ONE

The third woman in the pickup line at Hamilton Point Elementary School looks, more or less, like every other woman in the line, although a truly discerning eye might notice that she spends just that much more money and time on her appearance. She has chin-length hair, expertly cut and colored. She wears dainty silver-and-sapphire earrings, a crisp blue shirt, and lightweight wool trousers in the latest style-flat front, tapered at the ankles, fitted through the thighs, which means one had better be doing the latest style of exercise, Pilates or yoga or whatever fitness trend has finally drifted down from New York in the past few months. If Pilates, preferably the kind with machines. If yoga, it should be kundalini or Vikram, true Vikram, licensed Vikram. “You can do ashtanga, I suppose,” Connie Katz told Heloise the other day, at the Saturday soccer game, “but, as my kundalini teacher likes to say, ashtanga will work up a sweat, but it won’t fix your spine.”

“My spine’s fine,” Heloise said with a smile, but Connie was already moving away from her, ostensibly to follow her son’s progress down the field. Other women always seem to be moving away from Heloise, putting distance between them, disturbed by her aloofness, her lack of giddy complaints about the lives they lead, their mutual misery. As one of only two single moms with kids in Mrs. Brennan’s fourth-grade class, shouldn’t Heloise complain more, not less, than the rest of them? But Heloise doesn’t have a husband, and husbands are the fodder for the majority of the stories, the endless anecdotes about how much these women put up with, the heroic tales that tend to end: “And it was in his closet”-or the refrigerator, or the garage, or the front-hall powder room, or even the man’s own pockets-“the entire time!”

Heloise could live somewhere else. Self-employed, she can live anywhere she chooses. But Turner’s Grove is convenient for work, equidistant to Washington and Baltimore and Annapolis, and the schools are excellent, consistently in the state’s ninety-ninth percentile on testing. In fact, she has switched Scott from private school to the public one just this year, deciding that a larger student body was safer for them. It’s in small groups that curiosity gets excited, that idiosyncrasies are more readily noticed. No, a change of address wouldn’t change anything except the name of the street, the school, the soccer team. The same vigilance would have to be maintained, the same careful balancing act of not drawing attention to herself, and especially not drawing attention to the fact that she doesn’t want to draw attention. Heloise is constantly adjusting her life to that end. She used to have a full-time babysitter, for example, but that stirred up too much envy, too much speculation, so she calls the new girl, Audrey, her au pair and keeps her out of the public eye as much as possible. Her au pair is from Wilkes-Barre, but as it happens Audrey has a hearing loss that causes her to speak in a slightly stilted way, so neighbors assume she’s from some Eastern European country they should know, but don’t. Here in Turner’s Grove, Scott has a good life, Heloise has an easy one, and that’s all she can ever hope for.

“And your family’s here,” neighbors observe, and Heloise nods, smiling a tight-lipped Mona Lisa smile. Easy and good natured, she has managed the trick of seeming totally accessible, all the while sharing almost nothing about herself. She wouldn’t dream of confiding in anyone, even loyal Audrey, that discovering her half sister lived one development over was far from ideal. Hard to say who was more horrified when they realized they were in the same school district, Heloise or Meghan. Estranged for years and now virtually neighbors.

Checking her makeup in the rearview mirror-is that a bruise? No, her eyeliner just got smeary at her last meeting-she spots her sister several cars back in the line. If she could see her sister’s face, it would not be much different than glancing in this mirror. Only smaller, a little sharper and foxier. And frowning, begrudging Heloise her better spot in line, as Meghan begrudges Heloise everything. They are not even six months apart, beyond Irish twins. If they had been boys, the doctor might have thrown in the second circumcision for free. Then again, they probably only do that when Irish twins have the same mother. Heloise and Meghan share a father, a not particularly nice one, who left Meghan’s mother for Heloise’s, then spent the rest of his life making both women miserable.

