The office was eerily quiet this afternoon as it usually was when they were in the middle of a crisis. In two hours they were taping a conversation about a recent plane crash, and one of the guests, a flight attendant, had canceled earlier in the day. Then at noon, a pilot who had agreed to appear and would serve as the authority figure and centerpiece of the discussion called to say he was delayed in Dallas indefinitely. They were left with a couple of windbag travel agents, a friend of one of the other producers whose entire identity revolved around his refusal to fly, and a New Hampshire housewife who claimed to have “died briefly” in an airline disaster several years earlier. As far as Jane was concerned, going on to write best-selling religious tracts—in this case, I Met God—was ample evidence that death, no matter how shortlived, had not occurred, but as a nervous flier herself, she didn’t want to tempt fate by calling the woman’s bluff.

There was a faint knock on Jane’s door and Chloe Barnes tentatively stuck her head into the office and gave Jane one of her trembly looks of empathic concern.

“Everything’s under control, Chloe. I have several people lined up, I’m just waiting for them to call and confirm.”

“You’re sure there’s nothing I can do?”

“Very sure.”

Chloe bit down on her lower lip and raised her eyebrows, as if to say, “Poor you.” Jane had been touched by this wide-eyed, lip-biting expression for the first few weeks Chloe worked at the station. Then she saw Chloe staring at her with the exact same mixture of worry and pain while Jane was combing her hair in the bathroom mirror and realized it was a young, beautiful woman’s pity of a forty-year-old she considered past the point of sexual relevance. Jane would have laughed it off if she hadn’t been worrying about the sexual relevance question herself.

Half an hour earlier, Jane had phoned Rosemary Boyle, an old college friend who was in Boston to teach a couple of courses at BU. Rosemary was a poet, usually a self-involved conversationalist, but last year she’d written a memoir about being a widow, so she could provide an expert opinion on loss, or something equally pertinent and unspecific. Since the publication of Dead Husband, Rosemary was prepared to provide an expert opinion on anything, as long as it helped promote the book. The only thing she wasn’t prepared to talk about was the $1.5 million poor Charlie had left her when he died or committed suicide or whatever, and how her wrenching description of intolerable privation had added another few hundred grand to her coffers. Jane still hadn’t heard back from her. They could easily do the show with five guests, but four was out of the question.