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laughing at him?
    Lizzie marched to the television set and stood on her tiptoes, trying to change the channel. “Miss,” called the woman behind the reception desk. “You can’t touch that!”
    “Yes, she can,” said Diana. She knelt down in front of Milo and started talking to him in a low, comforting murmur. Nothing to worry about , Diana was telling her son. Everything’s okay . Lizzie strained and stretched until she hit the power button. When the set was off, she turned and beckoned for Milo, who was even paler and more somber than normal, looking even more like a miniature banker whose job it was to tell young couples that their mortgage applications had been denied.
    “Mommy’s going back to work,” Diana told her son. “Aunt Lizzie’s going to take you home.” She bent, hugging him. “I love you miles and miles.”
    “Miles and miles,” he repeated, then gave her a high five, a low five, and a fist bump before smoothing his bangs again and tugging his hat down securely over his ears. Lizzie reached for her camera again—she’d love to have a picture of that, of her sister being decent and gentle and sweet. Then again, she made her hands drop. Diana mustered a smile, gave her sister a tight nod, and slipped back into the ER. Lizzie took Milo’s hand.
    “Aunt Lizzie?” he asked in his gravelly voice as he followed her into the hallway. “Why was Grandpa on TV?”
    “Well, you know, he’s a senator.”
    “He makes laws in Washington,” Milo recited. “But who was that lady? They said she was his girlfriend.”
    “You know what?” Lizzie said, and took his hand. “Let’s talk about your delicious dinner. We don’t have to worry about Grandpa right now.”

SYLVIE
    As the car swung into the rest area, Sylvie grabbed the door handle, and the instant the tires had stopped, she yanked the door open. Avoiding Clarissa’s pained gaze and Derek’s murmured “Ma’am?” she hurried through the heat of the parking lot, up the concrete stairs, and into the rest stop.
    There, in the wide, tiled entryway that smelled of frying food and disinfectant, Sylvie stood as if frozen, head tilted back, staring up at the television set as it broadcast CNN. Travelers flowed around her: harried mothers with toddlers in their arms hustling into the ladies’ room, senior citizens making their slow way toward the Burger King, or stopping to peer at the giant maps on the wall. Sylvie ignored all of them, letting them walk around her, barely hearing their “excuse me’s” and “watch it, lady,” and “hey, that’s a real bad place to plant yourself.” Over and over, the same snippet of film played on the screen: a woman, her head bent, curly brown hair blowing in the wind as she walked through an apartment building’s door, followed by footage of Richard (blue suit, red-and-gold tie from Hermés she’d bought him last Christmas) on a standard-issue podium, delivering what was undoubtedly a standard-issue speech (together, they’d written one on education, and one on the environment, and one on Our Leaders of Tomorrow, which could be tailored for an elementary school or high school audience and padded for college graduations). Words bubbled out of the speakers, but Sylvie could no longer make sense of them. It was as if her mind was a Venus flytrap: it had ingested the pertinent facts, then snapped shut tight, refusing to let the words back out for further consideration. Sources are reporting … Joelle Stabinow, a former legislative aide, a Georgetown Law School graduate who frequently traveled with the senator … donor-funded junkets at tropical resorts …
    The pictures cycled past again: the young woman, then Richard. Her brown hair. His red tie. And now, another picture of the girl, in a bikini that Sylvie never would have attempted, not even at her thinnest. The girl—the woman, Sylvie supposed, because that was the politically correct term—sat, cross-legged, on the wooden deck of a boat. Her