But while Heloise has their father’s long-legged frame, Meghan favors her little sparrow of a mother, growing smaller and tighter with the years, her bones feeding off her skin. She doesn’t have an ounce of fat left on her body, and there are unhealthy hollows beneath her eyes. Heloise wonders if her sister still gets her period. Knowing Meghan, she probably willed it to go away after having four children in five years. Her husband refused to get a vasectomy on the grounds that it wasn’t natural. Heloise tries to figure out the chicken-or-egg implications. Did Meghan become borderline anorexic to punish her husband, to make herself less desirable to him, or did she stay that way because she welcomed the side effects? There has always, always, been a tightness about Meghan, a kind of controlled fury. You can see it even in baby pictures, her long, skinny body propped up on a sofa, her face pinched with resentment. The youngest child by a bit in Hector Lewis’s first family, Meghan believes she was short-changed on everything in childhood: allowance money, new clothes, extra helpings, her father’s attention. She has been making up for lost time ever since she landed Brian a year out of college. She keeps score by stuff, and her primary anxiety about having Heloise close seems to be that Heloise is in the top-tier development in Turner’s Grove, while Meghan is in Phase II. Larger, but with fewer custom details. Meghan lives for custom details.

Come to notice-Meghan is driving a new SUV today, although her previous car couldn’t have been more than three years old. She has moved up to a Lexus, the hybrid. The last time she and Heloise spoke-if one can call their chance encounters conversations-she was torn between the Navigator, by far the largest of the SUVs on the market, and the Range Rover. “The Rover makes a better statement,” she told Heloise, “but Brian vetoed it.”

“Statement about what?” Heloise was genuinely confused, but Meghan rolled her eyes as if Heloise were trying to provoke her. Disapproving of Heloise makes Meghan feels so good that Heloise almost-almost-doesn’t resent it. If Meghan ever comes to resent her too much, it will be bad, very bad indeed.

The final bell rings and the school seems to inhale before expelling the children in one big breath. Scott used to be one of the first out the door, but he’s infinitely cooler now that he’s nine and it’s a minute or two before he saunters out with his two best friends, Luke and Addison. But he is still young enough to light up when he sees Heloise, to remember, at least for a moment, that no one loves him more than his mother. He doesn’t let himself run to the car, but he picks up the pace, walking faster and faster until he bursts into the backseat, bringing noise and light and that wonderfully grubby little-boy smell, all dirt and glue and school supplies.

“Good day?” Heloise asks.

“Pretty good. We talked about genes in science.”

“Blue jeans?” she asks, setting him up to correct her.

“The genes that make you what you are. Did you know that two brown-eyed people can have a blue-eyed child, but two blue-eyed people can’t have a brown-eyed one? Not without mu-mu-” She lets him struggle for it. “Mutation.”

“Really?”

“Yes. So my dad must have had brown eyes, right?”

“Right.” She waits a second, then prompts: “And?” She doesn’t want him to grow up incurious like so many men, programmed only for their own outgoing messages.

“Oh.” He stops and thinks about what he’s supposed to say. “How was your day?”

“Pretty good.” Wednesday is one of her busiest days. She had two lunch appointments back-to-back.

“ Washington, Baltimore, or Annapolis?”

“ Washington. I had lunch at Red Sage. Tamales.”

“Luc-ky.”

She worries for a moment that she has trained him too well, that he might have follow-up questions, and then she’ll really have to gild the burrito, pile on more details about the lunch she didn’t actually eat, because she seldom eats the expensive meals purchased by her clients. Luckily, Scott launches into a complicated story about that day’s science class, and she knows she is safe. For now. But it is only a matter of time before Scott thinks to ask one day, “What does a lobbyist do exactly, Mommy?” Only a matter of time before she will have to muster an explanation boring enough to discourage him from asking still more questions. Sometimes, Heloise wishes she had settled for pretending to be, say, an importer-exporter, but then she would have been forced to do even more research to make her lies plausible. She may not be a real lobbyist, but her work has always centered on politicians and the kind of businessmen who court them, and she has absorbed quite a bit-more than she wants to, actually-about various state and federal issues. She has to watch herself sometimes, when a neighbor says something ignorant about Iraq or the Middle East and she’s tempted to contradict. Easier to stay silent than explain how she happens to know more about foreign policy than some fat-ass neighbor, that she actually does have sources in the State Department. And the CIA, come to think of it.

Heloise would have been a great CIA agent. Heloise could have been anything she wanted to be, according to the only man who ever really loved her, which is to say, the only man who never raised a hand against her. “But I am,” she tried to convince him. “I am exactly who I want to be.” He could never accept that, which is why they’re not together. Well, it’s one reason they’re not together. The unfortunate truth is that Heloise didn’t love him back, although she wanted to, and even tried for a while. But a cop, especially an honest one like Brad, couldn’t begin to provide for Scott and her as well she does. Economic inequity. It’s a problem in relationships.

