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.