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Cruise had attended one of Lincoln’s makeup classes).
    “Oh, God,” Ceil said, and from the urgency in her voice Sylvie could tell she hadn’t called to gossip. “You need to find a television set right this minute. They’re saying …”
    “What?” Possibilities raced through Sylvie’s mind—another terrorist attack? A bombing, a plane crash? An assassination? Something to do with her daughters? With Lizzie? (Even in her panic, she knew that Diana would never do anything that would end up on TV, unless she was being credited with some scientific discovery or medical advance that Sylvie would have to spend the rest of her life pretending to understand.) “You’re scaring me.”
    “It’s Richard,” Ceil said, her voice shaking.
    Icy bands tightened around Sylvie’s heart. “Is he all right?” But even as she asked the question, she assured herself that Richard was fine. If he wasn’t, she’d have been told. Her driver, Derek, or her assistant, Clarissa, sitting ramrod-straight, with her spine hovering inches from the seat, beside him—if something was wrong, really wrong, they would have been informed by now. There were procedures in place, calls she would have gotten. Ceil started talking again, speaking rapidly in her ear.
    “You know what? Don’t. Just never mind. Just come home. To my house, okay? Come straight here, and don’t watch the TV, Syl, promise me you won’t, just get here as fast as you can.”
    “Ceil. Tell me.” Sylvie gulped, pushing the panic down. “You’re scaring me to death. Tell me what’s going on.”
    From a hundred miles away, she heard her friend sigh. “I’m watching CNN right now, and they’re saying that Richard had an affair with one of his legislative aides. They’re saying that he went on vacation with her, to the Bahamas, and got her some cushy job in the D.C. branch of the law firm where he used to work.”
    Ceil paused. Sylvie pressed her lips together, clutching the telephone in her right hand, pressing her left hand flat against her thigh. She felt as if she was in a roller coaster that had crested the steepest hill, and all the track was gone. She was in free fall. Not Richard. Not her Richard.
    “Sylvie? Are you still there?” Ceil, cheerful, straightforward Ceil, who could get a whole room laughing with her reenactment of her stint as Anonymous Constipation Sufferer #3, sounded like she might have been crying. “Listen, honey, it kills me that I’m the one who has to tell you this, and I …”
    “Let me call you back.” She punched the button that would end the call, and leaned forward, feeling her three waistbands—the skirt, the control-top pantyhose, and the girdle she wore beneath them—biting at her flesh vengefully, as if her outfit was trying to strangle her. “Can we find a rest stop?” she asked as the telephone burped and displayed her husband’s face. She ignored the call. There was a quaver in her voice, but, she hoped, not one obvious enough for the pair in the front seat to notice. And she’d asked politely. Sylvie was always polite. It was a reaction, she thought, to her frequently profane mother, who’d once made the papers for telling a plaintiff’s attorney that he needed to buy her dinner if he was going to treat her like he’d been doing, because she insisted on dinner before getting fucked. Sylvie had made a point of raising her own daughters, headstrong Diana and dreamy Lizzie, to be polite, to be considerate, to think of others, and to remember, always, that manners mattered. Even when Lizzie was in the throes of her drug use, Sylvie liked to think that her younger daughter had said please and thank you to her dealer.
    In the front seat, a look passed between Derek and Clarissa, and in that look Sylvie saw that what her friend had told her was true … or was, at least, being reported as true. Sylvie felt a scream swelling in her throat, demanding release. Her husband. Another woman. And it was on TV. Her hands