She seemed torn between wanting to sell herself and needing to unburden herself. For someone with no regrets, she looked very sad as she stared down into her lap.

"I've always picked people, situations that were never going to work out. I'm here because I want to stop doing that." She reached up with a manicured finger and gently brushed away a strand of hair that had fallen into her eyes. She wasn't even trying to smile anymore. "I hope it's not too late."

"It's never too late, Ellen." Julia's response was automatic, but then there was a pause and I imagined that she was a little stunned by Ellen's frankness. Some of the perkiness had gone out of her voice. "One final question, dear. Describe for me a picture of your life if all your dreams came true."

Ellen turned slightly and for the first time gazed completely off-camera, the way she might if she was looking for her response through a window. But I knew she wasn't. I knew she was looking inside and she was struggling, trying to hold off her natural inclination to close herself off, to deny herself even the simple pleasure of saying her dream out loud. Because if you never say it out loud, you can still pretend the reason you don't have it is because you never wanted it to begin with. Anything else hurts too much.

"I believe it's a gift to know your dreams." Ellen had gathered herself and leveled her gaze directly at me-at the camera. "If I'd known before what my dreams were going to turn out to be, I'd have made different choices. That's not to say that I wouldn't have worked, but my priorities would have been different. I want…" She paused, started to speak, stopped, and tried again. "I want to learn to let people know me. I want to meet a man who wants to know me better than anyone else does. I want to be a mother so that I can leave something behind. If there's a place for me in this world, I want to find it. That's my dream."

She smiled into the camera, a radiant, hopeful, almost triumphant smile. That was the last image of her as the tape ran out and the screen went blank.

I stood in Boston-in-Common's sheltered entryway and stared out at the cold rain. It was one of those gloomy days where indoors you have to keep the lights on and outside there's no way to stay dry because of the wind. It was the kind of winter day that seeps through to your bone marrow and makes you feel that you're never going to get warm again.

Ellen's video was under my coat where I could protect it. I'd watched it twice waiting for Julia, thinking both times that she'd been wrong; it can be too late. It had been too late for Ellen, and I had the feeling that when she sat for that video, Ellen had somehow known that.

I turned on my cell phone and dialed the airport.

"Molly?" The rain started to pound the bricks harder, and I had to step back not to get splashed.

"I've been calling you for an hour," she said. "Where have you been?"

"I had to run an errand. I told you I was going out."

"You didn't say you'd be unreachable."

"Can't I have an hour to myself?"

"No skin off my nose." I heard her taking a drag on her cigarette. "I just thought you'd like to know that your bag room blew up."

When I saw the news trucks parked in front of the terminal, I knew it was going to be one of the days where I wished somebody-anybody-had my job instead of me. Bombs at the airport always made for good press, but reporters scared me almost as much as anything that could happen in the operation, including bombs.

I went the back way, where I could enter from the ramp. I followed the flashing lights, the official uniformed personnel, and the acrid, sinus-searing odor. I pushed my way through the crowd of employees at the door, wondered vaguely who was working the trips, and flashed my ID at the trooper standing guard. He lifted the yellow tape and let me in, where I joined what must have been twenty-five firemen, state troopers, inspectors, Port Authority employees, mechanics, and various others crowded into the concrete, bunker-like space. The way they were milling and talking, it almost looked like some absurd cocktail party, except that one wall and part of the ceiling was totally black, fire hoses were lined up on the wet cement, and right in the middle of everything was a blackened bag cart, misshapen and still smoldering, its singed contents splayed around the floor. There were lots of skis- actually, pieces of skis.

I felt the same way I do at cocktail parties, as if the action swirling around me had nothing to do with me, but not for the same reason. I looked around at the destruction, and I knew that of all the people in this room, I was the one, the only one, responsible for what had happened here.

I spotted my rotund supervisor talking to someone who looked important. Norm introduced me to George Carver, the fire chief. The chief was a large man, late fifties, with stern hazel eyes.

"It could have been a lot worse, Miss Shanahan," he said.

"Was anyone hurt?"

"No. As luck would have it, there was no one at all in the bag room when the device went off."

I wasn't feeling that lucky. "Can you tell me what happened? I was off-site and just got back to the field."

We stepped over a fire hose as he led me over to the bag cart, basically a metal box on wheels with two open sides covered by plastic curtains and a bisecting shelf. This one was slightly cockeyed, and the curtains were shredded and melted. I could smell the burned plastic.

"You had some kind of a small homemade explosive device that was probably about here." He pointed with his pen to a spot on the floor of the cart. "You see how this is bowed up?" He was referring to the shelf, which now looked like one of the golden arches. "And it was on this side. You see how the blast went out this way?" The concrete wall on the ramp side was covered in black soot. A computer that had been sitting on a rickety table lay shattered on the ground. He took me around to the other side. "Virtually no damage over here to your bag belt. This side of the cart was packed to absorb the shock and force the damage the other way."

Damned considerate. "You said there was no one in here at the time?"

"Right."

"And it was a single bag cart in the middle of the floor? Not a train?"

He nodded. "You people will have to do your own investigation to rule out whether or not the thing came in on an aircraft. I don't think it came in in a checked bag. My eyeball opinion is that someone rolled this cart in here, packed it, stuck in a device, and ran like hell."

"Jesus." I stared at a B727 parked on the gate less than two hundred yards away. Through the porthole windows I could see passengers moving down the aisle to their seats. My knees felt weak as I began to absorb the enormity of what could have happened.

Chief Carver followed my gaze. "Like I said, it could have been worse. We'll be conducting our own investigation and giving you a complete report. I should be able to tell you what kind of a device it was. We'll put it with all the rest of our reports on Majestic Airlines incidents at Logan."

"You've seen this before?"

"Bombs, bomb threats, fires. You name it. Your guys are real flamethrowers. I keep warning you people that someone's going to get hurt."

"Have you ever identified any of these flamethrowers?"

"No, and unless someone who saw something or heard something steps up, we won't catch this guy, either."

"If anyone knows about this, we'll find them." I tried to look and sound confident, but I knew full well how the union closed ranks. So did he. He responded with a look that was the equivalent of a pat on the head.

We had to step out of the line of sight of a trooper taking photographs. Someone from the Port was motioning to me. "Chief Carver, I'm glad to have met you, although I'm sorry about the circumstances. I'd like to come over and talk about some preventive measures we could take to avoid this sort of thing in the future."