Jane woke up hungry. She couldn’t remember what she’d eaten yesterday. Very possibly nothing. Desmond had asked her to have dinner with him last night, but she was too exhausted—from the flight, the pills, the drive, the exertion of all the confessing she’d done on the beach. She wasn’t sure what had brought that on, but lying in bed in the dank motel room with a frame of morning sunlight around the curtained window, she didn’t regret it. She felt lighter than she’d felt in a long time, possibly the result of letting go of so many pent-up worries. Although it could be that she was coming down with a head cold from sleeping in this refrigerated cell.

She wanted to stand and look at herself in the mirror across from the bed, but it was midwinter in here. As for walking across the cracked tile floor of the bathroom, that was out of the question. Something was wrong with the air-conditioning system. Maybe even these artificial climates were going wacky. She grabbed a pack of cigarettes from the shelf attached to the wall beside the bed. The cigarette thing had gotten out of hand. At the airport on the way home, she’d toss out however many she had left and that would be that. Berman would probably tell her that taking up smoking in practically the same breath as her initial full-frontal fumbling with Dale was a sign of self-hatred. She was ready to buy the argument—after all, it was her argument, not Berman’s—but that didn’t explain why canceling the Dale situation had upped her cigarette intake. She clicked the remote control and a pinpoint of light flared in the middle of the ancient TV screen. Last night, the local public television station rebroadcast a Keith Sommerstone documentary on the Korean War, and she’d watched an hour of it, mesmerized by the footage he’d gathered, his seamless editing, his ability to humanize even the most complicated political information, and the sheer scope of his project. He had vision. He was a genius. If she was going to have to go through life not being a genius—and at forty, the dream of being a prodigy had pretty much dried up—then she could at least appreciate someone else’s brilliance.