For someone keen to avoid exposure, Heloise has a strange fantasy: She likes to imagine being invited to Career Day at Scott’s school. She sees herself in an elegant black suit. (Which is, in fact, what she wears to work-tailored suits, silk blouses, and beautiful shoes.) She would sit on the teacher’s desk, crossing what everyone agrees are a pair of exceptionally well-kept forty-year-old legs, kundalini or no, and make eye contact with the one girl she knows she will find about two thirds back, in the row closest to the windows. A girl like her, hiding behind too-long bangs and a book, pretending she’s not interested in anything. A girl who daydreams during Career Day because she has yet to hear anything that sounds remotely plausible, much less interesting.

Heloise would clear her throat, once, twice, then say: “I work for myself, at a company licensed with the state of Maryland as the Women’s Full Employment Network. I make $200 to $1,000 an hour, depending on the services I provide. I wear beautiful clothes and set my own hours. I have been in the finest hotels in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area, even in New York, eaten sumptuous meals, gone to gorgeous parties and Kennedy Center galas. There is so much demand for my services that I can pick and choose as I desire, taking only the clients I find acceptable. I work perhaps fifteen hours a week and employ four to eight other women, providing them base salaries and health insurance in return for commissions on the jobs I book them.

“I am, of course, a whore and a madam. And I am here to tell you what no one wants you to know-it’s one of the best jobs a woman can have, if you can do it the way I do it.” Heloise has done it the other way, too, on the street with a pimp and scant money to show for all her work. Talk about economic inequity in relationships…

But Scott is suddenly in a panic in the backseat, and Heloise abandons her daydream. It’s music lesson day, and he has left his exercise book in his locker at school. Fearfully, anxiously-although Heloise is always gentle with his mistakes-he asks if they can go back.

“Of course,” she says, making a smooth U-turn in her car, a Volvo sedan that the other mothers pretend to envy. But their envy is a kind of condescension-Oh, if only I could get by with a car that small, but there are five of us in our household. You’re just the two. On Old Orchard Road, she passes her sister Meghan, her narrow face so tight that it has lost the heart-shaped curve it once had and become a triangle. Heloise knows that Meghan still has several more trips-dropping one child at swimming practice, another at soccer, then trying to entertain the youngest two at a Starbucks as there’s not enough time to go home before it’s time to pick up the one at swimming and the one at soccer. Funny-Meghan, so determined to flee her mother’s way of life, has ended up replicating it, albeit with a lot more money and a husband who will never abandon her. Of all Brian’s traits, his steadfastness is second only to his income potential. Still, Meghan is her mother all over again, endlessly exasperated, chauffeuring four children around, with no help, except part-time housecleaning, because that’s the one thing Brian is stingy about, hiring help. Brian, who hates his job, can’t stand the idea that all the money he makes might allow Meghan to enjoy herself. At least, that’s what Meghan told Heloise one night last December, when she dropped by to get homework that her youngest son needed, then stayed for a glass of wine, then two, then three. “He says, ‘You’re free all day.’ He says, ‘We eat macaroni out of a box and Chinese takeout three days out of five. What more help do you need?’ And when I point out that you have an au pair, he says: ‘Well, Heloise has a job.’ As if I don’t! As if four kids is as easy as one!”

Heloise had a few glasses of wine that night, too, and her heart went out to her sister, half though she may be. Meghan never got over the loss of her father, although Heloise thinks she should consider it a blessing. Hector Lewis was a violent, brutal man, who so resented the trap he created by knocking up his girlfriend that he spent most of his time at home beating Heloise’s mother and, eventually, Heloise. But he always made his child support payments to his old family and even went so far as to pay for Meghan’s college education. Her degree led to a good job in D.C., which brought her into Brian’s orbit. Still, Meghan seems to regard Heloise the winner in this nongame because Heloise has managed to create a life of ease and serenity, while Meghan has to bully, cajole, and beg for every dollar she gets out of her husband.

So Heloise told her sister how she did it, how she covered costs in Turner’s Grove, the kind of suburb that almost no single parent could afford. There had been no husband, no accident, no life insurance, inferences that she had let stand uncorrected in the community since she moved there. She paid for it all on her own, through her own work. “Call me madam,” she said, raising her glass, feeling a rare sisterly camaraderie.

