Just her luck that after all those years of Thomas encouraging her to relax and take time off, someone was finally grilling her about career advancement when she had nothing to display for show-and-tell. She’d let herself drift, had allowed herself to get distracted by motherhood. That had its own amazing rewards, but they weren’t ones people like Dale—people who desperately wanted a child themselves but couldn’t have one—would appreciate. She’d drifted further by convincing Thomas they needed a bigger house, with more space, and had ended up with a white elephant with endless space for hosting Sarah and all kinds of friends and relatives she’d rather not host. They should have bought an apartment on Beacon Hill. It wouldn’t have been that much more expensive and they would have been within walking distance of Symphony Hall and theaters and museums, places that might have inspired her. What a grotesque miscalculation to think that they were doing the right thing for Gerald by moving to Brookline where they could have that most useless of American obsessions, a yard. Gerald hated the outdoors. Two minutes of direct sunlight and he broke out in bright, stinging rashes. As for sports, he sneered at all of them and had asked Thomas to take down the basketball net the previous owners had left because he hated looking at it from the window of his third-floor “apartment.” Now they had a half acre of overgrown grass, flower beds gone to seed and weed, and bushes they couldn’t identify covering up most of their windows. Thomas occasionally spent a Saturday morning shoving around a squeaky lawnmower, a practice that almost always produced a strained lower back and a circle of hacked up grass that looked as if a field animal had been chewing on it.

Never mind any of it. She wasn’t about to let Dale get the best of her, make her feel bad about her own life when the entire purpose of this meeting was to make him feel bad about his. She smiled at him and finished off the rest of the martini. Yesterday, Caroline had faxed her a detailed outline of Desmond Sullivan’s Lewis Westerly biography, and she’d scanned it into her computer and retyped bits of it so she could pass it along to Thomas as her own work. This morning, she’d read a couple of chapters, thinking she might find a topic for a dinner conversation and be able to use Desmond Sullivan as a guest.

“I’ve put together a proposal for a series of biographical documentaries,” she said, amazed by the conviction in her own voice. “One-hour pieces, probably a series of six, although that depends on how successful it is. It easily could be expanded.”

“Biographies.” Dale nodded. “I thought cable had that all sewn up—Lifetime, A&E, no?”