I lie on my side, one finger tracing the gold emblem on the front of my passport, this gift that cost Lorenzo the earth, my ticket out of hell. Our ticket out, I think, holding my other hand to my belly. Only an hour ago I was thinking about Styron, and now, here I am, his short-lived Sophie, lying with her man, a terrible, Solomonic choice dangling in the space above us.

Which one? Which one do I save?

“How long do I have to think about it?” I ask, here in the dark of our bedroom.

We both know I don’t have long, not once we stage our first trial on Monday.

“We could stall the project,” I say. “Buy a few weeks.”

“Would that be enough?”

“No.”

Suddenly I’m thinking of a beach from more than twenty years ago, not a posh beach, not Cancún or Bermuda or anything—Jackie and I could barely scrape together the cash for a couple of nights in a crappy motel with no ocean view. But we went every summer to Rehoboth, to drink beer and sun ourselves and escape the madness of grad school for a few days. The last time we were there, I told her I’d socked away some money. We could stay another day, maybe two.

“Would that be enough?” Jackie said, sucking on a Corona she’d plucked from the cooler and squeezed a wedge of lime into.

“No.” I laughed.

“It all ends, Jeanie. Sooner or later. You can’t stay in the vacation bubble forever, you know.”

I don’t remember whether we stayed the extra day in that motel room, or whether we drove back the following morning. What I do remember is thinking, once we hauled the beach bags and suitcases full of bikinis and suntan lotion into our apartment, that it really didn’t matter. Sooner or later, we’d be right there in our Georgetown hovel, throwing leftovers turned science experiments out of the fridge, checking the piled-up mail, losing our tans, diving back into the academic grind.

Jackie, once again, was right. Sooner or later, it all ends.

“It crossed my mind,” I tell Lorenzo. “When Reverend Carl first asked me, I thought maybe he’d invented the whole story about the president’s brother’s head injury. I remember standing in my kitchen, wondering if he’d take my work and reverse engineer it.” I flop back on the pillow, wishing it would swallow me whole.

“Not your fault,” Lorenzo says.

But it is. And my fault didn’t start when I signed Morgan’s contract on Thursday. My fault started two decades ago, the first time I didn’t vote, the umpteen times I told Jackie I was too busy to go on one of her marches or make posters or call my congressmen.

“Tell me I don’t have to leave this bed,” I say. “Ever.”