Meghan had not been shocked, not at all. She asked several quick questions-How did you get started, what about diseases, how much do you make? Do you charge more for the really kinky stuff? What’s the worst thing you’ve ever had to do?-and Heloise deflected all of them, especially those about money, although she was scrupulously honest with the IRS about her earnings, if not their exact source. It was Meghan’s very lack of judgment, her matter-of-fact acceptance, that scared Heloise. She realized her sister was filing the information away until it might be useful to her. Meghan had always been a bit of a squirrel, a saver of money and secrets. Since that night, they were uneasy with each other.

“There’s Aunt Meghan! And Michael and Mark and Maggie and Melissa!” Scott squeals. Poor Scott, with no siblings and no grandparents, was thrilled with the sudden gift of four cousins, with one, Michael, exactly his age. He waves wildly, but his cousins have their eyes fixed on their laps, probably fiddling with iPods or video games, and Meghan’s terrifying gaze doesn’t seem to see anything, not even the curving road in front of her, a gorgeously landscaped death trap of a parkway. Heloise remembers a scrap of a childhood story, something in the moldering, fragile books that her father brought with him when he finally divorced Meghan’s mother, in which an animal or magical creature had simply torn himself in pieces from his rage. Meghan looks more than capable of doing just that.

MEGHAN DUFFY PEERS at the small print of the insurance policy, squinting. She’s only forty, she can’t possibly need reading glasses, but sometimes the fine print is truly fine, designed to keep anyone from reading it. “In the case of an accident that results in injury…”

“MOM!” Maggie’s thin screech echoes from somewhere out in the family room, put-upon and choked with tears. “Mark changed the channel and it’s my turn to pick the program.”

“It was on a commercial and I changed it back,” Mark shouts, and Meghan knows by his tone that he is fudging the facts, as full of shit as his father when trying to avoid her disapproval for some forgotten chore or absentminded error.

“I missed the part where they sing karaoke,” Maggie complains bitterly, and Meghan thinks, Well, thank your lucky stars. Because seventy, eighty years from now, when you’re on your deathbed, you are not going to be thinking about the day your brother changed the channel and you missed twenty seconds of some stupid pop tart singing karaoke. You are instead going to wonder why you spent sixty of those years married to an idiot who had bad breath and a repertoire of sexual moves that basically boil down to thrust-in thrust-in thrust-in and areyouthereyet?

No, wait, that was Meghan’s deathbed. Maggie will have to make her own deathbed and then lie in it.

Meghan shoves the papers back into the cherrywood pigeonholes above her desk, a touch meant to evoke an old-fashioned roll-top. Meghan’s work area is really a corridor, a narrow stretch of hallway between the family room and the mudroom that the Realtor insisted on calling “Mom’s office.” This not-quite-room is just wide enough to accommodate this built-in shelf, which in turn is just wide enough to hold a computer and a drop tray for a keyboard. “A place for all your work,” crooned the salesman, Paul Turner. No, Meghan had yearned to correct him, Mom’s work area is every square foot of this 6,800-square-foot house. What Mom needs is a soundproof bunker in the basement. Meghan would trade the whirlpool in her en suite bath, the laundry room that is bigger and nicer than her childhood bedroom, and even her Portuguese-blue Lacanche range for such a retreat. Especially her Portuguese-blue Lacanche, which mocks her with its smug French competence, its readiness.

She marches into the family room and an uneasy truce settles as soon as she appears, so she moves past, into the kitchen, checking to see what ready-made dishes she can pass off as homemade. Meghan once liked cooking, but the level of rejection possible when making food for five people is simply too staggering. She doesn’t take it as personally when the rejected salmon comes from the Giant, when the mashed potatoes are whipped by the folks at Whole Foods. She still winces at the waste, but at least she’s spared mourning her own time. Her mom had been one of the last of the mackerel snappers, insisting on fishy Fridays despite the Vatican ’s relaxed rules-and despite the fact that the Catholic church wanted no part of her, after the divorce. The Lewis children had not been allowed to turn up their noses at her worst concoctions. If you didn’t clean your plate in the Lewis household, it just followed you through the next three meals. Until it spoiled, you didn’t eat again, not in Mother’s sight. This was her father’s rule originally, but her mother enforced it even more strictly after he left.

