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in any situation … including, of course, Lizzie’s own. She remembered once, for her birthday, her parents had taken them to a state fair. Lizzie had been eight, almost out of her mind with excitement about the Tilt-A-Whirl she’d be allowed to ride and the cotton candy she’d be given to eat. Diana, at fourteen, hadn’t wanted to come at all, and had spent the ride upstate gazing out the window and heaving noisy sighs.
    The day had been wonderful. A cheerful round man in a suit and bow tie, the mayor of Plattsburgh, had met them in the parking lot. “So you’re the birthday girl?” he’d asked, bending down with a soft grunt until he was eye level with Lizzie. The mayor had whisked them to the front of every line. He’d made sure that Lizzie sampled every delicacy—the grilled sausage and sweet peppers, the fresh-squeezed lemonade, the Steak on a Stake, the soft-serve custard and fried dough—and had squeezed her close, beaming, for a newspaper photograph.
    Back in the car, sticky and sleepy and full, Lizzie had said to her sister, “This was the best day ever,” and Diana, with her face turned once more toward the window, had said, “You know the whole thing was a photo op.” Then she’d explained to her sister exactly what a photo op was, and how her father needed people in Plattsburgh to vote for him, which was why she, Diana, had been stuck wasting her Saturday in this stupid cow town when she could have been in the city with her friends. Lizzie had managed to hold back her tears until it was too dark for anyone in the car to see that she was crying. She’d thought the man had given her treats and taken her picture because it was her birthday; that she’d been the one they’d been fussing over.
    Sylvie, meanwhile, was urging Diana to be patient, not to judge until they knew for sure what had happened. She gathered herself, asking, “Are you two all right? Lizzie, are you handling this okay?”
    “ I’m fine,” said Diana. She sat down in a metal chair and crossed her toned, tanned legs, swinging the right one hard over the left. “Thank you for your concern.”
    “I’m okay,” said Lizzie, who knew why her mother had asked about her first. Of course Diana was all right. Diana was always all right. The world could be crumbling to rubble at their feet and Diana would be going for a run through the ruins. Lizzie took an experimental breath as, once more, the television set showed footage of her father with his arm around that other woman. Sources report that the senator gave Stabinow significant raises during her employment, then helped her find a six-figure job at a prominent D.C. law firm , said the voice on the screen, as the video dissolved into a still shot of the woman graduating from somewhere, beaming in her cap and gown. “I’m all right,” Lizzie said more strongly.
    “You’ll be sure to go to a meeting tonight?” asked her mother. Diana recrossed her legs and glared at the row of lockers as if they, too, had offended her. Diana was not a believer in meetings, or in what she called, with quote marks you could almost hear, “the culture of recovery.” Diana thought that if you had a problem, you dealt with it on your own, with willpower and cold showers and fast five-mile runs.
    “I’ll go,” Lizzie said, trying to sound like her sister, solid and smart and in control.
    “I’ll call you soon. I love you, girls,” said Sylvie, and Diana and Lizzie answered that they loved her, too, before Diana broke the connection. She put her phone in her pocket and snapped the television off.
    “I can’t believe this.”
    Lizzie couldn’t, either. Couldn’t, and didn’t want to. “Maybe it isn’t true.”
    Diana rolled her eyes again. Her talent for dashing Lizzie’s hopes, for puncturing Lizzie’s balloons, hadn’t diminished at all in the years since they were girls. “Of course it’s true! Dad said so.”
    “Not to me,” Lizzie said stubbornly.
    “And there’s