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breath.
    John opened his heavy eyes, and his gaunt, pained face cracked into a weak smile of pleasure as he saw her standing there. She straightened, smiled bravely back and went right to his bed, leaning down to kiss him. She felt the heat coming from his emaciated body as he held on to her. Please God, don’t take him from me. Not yet. Not ever.
    Then, in his rasping voice she heard him whisper, “Oh, you smell so good.”
    She knew she would never forget it. John had known he was near death. Yet, as sick as he was, he had taken pleasure in something as simple, as basic as her perfume.
    She would never wear another fragrance.
    Stop it! Stop replaying everything!
    Eliza rose determinedly from her desk, replacing the gold button earring she had snapped off to call Mrs. Twomey. She walked the few steps to the mirror on the pale gray office wall and looked into it. A thirty-four-year-old face gazed back. It had a look of honesty and intelligence, though most of the written critiques of Eliza Blake’s face had used words like attractive, pretty, engaging. The face that stared back was the face that greeted millions of viewers every morning on KEY to America .
    She looked into dark blue eyes which Harry Granger, her morning co-anchor, said “never missed a trick.” Right now, the white parts were tinged ever so slightly with pink. She reached back and grabbed the small, ever-present bottle of Visine from the top of her desk, tilted her head back, and squeezed.
    She forced a smile she did not feel and gazed into the mirror. Her top teeth, the ones that showed, were white and straight. The ones that didn’t show were white and crooked. The orthodontist had never given her a retainer for the bottom ones. Nor had she ever asked for one, she admitted ruefully. As it was, she had only grudgingly and sporadically used the uncomfortable mouthpiece for the upper teeth. She thought of her parents, who hadn’t had that much money but did have plenty of problems of their own. She was grateful that they had found the funds for those teenage braces.
    Eliza lifted her chin, jutting it out in the direction of the mirror, and considered the thin scar, a vestige of an eleven-year-old girl’s too deep a dive into a cement-floored swimming pool. Luckily, the scar fell just beyond the camera’s watchful eye.
    She knew that she had been genetically fortunate in many aspects of her life. A noted cosmetic surgeon had once told her that people paid him thousands of dollars to make a small, straight nose like hers. The shiny brown hair, now resting freshly trimmed on her shoulders, was kissed with natural highlights, though no one around the jaded KEY News broadcast center believed it. At five foot seven, she was tall and thin, the baby pounds from Janie’s birth having come off with some concentrated effort.
    Yes, in the general scheme of things, she had been physically blessed. But as Eliza looked at the crow’s feet crinkling insistently at the corners of her eyes and the furrows that had become decidedly more pronounced at her brow line, she knew that the events of the last few years were taking their toll.
    Don’t start thinking about all that now, she told herself as her adrenaline started to pump.

Chapter 5
    The KEY press information officer called. The New York Times wanted a statement from the president of the news division regarding the Mole report of Eliza Blake’s cocaine addiction.
    “Tell them it’s ridiculous,” snapped tired Yelena Gregory.
    What else could go wrong?

Chapter 6
    In the six years Eliza Blake had been with KEY News in New York, the professional gods had certainly been with her. Hired away from the Providence affiliate, where she had anchored the six and eleven o’clock broadcasts, her first job at the network was general assignment reporting. Just a few months into her new position, the vicious winds of Hurricane Anthony had smashed into southern Florida. Mispredicted by the weather service, the malevolent