She remembered asking Heloise, in their wine-coaxed moment of candor, if things had worked the same way in her version of the Lewis household. “Not exactly,” Heloise said, refusing to elaborate, infuriating Meghan, for Heloise was clearly implying that her version of the Lewis household was all lovey-dovey, the place where true love triumphed and who cares if the first Lewis family was left in the dirt, with only support checks and occasional visits from Hector. Visits, Meghan knew, where he often banged the first Mrs. Lewis once Meghan was asleep, or so he thought. Her own mother always called the second Mrs. Lewis that-whore-Beth, just one word, said very quickly. Meghan was eleven or so before she realized it wasn’t an actual name, Thatwhorebeth, a distant cousin of Terebithia.

She pulls out the plastic boxes of prepared food-salad, a roasted chicken, asparagus-and places them on the broad granite counter where they eat most of their meals. She could put the food on actual serving platters, but why bother to disguise its origins? Brian, who flew to the home office in Atlanta this morning, won’t be home until almost ten, and he’s the only one who cares if food is homemade, and only because he hates to think she’s had a free moment to herself. As if, she thinks, gathering up the pair of Crocs that Maggie has left in the middle of the kitchen floor, then rinsing the glasses and plates left over from the kids’ snacks, which almost certainly ruined any appetite they had for dinner. The phone rings. Once, the kids would have vied to grab it, but the two oldest have cell phones and the youngest have IM accounts, so the phone holds no interest for them. She lets it ring, thinking it might be Brian, whining for an airport pickup, which she has no intention of providing, but then notices that the caller ID is displaying her insurance agent’s cell number.

“Meghan,” Dan Simmons says. “I didn’t think I’d catch you.”

“Oh, I’ll always let you catch me, Dan.” More cute than pretty, Meghan has been an outstanding flirt since her early teens. Much better than Heloise, with her ice princess shtick. Does she drop that superior manner when she is with her clients, or is that part of her appeal? Her sister’s secret life excites Meghan, a fact she barely admits to herself. On those rare occasions when Brian wants to have sex with her and she manages to muster up the energy, she pretends she is Heloise and he is a client. That she is in charge and he has to leave when they are done, handing her a nice stack of large bills. As if.

“You’re working late,” she says.

“Yes and no. I’m in my little home office, returning all my calls, but already starting on cocktail hour, as you can see.”

The Simmonses are next-door neighbors, their house a mirror image of Meghan’s, only Dan has availed himself of “Mommy’s office.” Sure enough, she looks through the window over her kitchen sink and sees Dan across the way, hoisting a martini. Dan is fun.

“Ah, Daddy’s little helper,” she says, walking over to her refrigerator and locating a bottle of wine, suspiciously deep on the bottom shelf. The health education segment at Hamilton Point turns children into anti-alcohol Nazis, and Michael keeps hiding her wine behind the milk. “We’ll have a drink together. What’s up?”

“You called me,” he reminds her. “Two days ago. Left a message at the office.”

“Sorry. I forgot.”

“Hey, it’s a pleasure to have a client who calls me,” he says. “Most people run when they see me coming, like I’m that guy in Groundhog Day.”

She laughs, although she has no idea what he is talking about. Movies, sports-most of men’s conversational milestones are lost to her, but she pretends to get them. “Well, with four kids and a husband who’s on the road three days every week, I have to make sure we have all the coverage we need.”

“Don’t worry,” Dan says, “if a plane goes down, you’re fine.”

“I worry that the airlines are so broke these days that we won’t recover a cent.”

“Well, it’s true, if Brian actually died in a plane crash, there probably would be a war of deep pockets, with my company fighting the airlines’ carrier over who had to pay out. But it’s also true that we’re talking about something that has virtually no odds of happening. What you really have to worry about are the kind of mundane accidents that no one thinks about. Slip in the bathtub, a fall down the steps. And cars, don’t get me started on those death traps. I think you have adequate coverage for that, but I’ll review everything. I know you told me that Brian has a handgun, but it is kept in a safe, right?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay, because we require that. Meanwhile, I don’t think you have enough disability coverage, but almost no one does. And have you thought about some of the financial products I mentioned to you the last time you both were in-”

Screams rise from the family room, providing her a graceful way to end the conversation. “I better run before blood is shed,” she says. “It’s so hard to get out of leather.”

