Jane gazed out the window of the rented van as Desmond drove through downtown Waugborn, an architecturally neutered area in which every building—most brick, many nearly a hundred years old—had been partly sheathed in beige vinyl or white aluminum, stripped of their individuality and integrity. Once, this probably had been a collection of family businesses selling the necessities of life; now it looked like a row of portable storage units housing makeshift martial arts schools, video rental outlets, and grimy magazine stores with advertisements for a multitude of lottery games plastered on their windows. A handwritten sign on one proudly proclaimed: “We Had Two $50 Winners This Year Alone.” That told you everything you needed to know about what constituted winning in a place like this.

Waugborn was about fifteen miles from downtown Boston, but Jane had never driven through it. She occasionally read about it in the paper, usually a lurid story of a prom at which there’d been a drug overdose or a shooting, or a report of a tractor trailer overturning and spilling hazardous material onto a watershed area. This was one of those towns people had moved to in order to escape the dangers and congestion of urban living. Now it was as densely packed as the inner city but lacked the city’s conveniences and cultural benefits. Unless you consider a store that sells “balloons for every occasion” a cultural benefit. It was mid-afternoon, balmy and aggressively bright. Jane had on her darkest sunglasses, both to cut down on the glare and to hide her own exhausted eyes. The dusty downtown streets were populated by hunched teenaged boys cradling cigarettes and young mothers wearing windbreakers, pushing strollers, and in general, looking as weary as she felt.

Suburban blight. She’d suggest it as a topic for Dinner Conversation, haul in a few sociologists and urban planners, try to book the mayor of Waugborn or a similar disaster area, a few parents worried about their kids getting gunned down in the junior high. In terms of the pilot, this shot through the window of the van would be a perfect visual metaphor for Anderton’s life, or at least the end of it: the loss of identity, the death of a career. Come to think of it, it was a perfect visual metaphor for Jane’s own blighted heart, full of contorted emotions. It didn’t make sense to her that you could feel so energized and renewed one minute and thoroughly depleted the next; so filled with excitement and erotic anticipation at ten in the morning and so flattened by guilt and self-loathing by noon.

“Anderton’s brother-in-law grew up in Waugborn,” Desmond said, “and her sister, Margo, spent the majority of her life here. After Anderton’s husband died, she moved up here to be with Margo and her husband. She came to love the place.”