“That was some storm,” I said in the morning, trying to make conversation while I poured Sarah her coffee. She said nothing.

“Look,” I said, “I know I’ve fucked up, big-time, but it’s not like Magnuson made it out to be. I wasn’t trying to keep that guy from doing his story, I had no intention of doing that, and I’d said to Trixie that-”

“Just what did you say to Trixie?” Sarah said. It was the first time I’d heard her voice in maybe eighteen hours. “What do the two of you talk about? When you have your little lunches, your little meetings, your rendezvous?”

“‘Rendezvous’?” I said. “Why not ‘tryst’? There’s a word we don’t hear much anymore.”

“It’s a tryst?”

“Listen, I had lunch with her the other day, she told me she had this problem, I told her I couldn’t help her out with it.”

“Is that how you weren’t helping her out with it? Going back out there to talk to that reporter, to get him to give up his camera?”

“All I did was tell him Trixie was afraid to come into the diner unless he gave up the camera. He’d been trying to sneak a pic of her and-”

Sarah, screaming: “And what do you care! So what if he does! What is that to you? Since when did you become her protector?”

Her voice echoed off the kitchen walls.

I didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “You’re right. It’s her problem. It’s not my problem.” I paused. “It’s not our problem.”

Sarah took one last glaring look at me, then turned and went back upstairs to get ready for work. The coffee I’d poured for her sat neglected on the counter.

Angie, who’d been coming down the stairs as Sarah was going up, appeared. “I don’t know what you did, Dad,” she said, “but it must have been bad, even by your standards.”

I was ready with something sarcastic, then said, “Yeah. It was.”

And as I sat in my new! desk! in! the! Home! section, I tried to sort out which was the worst of my crimes. It hadn’t been getting myself demoted to one of the paper’s soft sections, and it hadn’t been nixing Sarah’s chances at becoming foreign editor, although that one was up there.

It was the fact that I hadn’t been honest with her. I hadn’t told Sarah what Trixie had asked of me. I hadn’t told her I’d agreed to at least meet with Trixie and Martin Benson.

The way Sarah must have seen it was, if I hadn’t disclosed the details of that conversation with Trixie, what other conversations with her had I failed to fill her in on?

Once, a couple of years ago, when I’d made a joke that I was not having an affair with someone, Sarah had laughed. It was the one thing she knew she’d never have to worry about, she said. I could never pull it off, I’d have too guilty a conscience, my face would betray me when I attempted a lie.

Plus there was the part about my loving Sarah more than any other woman in the world.

But I’d crossed a line somewhere, and was over it before I’d realized it. My marriage to Sarah meant a lot more to me than my friendship with Trixie. And if that meant distancing myself from her, then that’s what I’d have to-

My phone rang.

Did the Metropolitan switchboard already know I was here, and not out in the newsroom?

“Walker,” I said, picking up.

“It’s happened,” Trixie said.

“What?”

“My picture. It’s in the paper. Fucking amazing picture too. Must have been shot with a telephoto. No camera phone shot.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Maybe you could tell me why your paper shot it?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“There’s this little line, under the picture.”

“A photo credit,” I said.

“Whatever. It says, ‘Special to the Suburban by Lesley Carroll, slash, The Metropolitan.’ She must have been parked up the street from the house, took my picture as I was going from the car to the house. I’m fucked.”

Lesley Carroll took the picture? One of our photogs? I thought about it for a moment, and it started to make sense. Magnuson tells his old buddy Blair, Hey, our Walker guy messed with your guy over a picture of this woman? Leave it with us. We’ll get you a picture. We’ll send one of our people. We’ve got shooters who’ve been to Iraq and back. Think we can’t get a shot of this, what’s her name? Trixie Snelling? We’ve got this young intern, eager to make a name for herself as a photographer. You can bet she’ll get you your picture. Consider it our way of saying we’re sorry.

That’s how it must have gone.

“I’m sorry, Trixie. I really am.”

“This couldn’t happen at a worse time. With those guys in town, trying to sell stun guns.”

“Trixie, I have to go.”

“Didn’t you check those guys out? Didn’t I tell you to?”

“Trixie, I’m sorry.”

And I ended the call.

For a while, Miranda was your basic street kid. Stopped going to school, gravitated to the big city, hung around teen drop-in shelters, slept someplace different every night, got a bucket and a squeegee and tried to make some money cleaning people’s windshields. Most of them, they pretended not to see you when you tried to make eye contact. If you could catch their eye, wave the squeegee, smile nice, make them realize you weren’t some crazy crackhead or something, they might give you the nod, let you clean their window, they’d give you a couple quarters, maybe a buck if you were lucky. But mostly they ignored you, or waved you away, or told you “Fuck off, you miserable cocksucking whore, go get a real job like everybody else.”

But she still made a good buck. She got to where she could guess who’d let her squeegee and who wouldn’t. She did better with men, not so good with lady drivers. She figured, maybe the men are less intimidated. “You dumb ass,” one of her coworkers said. “You wonder why you do okay with the guys? Look at you. Leaning over their window with those knockers? That one guy, he drove around the block, didn’t you notice you did his window twice in five minutes? Shit, you look like that, what are you cleaning fucking windshields for? You could be making a fortune doing something else.”

“I’m not hooking,” Miranda said.

“Who said anything about hooking? You’re like a dancer, leaping between those cars. Go on stage, dance around, shake ’em. Beats cleaning somebody’s windshield when it’s ten below.”

Miranda had never really thought of herself as good-looking. Compliments weren’t exactly handed out back home. Somebody told her there was a bar up in Canborough where they were looking for strippers. She should check it out, they said.

It wasn’t exactly what she wanted to do, but she was tired of working outside and freezing her ass off. She could have landed on Claire’s doorstep, but she had a decent life with Don. Miranda didn’t feel right barging in on it. They were living above a pizza place somewhere, sleeping on a pull-out couch in a one-room apartment. She had some secretary-type job, he’d lined up something at the Ford plant. You could make good money there. Someday, he said, they’d get a nice house out in the country.

Miranda was happy for Claire, happy that she had a boyfriend who loved her. They were probably going to get married, that’s what Claire had told her. Miranda didn’t want to mess that up. She had to try to make it on her own. She’d been put down all her life, but she still had pride. She wouldn’t allow her parents to steal that from her.

“You can stay with us,” Claire told her. “Really.”

But Miranda said no, don’t worry, she had plans.

Going to Canborough and trying out to be a stripper, that was her plan.

She hitchhiked up there, carrying everything she had in a backpack she’d found in a secondhand store. Got herself cleaned up in the washroom of a McDonald’s. Someone must have told, because just as she was finishing up, this short woman in a brown uniform and nametag that said “Lulu” came in, said, “This ain’t the Y, sweetie. Scram.”