All she could think of was what had happened, how he had told her, why he had left her, and that he was no longer hers. Pain had given way to fury, which led to sorrow, which grew to grief, which reverted once again to anger, until at last by Thanksgiving her emotions were so frayed at the edges that she was numb. She almost blew the biggest campaign of her career, and two weeks before that she had had to go into her office, lock the door, and lie down. For a moment she had felt as though she were going to have hysterics, faint maybe, or perhaps just put her arms around someone-anyone-and burst into tears. It was as though there were no one now, no one to whom she belonged, no one who cared. Her father had died when she was in college, her mother lived in Atlanta with a man she found charming but whom Sam did not. He was a doctor, and pompous and self-satisfied as hell. But at least her mother was happy. Anyway, Sam wasn't close to her mother, and it wasn't to her that she could turn. In fact she hadn't told her of the divorce until November, when her mother had called one night and found Sam in tears. She had been kind, but it did little to strengthen the bond between them. For Sam and her mother it was too late. And it wasn't a mother that she longed for, it was her husband, the man she had lain next to, and loved, and laughed with for the last eleven years, the man she knew better than her own skin, who made her happy in the morning and secure at night. And now he was gone. The realization of it never failed to bring tears to her eyes and a sense of desolation to her soul.

But tonight, cold as well as weary, for once Samantha didn't even care. She took off her coat and hung it in the bathroom to dry, pulled off her boots, and ran a brush through her silvery gold hair. She looked in the mirror without really seeing her face. She saw nothing when she looked at herself now, nothing except a blob of skin, two dull eyes, a mass of long blond hair.