ava’s husband, Potter, and their twins, Maggie and Homer, live in the city, but Ava keeps threatening to move to New Canaan (the lawns! the schools!), so Margaret wants to spend as much time as she can with them while they’re still just across the park. Margaret and her husband, Dr. Drake Carroll, travel to Boston to see Margaret’s son Patrick, his wife, Jennifer, and their three teenage boys, and then often they take the ferry over to Nantucket to visit Margaret’s son Kevin, his wife, Isabelle, and their children, Genevieve, Kelley, and baby Arnaud.

Just this past year, Drake has cut back his surgery schedule at the hospital in anticipation of full-on retirement, so he and Margaret have been able to travel. They took a Viking River cruise down the Rhine and the Rhône; they trekked Milford Sound in New Zealand. It’s been a long time since Margaret has been able to travel for pleasure. While she was working, the network sent her places like Kosovo, Tel Aviv, Fallujah, Medellín, Lagos, Haiti, and, once—a happy lark—to London to cover William and Kate’s wedding.

Margaret sits on the boards of three charities—one hospital, one museum, one homeless shelter. She emcees each of these organization’s major benefits; she plays in celebrity softball games; she has been approached by Dancing with the Stars (she said no); and she’s been toying with teaching at the Columbia School of Journalism.

She’s been asked to write her memoirs but she’s nowhere near ready for that—too much living yet to do.

She’d like to write a book describing the magic of being a grandmother, but Leslie Stahl beat her to it.

When Margaret’s phone rings on the third of September and she sees it’s her former boss Lee Kramer, head of the studio, she thinks he’s calling to make an elaborate excuse for why he and his wife, Ginny (editor in chief of Vogue), can’t attend the hospital benefit three weeks hence. That’s fine, Margaret thinks. There are so many worthy causes in this city and you can’t go to everything, though Margaret plans to hit Lee up for fifty thousand at least.

“Don’t say no.”

This isn’t the greeting Margaret was expecting. “Good morning, Lee. How are you?”

“Please just hear me out.”

“How are Ginny and the kids? How does Evie like Cornell?”

“I’d like you to come back for one assignment.”

“Thanks for calling,” Margaret says. “Bye.”

“You don’t even know what it is.”

“No, but I know how this works. I say yes to one assignment, then another assignment comes along, then Sixty Minutes offers me a ten-segment deal, then you offer me my own half-hour show aimed at baby boomers, and the next thing you know, my grandchildren are seeing me more on TV than they are in person.”

“This is one assignment and it’s your favorite kind of story…”