“Was she schizophrenic?” Chloe asked. She and Tim Gough, an undergraduate from Emerson College doing an internship at WGTB, were seated in the back of the van surrounded by lights, tripods, and an assortment of video equipment they’d borrowed from the station. “A lot of people who have neurological chemical imbalances are misdiagnosed as alcoholics, drug abusers, and anorexics.”

Wouldn’t it be a tremendous relief, Jane thought, to have something as neat and decisive, something as blameless and clinically sanctioned as a neurological chemical imbalance? That way, you could explain away your own rotten behavior, your own choices. You wouldn’t have to slip so deeply into the murky regions of right and wrong, wouldn’t have to be consumed by regret. Maybe a pill or a transplant or a treatment would numb all your imbalanced longing and lust and the rest of the unwieldy baggage she’d been carting around recently. Including—possibly, who knew?—love. Come to think of it, she did feel as if most of the chemical compounds in her brain had taken it upon themselves to have a blow-out party.

“There’s no indication of schizophrenia,” Desmond said. “No family history of it or any other mental illness.”

“Oh.” Chloe sounded crushed. It would be a tough job to turn Pauline Anderton into a victim, but if anyone was up to the task, it was Chloe. She was clearly horrified by the degraded downtown, and probably horrified by the ordinariness of it, too.

“You’re sure you’re comfortable using this equipment?” Jane asked.

“Pretty much. The camera I used for my senior project was a little more sophisticated than this stuff, but one of the guys at the station spent about five hours going over everything with me. And Tim’s majoring in media studies.”

Silent, long-haired Tim was so in awe of Chloe, he’d barely shown signs of life since they left the station. Today Chloe had come to work wearing a dark business suit. With her fashion-model frame and cascading curls of raven hair, even this conservative outfit look inexplicably fetching. Everything Chloe wore would make Jane look like a drab, harried lawyer or an over-the-hill hooker. There was no point in trying to do something about her fashion sense now; in five years, when she hit her mid-forties, she’d turn invisible, assuming she wasn’t already. But for the past few weeks, despite all the chemical imbalances in her brain, she’d felt wondrously visible for the first time in years. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t turning heads on the street, that people like Chloe had sorted her into the remainder bin; someone was actually seeing her when he looked at her, and approved of what he was seeing. Too bad—too inconvenient—that the someone was Dale, but you can’t have everything.