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long intake of breath. “Now, can you please look at these numbers I worked out? Because I think I’ve found a way to keep both of my assistants.” For Boris wanted her to lay off her full-timer and keep her half-timer: the last thing Julia intended to do, given that her full-timer was the only black secretary in Kepler.
    “Tell you something else. Your friend Kellen? The story is, he was having this hot-and-heavy affair with some married woman.” His eyes were greedy. “I wonder who.”
    “Kellen had nothing but affairs.” Her cheeks grew warm. “He liked life to change around him. Nothing excited him except the future and its…possibilities. He used to say he never wanted to do anything twice.” Julia winced, and made herself stop. How on earth had she allowed her fellow dean to lead her down this path? Kellen had been talking about sex when he made the remark a lifetime ago—sex, as it happened, with her. “Boris, please, if you look at my proposals—”
    “Already looked. They’re garbage. You’re trying too hard to be nice. Face facts, Julia. Somebody’s going to wind up hating you, right? Right. So the only way you exercise any autonomy at all is by choosing who.” The waitress, who knew Boris’s proclivities, had brought a third Dr Pepper without being asked. He downed half in one dribbling gulp. “Anyway, this married woman? I hear she’s pretty prominent around town. Or her husband is.”
    “What are you trying to say, Boris?”
    He ignored her indignation. Wiping his fingers on the tatters of his napkin, he hunched closer, increasing the likelihood that he would sputter on her. “So, are you going down to New Orleans or whatever for the funeral?”
    “Arkadelphia. And yes.” Wondering why she was blushing afresh.
    “How about our esteemed president? Showing the flag, delivering a eulogy, weeping crocodile tears?”
    “Lemaster has too much work.”
    “Too bad.” A furry grin. “Want some company?”
    “Have some, thanks.” Now in an even greater hurry to escape him.
    “Well, good. You have fun, if that’s what one does at funerals. How are the kids taking it?”
    “They’re fine,” she said, not sure whether she was lying. Should she talk about her eldest, Preston, off at grad school, who never called home if he could avoid it? About Vanessa, whose troubles could fill a book? Or Aaron, her ninth-grader, who had fled to Exeter to escape the tension in the house since his older sister’s arrest? And what about Jeannie, more determined than ever to prove herself the household’s perfect little princess? She felt all four of them drifting away from her, and the pain of loss twisted her mind in sadder directions. “They didn’t really know him,” she said, a bit faintly. “Or not very well.”
    He was already on to another subject. “Oh, listen, I’ll tell you another thing I heard about your friend Kellen. A few people out in the Landing were pretty angry with him.”
    Boris lived just a mile from Hunter’s Heights and loved to spread gossip, some of it true. Julia was intrigued, finally, in spite of herself. “Angry at Kellen? People in the Landing? What did Kellen have to do with the Landing?”
    “No idea, but, whatever it was, it sure got a lot of people’s backs up.”
    “Well, no disrespect, but I don’t see how on earth Kellen could have been doing anything in the Landing without me knowing about it. He would have told me—” Julia stopped, confused by her own words. Her colleague’s mocking eyes told her that he had spotted her error, but would preserve his teasing for a fitter time. “I mean, I would have heard about it. We all would.”
    “Unless he didn’t want you to know,” said her fellow dean, and took another messy chomp on his burger.
    (II)
    B Y S UNDAY AFTERNOON , two days before her lunch with Boris, the gossip-flies had already begun buzzing everywhere. No screen or spray ever suffices to keep them out. Stop answering the telephone and they