She’d still been with Dan at that point, but she hadn’t gone out to the Zone. Hadn’t even bothered to phone and tell him she was back. Mostly, she just stayed drunk.

She did manage to visit Rosanna’s family, and for about three hours in their company she felt half human. But she fell apart when Poppi Ugo brought out the family album and insisted on taking her through every shot they had of Rosanna. She’d guzzled down nearly three-quarters of a bottle of grappa, crying hysterically all the time, and had passed out on the couch. She woke up at three in the morning, shivering under the Natoli family quilt, then vomited and snuck out the front door, leaving twenty dollars to cover the dry-cleaning bill. Hours later she remembered that dry cleaning as she knew it didn’t exist yet.

She’d gone back to apologize, but the Natoli clan refused to hear it. They tried to talk her into staying for another 188-course dinner, but-fearing a meltdown-she had begged off and fled back to the city. The next she heard from them was when this package turned up at the Times.

The mailroom cleared about a thousand items a week for Julia. Letters from servicemen she’d written about. Cookies baked by their moms. Crayola drawings by little girls who said they wanted to grow up and be just like her. And at the other extreme, hate mail and death threats from fans of the former FBI director who blamed her for his ruin, or from nutjobs who just didn’t like her. There were plenty of those. Many of them working for the same paper as her.

The package from Rosanna’s family lay on her desk for about two weeks before she could bring herself to do anything about it. Worried that she might fall apart in front of her colleagues, Julia had carried the parcel back to her apartment and left it in a closet for nearly a month.

It took a fifteen-hour liquid lunch at the Bayswater before she could get it back out of the closet, and two pots of black coffee before she could take a knife to the packing tape without cutting a finger off.