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couldn’t go on this way. She was dishonoring her family, who had loved life and lived it to the fullest. Though the dizziness and the nightmares were beyond her control, her thoughts weren’t. She could control her thoughts, or at least try to.
    Doing something. That was usually a good antidote. But do what? The house was spotless. Her accounts were in order. She’d neglected her food blog for so long she had no more followers, so that was out.
    Food.
    Okay.
    She’d cook something else for Joe, to thank him for saving her from the big bad slobbering puppy. Baked ziti. A hearty recipe a friend’s Sicilian grandmother had taught her. He could freeze the pan and share with his buddies over poker some other time.
    The thought energized her enough to propel her from the couch and back into the kitchen. Her hands took over. When she cooked she rarely had to think. Her hands just did the work without much input from her. It was magic.
    So she switched on her cook setting and went along for the ride.
    There was something so magical about food. Food and sex, the eternal healers. In her heart of hearts, if someone put her feet to the fire to make her tell the truth, she thought food was better than sex. More reliable as a source of pleasure. Good food never let you down like people did.
    Before the...before. Before, she’d been making a name for herself as a food blogger because all of it interested her.
Foodways
, her blog was called. Well, it had been called that when it was active. Now it was dormant, dead. She still got puzzled inquiries from fellow food enthusiasts who hadn’t put together that Isabel Delvaux of
Foodways
was one of
the
Delvauxes, the political and artsy family. The family that had died in the Washington Massacre.
    The contacts were falling off fast and other food bloggers had picked up her readership.
Foodways
was dead. Last week she’d even canceled her personal
Foodways
email address.
    But in its heyday
Foodways
had received hundreds of thousands of hits a day. A million and a half readers. A best of collection of her posts had been published and enjoyed a modest success. Before...before. Before, she’d received several offers from publishers about writing a big book about the history of food, about food folklore throughout the world, including recipes. She’d been in negotiations with a major publisher when...
    When the bottom dropped out of her world.
    Memories usually carried sharp-cutting edges, slicing deep, making her bleed. It was only in the kitchen that she was able to chase memories away.
    Right now she resolved to make the best pan of baked ziti in the history of the world for Joe. She’d put it into the biggest pan she had and leave a note on top that he could freeze the pan until the next poker night if he wanted. All he’d have to do was take it out of the freezer and pop it into the oven an hour before his friends were due to arrive.
    Not the microwave oven, she’d have to add that to the note. She knew the attraction microwaves held for bachelors.
    The real recipe, the true one, for baked ziti took hours. It was something only a grandmother could possibly cook. And, well, Isabel, who had hours to kill. Great aching vast oceans of hours to kill.
    So she set to it, making the sauce from scratch, making almost a hundred tiny flavorful meatballs, undercooking the ziti because they’d finish cooking in the sauce in the oven, grating the scamorza cheese. It was a rich dish full of carbs and fats and protein. The kind of dish you’d need if you were walking across Antarctica.
    Not the kind of dish she could eat, though she could certainly cook it. That was another thing that had fled from her world that night, together with sleep. An appetite. She’d always loved food and now most food tasted like cardboard, like a simulacrum of food. No matter what the dish, whether she’d prepared it or a master chef had, she couldn’t taste anything. Her stomach often clenched shut so tightly her