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office, the first question wasn’t “When can you start?” but “What were you thinking when that first shot whizzed by?”
    At the second interview she was asked whether she was relieved to have been shot in a place so well padded. And he wasn’t referring to the parking garage. At the third, there weren’t even any questions. Just a twenty-something HR person who knew nothing about her and didn’t seem to want to. Vivien slogged home through the late-afternoon traffic and told herself something would turn up. And for a while she thought maybe something really would.
    Friends and colleagues gave her leads on openings they’d heard about. But when she followed up she was inevitably deemed overqualified for the positions, and Vivi, who hadn’t yet won the lottery and was growing increasingly desperate, had too much pride to beg.
    Her closest friends took her out to eat and commiserate over the arrival of Regina Matthews, who was already appearing in brief bits on the air as they prepared the audience for the woman who would take over Vivien’s spot. “She’ll never be you,” a former colleague told Vivi over lunch at a nearby deli. “But she does have great lips.”
    Stone chided her for giving up so easily. She was great at what she did and she had one of the best demo reels in the business.
    “All they’re thinking about when they see me is whether I have a scar on my butt,” she replied. “Or why they should hire me when CIN felt they needed somebody younger.”
    “You’ll find something. And when I get back, we’re going to take a vacation somewhere,” he said. “Somewhere fun where nobody’s shooting anybody else.”
    It sounded heavenly to Vivien, except that there was no telling when he might actually get back, and by the time he did she’d be noticeably pregnant or, possibly, a mother.
    Yet she couldn’t bring herself to tell him about the baby. Some small part of her was not only in shock and delusional but seemed to think that if she didn’t mention her pregnancy, it would simply go away. In these earliest months when the chance of a miscarriage was highest, she told herself there was no need for a discussion that might end up moot. And so she kept the news to herself even though she knew that the longer she waited the harder it would be to tell him if she had to. And the harder it became to talk normally as if everything, other than her lack of employment, was just fine.

    BY THE TIME she completed her first trimester, September had given way to October and Vivien could no longer pretend that her condition was temporary or that she was somehow going to find a position in New York even half as good as the one she’d left. In fact, she had begun to doubt she could find anything that came anywhere close to resembling journalism as she knew it.
    She’d already talked to everyone who’d agreed to see her and a few who hadn’t, and had been reduced to answering newspaper and online ads like some rookie fresh out of journalism school. Today’s interview was with the editor of a weekly publication that might best be described as USA Today meets People magazine with a heavy dose of the National Enquirer .
    Vivi studied John Harcourt surreptitiously as she took a seat in his cramped, windowless office. He might have been twelve, thirteen at the most. Which meant Vivien could have already been at CIN a full two years before he was born.
    He was not, as it turned out, familiar with her work, but he thought that her name sounded somewhat familiar.
    Despite an almost irresistible urge to stand up and walk out, this time Vivien listened to the little voice that reminded her of how that had worked out the last time and instead ran through the highlights of her career. As she did so she told herself that if she couldn’t get this appallingly low-paying job at the Weekly Encounter , she deserved to be unemployed.
    “Honestly,” he said. “The column we’re looking to start doesn’t really sound