Wrong.

Janet Stone let the word echo in her mind the way Hank had always said it when they’d made a mistake: deep down and echoing, like the sound of a bell, with all the emphasis at the end. And then let it chime again and reverberate again, waiting for the memory to hurt. There was a pang but not a bad one and she was grateful. It had taken too long-far too long-for her to get this far, being able positively to think about it without breaking down, without actually having to leave a room. So it was getting better: a necessary test.

She’d soon have to leave this room, though: she was ready for a lot of things, but not quite yet for Harriet Andrew’s ritual assemblage of Washington glitterati, a melee of teeth-flashing gabble and spilled drinks and furtive hands. She should have known better, of course. She and Hank had nearly always found an excuse to avoid coming. Testing herself against the pain of memories, Janet forced another recollection. Hank hadn’t called them melees. Menagerie had been his word. Janet thought the description was fitting; she was in a menagerie of performing human animals being watered and fed: doubtless, as she understood inhabitants of menageries did, they’d further perform by mating before the night was out. It was an impromptu intrusion and Janet thrust it irritably away. She could never allow herself reflections about sex: the subject-the very thought-was more tightly locked out and forbidden from her mind than anything else. How could it be otherwise? What could there be-who could there be-after Hank?

Janet gazed around, seeking a doorway from the cage in which she felt incarcerated. It was not Harriet’s house. It was a four-story brownstone on Dumbarton Street that Harriet’s father had bought when he was seconded from the Bank of England in London to the World Bank in Washington and had afterwards retained as the undoubted investment it was.