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they'd ordered.
    Joseph never called them his stepdaughters. They were his daughters. He must have shown his distaste for the word. Felicity's wide eyes opened just a bit wider. Her lips parted. She said quickly, "I haven't seen them around the office. I miss them."
    "So do I."
    "Poor Miranda. What a scandal."
    "Double whammy."
    "It's no wonder she doesn't come around. The poor woman is probably afraid to leave the house."
    For a moment, Joseph did not connect the word "woman" with Miranda. She was a girl, always had been, always would be. If she were a woman, what did that make him?
    "Time flies," he said, pouring himself another glass of wine. "I used to read them their bedtime stories. Now they're women with scandals."
    "Well, not Annie. Nothing scandalous about that one."
    Felicity was right about Miranda being afraid to leave her apartment. She had always spent as little time as possible in her loft, an overpriced, underfurnished rental, always at her office or out to dinner or just out. Now she ordered her meals from every Tribeca restaurant that delivered, answered the door in her nightgown, paid with a credit card, and shuffled back to bed. Her slippers slapped disconsolately against the highly polished wood floors. The world droned on, uninterested and uninspiring, beyond her tall windows. She did not hear the car horns or the shouts of the drivers stuck behind double-parked delivery vans. She did not hear the helicopters. She did not have the energy. She heard only what followed her closely--her slippers and the murmur of the television, the creak of the platform as she settled back into bed, the sickly clatter of the plastic tops hitting the floor as she opened her containers of gummy food, her strong, unhappy heartbeat.
    Felicity was right about another thing: it had been a bad year for the Miranda Weissmann Literary Agency, a terrible year, a year of queenly annus horribilis proportions. The Scandal of the Scandals, the blogs called it. All involving Miranda's highest-profile clients. First, Rudy Lake, whose best-selling, wrenching prison memoir had won him a parole for the murder of his first wife, turned out to have plagiarized the better part of his book from an obscure Hungarian novel of the 1950s; then the elusive Bongo Ffrancis had turned out to be a middle-aged Midwestern housewife, not the seventeen-year-old Welsh heroin addict his memoir had described; and finally, the Midwestern housewife Sarah-Gail Laney, who wrote about her painful search for normality after being raised by sexually abusive missionaries who poisoned each other in Uganda, had actually been raised in Hoboken, where her parents, sharing in the profits of her book, still lived in the quiet two-bedroom apartment in which she'd grown up.
    Miranda had greeted these developments with her typical high-volume, inefficient ferocity, berating the press and the world in general; and simultaneously with a quick, irritable tenderness for her clients. When the scandals first broke, six months ago, she had busied herself arranging lawyers and interviews and excuses. She had been indefatigable. Now the publishers were after their advances, her other writers had fled, and the lawyers, interviews, and excuses were as much for herself as for the fraudulent memoirists.
    Before the scandals came, Miranda had been the agent who could spot the flash of memoir gold in the barren hills of anecdote, who could meet someone on an airplane one day and sign a deal on the book they had never before thought of writing the next. She found talent and excitement everywhere. In the beginning, there had been two beautifully written, deeply moving memoirs--the Rhodesian childhood, the Egyptian one--that won prizes. Miranda had discovered them, had cherished them and shepherded them into their rightful place in the world, had made a great deal of money from them, too.
    In the following years, she uncovered originality and authenticity with such regularity that her little