If Miranda was swept up in the waves of successive Lite Victories, Annie was comfortably dug in to her burrow of books. She read the same ones over and over — the classic novels of nineteenth-century England, the minor novels of twentieth-century England. Annie was matter-of-fact, but the facts were never hers. The light of real life, which to Miranda meant the busy melodrama of everyday scandal, never penetrated this soft, dappled world. Miranda sometimes thought of Annie as a kind of desiccated opium addict, stretched out in a smoky, sweet-smelling den with her fictional strangers, cut off from the noisy circus of life, uncaring, inaccessible, eyes closed in someone else's dream. By the book, Miranda always said of Annie, trying to describe what she considered to be the literalism of her sister's imagination. Perhaps it was this quality that made it a surprise to Miranda when she discovered that with this divorce Annie, too, was sad and disoriented and, most of all, angry.

"I miss him," Annie said. "And I hate him. Hate. Hate. Hate. Loathe. And hate."

"Life," Miranda replied, rather triumphantly, "is wracked by tragic contradictions."

This was one of Miranda's core beliefs: Life was wracked by tragic contradictions... that would all come out right in the end. At this moment, however, with regard to Josie's treatment of her mother, she could not bring herself to pronounce the second half of her sentence.

Annie noticed the omission and was about to comment on it when Miranda's cell phone rang. In the past, Miranda would have answered and carried on, with great gusto, a conversation full of personal details from the sordid stories Miranda's authors specialized in. But this time Miranda said, "I guess that will have to do," in a tired voice.

"Business?" Annie said when she hung up.

"What's left of it." Miranda took a deep breath. Failure: it was like having a fatal disease. People pretended it didn't exist, turned away quickly with an embarrassed look of pity, stopped talking when you came up to them unexpectedly. People pretended it didn't exist, and so did she; yet it was always there, the air she breathed.