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with Noah. I took a few steps closer so I could see her face, the strong jaw, the prominent nose, and perfectly arched eyebrows. They all still came together magnificently despite the crow’s feet beginning at the corners of those steel blue eyes. I would have called the slight marks from her nose to her red lips “laugh lines” except Bitch Goddess wasn’t known for her hilarity.
    Not that I left her with a lot to chuckle over.
    Bitch Goddess dropped her head onto her chest and, without looking, slipped a hand into the designer leather bag sitting beside her. Sighing, she pulled out what had been a familiar part of our marriage, a silver flask wrapped in tan leather. We’d gotten matching ones as a wedding present from our coworkers in the newsroom at the Philly Enquirer , before she’d moved to TV news.
    With a flick of the wrist, she opened the flask.
    What was in it? I wondered. Our poison of choice had been vodka.
    She looked around, stopping mid-swallow when she saw me.
    “Hey!” she called out sharply. It wasn’t an invitation to join her. It was a warning to leave her alone.
    Shaking my head, I turned and walked back to my car, trying to ignore the slurred hate that spewed from her perfect, red mouth.
    *****
    I spent the weekend at my campus apartment grading papers; Bitch Goddess, after all, got the house in the divorce. Fitzgerald House, named for the founder of the university, accommodated unmarried faculty like myself in one-bedroom apartments and was part of my pay. Most of my neighbors lasted a term or two before falling in love, buying a house or moving on.
    I was the only one who’d lived there four years.
    By Sunday night, I was done and final grades were submitted. I made myself a ham sandwich and flopped into the brown shapeless recliner in the living room. I grabbed the TV remote and turned on the DVR, pressing buttons to see what I’d watched at least twice a week for the last year.
    It was Charisma Prentiss, looming large on the screen behind four panelists. She was beautiful, tan and fit in her blue press helmet, jeans, sand-brown boots and brown tee shirt. I had no doubt she could easily carry the military-issue pack on her back, and probably someone else’s, too. She’d been the reporter’s reporter—print or broadcast, she could do it all, a Bond Girl with a nose for news.
    Among her peers, her ego had been as legendary as the stories she filed, fed by her superiors in New York, who needed someone with flair and panache to keep the world focused on the stories that “mattered.”
    Her peers may have hated her and the attention she garnered, but the troops she embedded with loved her. She could keep up with the physical demands of an army on the move and painted those stories with words that were more than a little pro-military. In the days following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, none of her editors or supervisors seemed to catch that tendency—or, considering the jingoistic times we lived in, if they cared. She took risks other journalists wouldn’t consider, a mixture of recklessness and arrogance, spiced with a star power that brought ratings and readers to whatever story she provided.
    I never met her, but the world knew what happened.
    I watched the panel discussion one more time: The fearless way Charisma covered the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria put many male correspondents to shame. Her series on underground schools for girls in Taliban-held territories was legend. Charisma’s final tale was so ingrained, I could recite it from memory: The car bomb that claimed her husband, her refusal to give in to her injuries and her drive to get back in the game, followed by one wrong story that brought it all crashing down. Then she disappeared off the face of the earth.
    I had no idea where to find her, not even an idea of where to begin looking. Was she still working? Had she retired? Changed careers? Was she dead? If the post-traumatic stress syndrome she reportedly suffered was