They were leaving for Florida in less than a week, and although she hated to fly, didn’t like the stifling humidity of the South, and had discovered that the area of Florida they were visiting had so little to recommend it, it was generally passed over by guidebooks, she couldn’t wait to get out of town. She went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. Then she looked into the mirror, hoping she’d see conviction and competence, something that might please David Trask, even if she wasn’t quite up to intimidating him these days. No such luck. Her hair was too long and stringy, had lost some of its luster, and her face was gaunt. She still couldn’t get Thomas’s words out of her mind, what he’d said the night he came back from the hospital. If only she didn’t have a guilty conscience, she would have asked him what he meant. But as it was, she had to assume the worst. And worst of all, she longed to talk it over with Dale. He was the only one who knew what was going on. Or had been going on. It had been two weeks since she’d left the message on his machine telling him she couldn’t see him anymore, and just as she’d predicted, he was doing the wretchedly honorable thing by not calling her back.

2.

David was pacing in front of his wide window, the sky a dark field behind it. “The threat of rain,” they’d said on the weather this morning. But how could it be considered a threat when it had scarcely rained all fall and everything seemed to be drying up? They should do a Dinner Conversation on the glib giddiness of weather reporting. She’d make a note of it when she got back to her office.

David looked unhappy, as he often did these days. A little over a year ago, he’d made the colossal mistake of marrying a beautiful, younger woman—for love. It was generally assumed that David had family money—who in public television, aside from Jane, didn’t?—and he wasn’t unattractive, but he’d married out of his league. It was obvious to anyone who knew anything about women like Mara Kray that David was a stepping-stone on Mara’s path to somewhere else. She needed a bigger and more glamorous audience than she was likely to find in Boston, and Jane supposed it was only a matter of a year or two before Mara hooked up with a better connected and more powerful man. In the meantime, she tended to flirt with good-looking nonentities, her male counterparts, and publicly humiliate David in a gentle, condescending way. In the gray morning light, his skin looked sallow.