Dan laughs. He probably wishes that his own wife was so chipper and cavalier about household calamities. Lillian Simmons is a big-boned slob who looks ten years older than her age, but she is also absolutely reliable, the go-to mom of Hamilton Point Elementary, the one who can be counted on to bail out any forgetful snack mom. That’s the thing about wives. All men want them, they just don’t necessarily want the ones they have.

A slip in the bathtub. A fall down the stairs. An accident on the twisty snake that is Old Orchard. A plane falling out of the sky. She should be so lucky. She trips over another pair of Crocs-the things seem to be breeding-and calls the children to dinner, and something in her voice silences the bedlam instantly, bringing them to the table with heads down. Mom’s mad. Walk carefully. She hates seeing her children like this, controlling them through her anger, but her incipient fury seems to be the only power she has over them, over anyone.

BRIAN DUFFY SQUEEZES into the last open spot at the bar, putting his elbows down before he realizes the wood is still damp from the bartender passing a wet dishrag over it. As if that filthy bit of cloth could make anything cleaner, he thinks with a shudder. It takes him several minutes to get the bar wench’s attention, and in the time he waits, his order somehow mutates from a defensible light beer to a vodka martini, a double. Sure, add a quesadilla and some chips. It’s not like he’s going to get dinner on the plane and there’s never anything waiting for him at home.

Airport bars used to be kind of sexy, based on the movies and television shows he had watched as a kid. Sweeping views of planes taking off and landing, well-dressed people sipping cocktails and speaking low, charged encounters between strangers. Now they tend to be like this one, a cramped windowless room in Atlanta Hartsfield, where you have to fight for every inch of space. On the trip down, he read a paperback that began with a man meeting a beautiful blond in an airport bar and he had found that one detail more far-fetched than the high-tech crime caper that had followed. Airport bars are the new saltpeter.

Look at this one. On his left, two honeymooners, post-honeymooners by all appearances, weary beneath their red-tinged tans, barely speaking to each other as they contemplate the rest of their lives together. To his right, one of those corporate women who travels with a roller bag she can barely lift, the kind of woman who won’t make eye contact with a man until she drops her suitcase on his head. A bitch, a ballbuster. Just his type. In fact, she looks uncannily like the woman who fired him three hours ago.

He still can’t believe he had to fly to Atlanta to be fired. All the signs were there-the lack of a clear agenda for today’s meeting, the fact that they wanted him in and out in a day, when they usually brought people in the night before, put them up at the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead. Funny, he was the company’s de facto executioner for seven years, flying into various branches and firing people under the rubric of “reorganization,” and yet he didn’t see his own death coming. “You know we always do these things face-to-face, Brian,” said Colleen Browne, whom he thinks of as Cold-Faced Bitch, a woman he has wanted to bend over a desk since the first time he saw her, and never more so than when she was firing him. He considered it, for a fleeting second, thought about grabbing her, ripping away her little black suit, forcing her facedown onto her BlackBerry so hard that she would end up sending text gibberish to everyone in her address book.

But negotiating a decent severance had seemed more pressing. At least he had the context to do that, to get a good package. Six months’ salary, a full year of medical, no small thing with four kids. Still, he thinks of the CEOs who fuck up companies and walk away with ten, twenty million, and he thinks maybe he should have fucked the brunette instead. The country’s tiptoeing into a recession; his sector, financial services, is in particularly bad shape. Six months might not be enough, and thanks to Meghan’s free-spending ways, they don’t begin to have the savings they should. He orders another drink. He can’t bear the thought of going home, having to tell Meghan about this. What would happen if he missed his plane? It happens, and he’s in Atlanta Hartsfield, so anything is credible.

But then he would be in some dopey airport hotel, with nothing but porn to keep him company. He wants the real thing, but he can’t kid himself, he has no game left. The only way for him to have sex tonight is to pay for it, something he’s never done. Okay, something he says he’s never done. There have been a few furtive hand jobs here and there, on the way home from Baltimore, but nothing more because he’s worried about catching something.

He pulls out a card given to him by a guy he met three weeks ago, a lobbyist employed by the company, who got a little loose over dinner and started talking about this amazing escort service in the Baltimore-Washington area. The card has nothing but a number and a set of initials: WFEN. Sounds like an AM radio station. His plane gets in at eight, if he’s lucky, but he always fudges his arrivals, tells Meghan he’s coming in at least two hours later. What if he just went to this place instead, telling Meghan that he was still in Atlanta? Ah, the beauty of cell phones, the liar’s best friend.

