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They had relocated because Roger had gotten a teaching job in creative writing at Stanford.
    The notion of staying in San Francisco because she had a good job at the Chronicle hadn’t even been a consideration for Roger. Sarah had finally agreed to move, mostly because she wanted to have a baby, and Palo Alto seemed like a beautiful place to raise a child.
    In the spring of 1984, Sarah wrote her best work to date, a vitriolic, deeply felt nine-thousand-word piece about corruption in northern California hospitals. She had written the article because she was personally outraged by the payoffs she had discovered going on between hospital suppliers and some staff doctors.
    A twenty-three-year-old nurse by the name of Jeanne Galetta read the three-part feature in the Times-Tribune . She liked something about the writing style, something in Sarah’s ability to get the truth down in a straightforward way. The nurse decided to contact Sarah about a subject that was deeply troubling her.
    Jeanne Galetta was employed by one of the private nursing services operating around Palo Alto. As recently as a month before, the nurse had been working at the Cavanaugh estate in nearby Woodside. During Jeanne Galetta’s ten-month relationship with Agnes Cavanaugh, a bedridden woman in her early fifties, she had become convinced that the wealthy woman’s two daughters were poisoning their mother.
    Agnes Cavanaugh suffered a massive stroke and died soon after the nurse first talked to Sarah about her suspicions. An autopsy was requested, and performed. Traces of cyanide were found throughout Agnes Cavanaugh’s body.
    Because of the wealthy Cavanaugh family’s notoriety, the series that Sarah wrote was carried in the San Francisco Chronicle and also picked up by the United Press. The two Cavanaugh daughters were indicted on first-degree murder charges. They were eventually convicted, right there in the downtown Palo Alto courthouse.
    Because she’d understood the power of her story from the beginning, Sarah had been shaping the early interviews with family members and friends into a lengthy manuscript, which she decided to call A Mother’s Kindness. She had finished all but the last two chapters by the end of the court trial.
    A Mother’s Kindness was published the following fall. It almost immediately exceeded the publisher’s expectations, breaking out very big in California and all through the Far West. Ultimately, A Mother’s Kindness became the number-one best-seller in nonfiction, and the book was turned into a successful television mini-series that was kindly reviewed.
    Then, almost as abruptly as it had begun, the fairy-tale experience ended—crash-landed like a paper airplane in a wind tunnel. One month after she had been written up in Time and People, Roger left her.
    He admitted he couldn’t stomach being referred to as “Sarah McGinniss’s husband.” Roger also confessed that there was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student at the university who had been “consoling” him. As Sarah later learned, the graduate student had been helping Roger “cope” during her pregnancy with Sam as well.
    The more she heard about Roger’s girlfriend at Stanford, the angrier Sarah became. She had sacrificed, no strings attached, while he was getting his doctorate, and then when he decided they should leave San Francisco. Now he had shown that he couldn’t give even a little of himself for her. He had been calling her “the Shana Alexander of Palo Alto.” It was a pretty funny line, but damn him anyway.
    She and Sam moved to New York City the next summer, partly because of research work she needed to do for her new book, but mostly because Sarah knew she had to be far away from everything that had happened in her marriage. She wanted no reminders.
    More than anything now, she needed to write a very good book. She wanted to show that A Mother’s Kindness hadn’t been a one-shot. Sarah especially wanted to rub Roger’s face in each