Frank couldn’t have been aware of Nicole’s train of thought, but he couldn’t have missed the direction it was going in. He exhaled through his nose the way he always did when he was angry. “Just tell me what you want, okay?”

“What do I want?” Nicole shot back. “This month’s check would be nice. Last month’s check would be even nicer.” The other thing Nicole wanted, the thing she couldn’t say, was to understand what Frank saw in an airhead more than ten years younger than he was. She’d seen enough of Dawn both before Frank left that note on her pillow and in the time since, dropping off and picking up kids on weekend visitations, to be sure her only visible asset (aside from the nicely rounded ones in her bra) was the ability to listen to Frank go on about encryption algorithms for hours at a time without her blue, blue eyes glazing over.

Frank snorted again. He sounded like an irritated mule. “Is that why you called? To nag me again? I’ll get ‘em to you as fast as I can. I’m not made of money, you know.”

Thanks to Spy by Wire, he had a very nice little pile. If he thought Nicole didn’t know that, he was bone stupid. Stupider than somebody who’d run off with a twenty-two-year-old golden girl when his son was just starting to crawl. Nicole had been listing all the payments he’d been late on or skipped. One day, in court…

But she didn’t need the list now. She needed cash – cash and a place for Kimberley and Justin to stay.

Her grip on the telephone tightened. If only it were his neck. But she couldn’t afford to lose her temper. She couldn’t afford anything right now, least of all an ex-husband more annoyed with her than he already was. “No, that isn’t why I called.” She didn’t apologize – she never apologized when she was right. “I called to ask if you could take the kids tomorrow. Your hours are a lot more flexible than mine. If you could just – ”

“What’s the matter with Josefina?” Frank broke in. “Immigration finally catch up with her?”

Nicole took a deep breath and counted to five – counting to ten, right then, was beyond her. When she could trust her voice, she said “No” and explained in words of one syllable, with a minimum of sarcasm, about Josefina’s mother. “I know it’s impossibly short notice” – for that, she could apologize; her pride wasn’t so sticky – ”but she didn’t give me any warning at all, just hit me with it when I dropped the children off this morning. I’ll find somebody else as fast as I can. I’m sure it won’t be past this weekend. By that time I’ll – ”

Frank interrupted again: “I can’t.” She’d always had a knack for knowing when he was lying – except, of course, about Dawn, but that wasn’t the issue now. She was sure, down in her bones, that he was telling the truth. “It is impossibly short notice,” he said. “I’ve got way too much stuff going on to take ‘em now. I’m sorry, Nicole. I wish I could.”

He was telling the truth about that, too. She could feel it much too clearly for comfort. Dammit.

“Please, Frank,” she said – never mind if she had to get down on her knees and beg, this was critical. “Have I ever asked you for anything like this before?”

“No, you haven’t,” he admitted, but there wasn’t any give in his voice. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t do it.”

Nicole rolled all her frustrated fury into a bullet – rage at Josefina, rage at Sheldon Rosenthal, years’ worth of rage at Frank – and sighted it dead center on her ex-husband. “Why not? They’re your children, too, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“I can’t take them tomorrow,” Frank said again. He not only snorted like a mule, he could dig in his heels like one. He wasn’t budging now.

Nicole didn’t care if he grew roots to China. “Why not? What are you doing that’s so important?”

“Nicole…” There it came, the tone of sweet reason driven to desperation, with the edge of temper that threatened but hadn’t quite, yet, blown up. “Look, I’m not on the witness stand. You don’t get to cross-examine me anymore.”

“What do you mean, ‘anymore’?” Nicole couldn’t manage sweet reason, or desperation, either. She was plain, flat angry.

“Just what I said,” Frank said. “If you’re done, will you kindly get off the line? I’m expecting a call.”

“Go to hell,” she said crisply, and hung up.

The rush of gratified fury died away, leaving her shaking too hard to do anything more useful than stare at the telephone. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. It had been her idea to move to L.A. from Indianapolis. She’d always been the dynamic one, the go-getter, the one who’d make her mark on life in capital letters, while he’d messed around in grad school playing with computers because they were easier for him to deal with than people. And now, somehow, he was happily shacked up with Ms. Young-Blonde, with a big name that was likely to grow bigger, while her life and her career headed the wrong way down a one-way street, head-on into a phalanx of trucks.

She swiveled her chair to glare at the framed law degree on the wall. Indiana University Law School. In Indianapolis, it would have stamped her forever as second-rate: if you weren’t Ivy League, you weren’t anybody. In Los Angeles, she’d found, it was unusual, even exotic. That still bemused her, after half a dozen years.

“There ain’t no justice,” she said to the wall. The wall didn’t deign to answer.

Nicole was still sitting there, still glowering at the diploma, when Cyndi came into the office and plopped the day’s mail on the desk. “Doesn’t look like anything you have to handle right away,” she said. She was trying to sound normal – trying a little too hard.

Nicole didn’t snap at her for it. Much. “Good,” she said. “The way this day is going, I’m not up for handling much of anything anyway.”

Cyndi bit her lip. “I’m sorry,” she said, and hesitated, visibly wondering whether to go on. At last she decided to go for it: “It should have been you, Ms. Gunther-Perrin.”

“It wasn’t.” Nicole’s voice came out flat. “That’s all there is to it.”

Cyndi couldn’t say anything to that. She shook her head and left for the relative safety of her desk.

Nicole hardly noticed. Opening envelopes gave her hands something to do but let her mind stay disengaged: perfect. If she worked hard enough at it, she might just disconnect altogether. Once the envelopes were open, she shuffled the papers they’d held, looking busy without doing much till she could escape to lunch.

Yang Chow, over on Topanga Canyon, was hands down the best Chinese place in the west half of the San Fernando Valley. That wasn’t why Nicole drove there. The restaurant was also a couple of miles away from her Warner Center office building, far enough that, with luck, she’d be the only one from the firm there today. Shop talk and gossip were the last things she wanted.

She sat alone at a table in the casual elegance of the restaurant – no storefront fast-food ambience here – eating soup, drinking tea, and going after chili shrimp with chopsticks. Yang Chow’s were of hard, smooth plastic, and didn’t give as good a grip as the disposable wooden kind. She counted herself lucky not to end up with a shrimp in her lap.

That’s what my luck’s come down to, she thought, splashing soy sauce onto steamed rice: I don’t spill food on myself. All around her, businessmen chattered happily in English, Chinese, Spanish, and some other language she didn’t recognize.

Why shouldn’t they be happy? They were men.

One of them caught her looking. She saw what she’d come to call The Progression: widened eyes, Who-Me? glance, broad come-hither grin. He was wearing a wedding ring, a broad gold band. He didn’t bother to hide it. Without that, she would simply have ignored him. As it was, the look she sent suggested he had a glob of snot in his mustache. He hastily went back to his pork chow mein.

Nicole took her time finishing her lunch. Going back to the office had all the appeal of a root canal. She stared out the window at the traffic whooshing past on Topanga. She was aware, rather remotely, of the busboy taking her dishes. Only after the waiter came by to ask for the third time, in increasingly pointed tones, whether she wanted anything else did she admit to herself that she couldn’t stay there all afternoon. She threw a five and a couple of singles on the table and walked out to her car.