Jane appreciated self-deprecation as much as the next person, but only when it was clearly an attention-getting display of false modesty. Caroline’s humble whimpers often pointed to actual flaws. But how nice that Dale Barsamian, Jane’s ex-husband, had married Caroline instead of a fifteen-year-old beauty queen or a manic overachiever, someone who would have inspired crippling jealousy and made Jane wonder even more acutely if her own second marriage hadn’t been a little hasty.

“I’m not getting you at a bad time, am I?” Caroline asked.

“I’m supposed to be doing damage control,” Jane said, “so I’d much rather talk with you.” Despite her quirks, there was something relaxing about talking with Caroline; she was genuinely kind and thoughtful, and was so modest, you didn’t have to engage in conversational one-upmanship with her. Jane often found herself bringing up boring topics she wouldn’t dare discuss with someone she wanted to impress. “How are the cats?” she asked.

“All right, I guess. Willie kept me up last night. I don’t know what’s gotten into him. He’s so talkative all of a sudden.”

“Really? Has he got anything interesting to say about plane crashes?”

“I didn’t mean it literally.”

Caroline could be one of the most curiously dull intelligent people Jane had ever met, not counting everyone at Deerforth College. She had a Ph.D. in English Lit (from Yale, no less) and a law degree from NYU, but she didn’t seem to know what to do with either of them. Since marrying Dale five years earlier, she’d devoted herself to studying Sufism. You’d think you could get her to make an interesting comment every once in a while, or at least recognize a joke when she heard one. The one time Jane had had her on the show, she’d made a few embarrassingly dim observations about George Eliot and then sat there eating, something most guests had the common sense to realize was out of the question, no matter how tempting the food looked.

And yet Dale was devoted to her. Jane didn’t know whether to envy Caroline or pity her for that. At his worst, Dale was a cad, a liar, and a self-centered, uncommunicative brat. When their divorce had come through, Jane had felt a ripple of elation pass through her body, as if she’d just quit the worst job of her life. The problem was, as soon as she’d untied all the strings that had made Dale’s bad qualities so maddening and confining, she was free to see all the good things that had made him so attractive in the first place: his intelligence, his spiky survival skills, and his languorous, louche sexual charms.