The woman who answers the phone has an odd voice, a little toneless and loud. “Yes?”

“Is this…WFEN?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to make…a date.”

“And how did you hear about us?”

“How…” He provides the name of the guy and there’s endless clicking, like at an airline ticket counter.

“Name and birth date, please, along with the credit card you plan to use.”

“What?”

“We do not take new customers without a referral and all customers must be subjected to a criminal background check.”

“What if I want to pay in cash?” Meghan does the bills, no way he’s putting this on a card.

“That’s fine, but we still have to have a credit card on file.”

Even in his frustration, he admires the setup. Someone has thought this through. Plus, they’re not asking for the security code, so he doesn’t think they can charge anything, and if they did, it would be easy enough to get the charge off his card. And the lobbyist said the one he had was worth every penny, a real pro. Brian’s just drunk enough to give his real name, although he lowers his voice while reading the card number into the phone.

“Wait, please.” He’s put on hold, very pleasant jazz music to keep him company. The woman comes back on the line faster than most service reps, that’s for sure.

“I’m sorry, we cannot take you.”

“Hey, that card is good.” Shit, has Meghan pushed it beyond the limit again? And he needs this, he has never needed anything more, he decides, than anonymous, nasty sex with someone who has to do whatever he says.

“We cannot take you.”

“Look, if you want another card-”

“We cannot take you.”

“Did something come up on the background check? It has to be a mistake because I’m clean as a whistle.”

“I’m sorry.” The woman hangs up, and when he redials, no one answers.

Seven hundred miles to the north, give or take, Heloise and Audrey sit in Heloise’s refinished basement, the one where Heloise keeps her office, and look at the number on caller ID. Audrey opened a document on the computer as soon as she picked up the phone, per Heloise’s instructions. But there was no criminal background check, no quick peek at credit records. The moment Audrey put the caller on hold, she summoned Heloise to the basement and asked her what to do.

“My brother-in-law,” Heloise says. “My fucking brother-in-law. What are the odds?”

“He would have been eliminated geographically even if he weren’t a relative,” Audrey says. “He’s within the ten-mile radius.”

Heloise won’t take any client with a home address in her son’s school district.

“I almost wish I could take him on as a client, give him to Staci down in D.C.,” Heloise says. “If Brian got rid of all that tension he’s carrying, he might be a better husband and Meghan might not look so furious all the time. But I can’t risk it. And, frankly, he can’t afford it, based on what I know of that household’s finances. If he wants sex, he’ll have to sleep with his wife or settle for good old-fashioned adultery with someone at work.”

Audrey frowns. She has rather strict views on the sanctity of marriage, an interesting position for a woman who oversees the office of a thriving sex business. It is an even more interesting position for a woman whose hearing loss was caused by a vicious beating by her own husband, who also happened to be her pimp. Still, she was faithful to him, within the compartmentalized system that defined their relationship. She had sex with other men for money, but only her husband had her heart, and this remained true right up until the moment she killed him in the middle of another beating. Paroled a year ago, she was referred to Heloise by an old friend.

“Better to use a street-level worker,” Audrey says, using the term Heloise prefers. “As long as he wears a condom. Don’t you always say adultery is more expensive in the long run?”

“Indeed,” Heloise says. “Now who’s out tonight?”

“Gwen, in Annapolis. The senator got a bill out of committee, and he wanted to celebrate. But he never goes late. The GPS shows they’re already at the hotel and I expect her safety text within the hour.”

Audrey’s phone buzzes at just that moment and the two women look down to see the message: “Babycakes.” Just as bondage freaks have their safe words, Heloise assigns each of her girls a silly, frequently changing term to text when a date ends. Between that and the GPS that each girl wears on the inside of a wide bangle bracelet-Ho-jacks, the girls call them-she hasn’t had a problem. Yet. But that’s the nightmare that looms largest, the fear that she will be summoned to the morgue one day, asked to identify one of her employees.

“That was fast,” Audrey says. “Even for the senator.”

“Well, getting a bill out of committee,” Heloise says. “It can be pretty exciting.”

She goes upstairs to read to Scott. He’s getting too old for this, but Heloise argues that it’s really for her, that she won’t read the Harry Potter books if they don’t read them together. She has a date at ten, but Scott will be tucked in by then, safe under Audrey’s care.