Nothing had gone the way she’d expected it to today, and for once, that was happy news. Pauline Anderton was alive. However it affected their project, the mere fact of it was, at this moment, exhilarating. It showed that it was never too late for things to turn around, that it was never pointless to hope for a shift in wind direction and a change in the weather. All it took was patience, conviction, and commitment to pursuing the real story instead of inventing the missing pieces. Luck didn’t hurt, either.

Desmond shut off the engine. “Are you ready to run?” he asked.

They dashed through the wall of water, ran into his room, and collapsed onto the beds, dripping. Miraculously, the air conditioner was turned off, and the room was blessedly warm. “What’s your best guess,” he said, “about the impact of this little discovery on our pilot?”

She mulled this over for a moment. “With TV, you never know. But my best guess is: feeding frenzy.”

He got towels from the bathroom and tossed her one, then stood at the window, gazing out at the storm and drying his hair. Considering what had happened this morning, he seemed remarkably quiet, almost subdued. He looked gawky and frail with his wet clothes stuck to his body.

“Desmond?” she said. “Are you all right?”

He turned away from the window and faced her, the towel draped over his wet head. “I missed it,” he said finally.

“What?”

“The key to everything. Michael. The whole unfinished piece of the biography.”

“It probably wasn’t as obvious as it now seems.”

He shook his head. “It’s right there—in the cards she sent, the letters she wrote, the sarcastic interviews she gave. It was all there, and I was looking at it, but I still missed it.”

There was a useful cliché for this attitude, something about a gift horse. “You know it now,” she said. “That’s what matters, isn’t it?”

“You know why I missed it, Jane? Why I wasn’t seeing the key to everything in her life? Because I wasn’t seeing what it was in mine.”

“I imagine you’re talking about Russell.”

“I wasn’t looking for the missing piece, I was running away from it.”

The key to everything. What a great luxury to believe in the simple efficiency of a thing like that. If she were handed such a magic tool, she’d know where to go from here; how to forget Dale, how to feel like a real mother to Gerald, how to be Thomas’s wife.

Desmond finished drying his hair and dropped the towel onto the bed. He opened the drawer of the bedside table. “I have something for you,” he said.