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agency was dubbed the Memoir Mill on Gawker. Now, suddenly, some of those authentic and original stories Miranda uncovered turned out to be fraudulent and recycled lies.
    She had been deceived. She had been lied to. She had been abandoned by the stories she had nurtured with such love and care. When she saw her mother suffering from the divorce, from Josie's deception and treachery, Miranda sometimes had trouble keeping herself from gasping in intimate recognition. There is divorce and there is divorce, she told herself. And for me, there is both.
    When Felicity said that Annie did not have scandals, she was right about that, too. Annie was a hardworking, even-tempered person who tried to take life as it presented itself without making a fuss. If Miranda was swept up in the waves of successive Lite Victories, Annie was comfortably dug in to her burrow of books. She read the same ones over and over--the classic novels of nineteenth-century England, the minor novels of twentieth-century England. Annie was matter-of-fact, but the facts were never hers. The light of real life, which to Miranda meant the busy melodrama of everyday scandal, never penetrated this soft, dappled world. Miranda sometimes thought of Annie as a kind of desiccated opium addict, stretched out in a smoky, sweet-smelling den with her fictional strangers, cut off from the noisy circus of life, uncaring, inaccessible, eyes closed in someone else's dream. By the book , Miranda always said of Annie, trying to describe what she considered to be the literalism of her sister's imagination. Perhaps it was this quality that made it a surprise to Miranda when she discovered that with this divorce Annie, too, was sad and disoriented and, most of all, angry.
    "I miss him," Annie said. "And I hate him. Hate. Hate. Hate. Loathe. And hate."
    "Life," Miranda replied, rather triumphantly, "is wracked by tragic contradictions."
    This was one of Miranda's core beliefs: Life was wracked by tragic contradictions . . . that would all come out right in the end. At this moment, however, with regard to Josie's treatment of her mother, she could not bring herself to pronounce the second half of her sentence.
    Annie noticed the omission and was about to comment on it when Miranda's cell phone rang. In the past, Miranda would have answered and carried on, with great gusto, a conversation full of personal details from the sordid stories Miranda's authors specialized in. But this time Miranda said, "I guess that will have to do," in a tired voice.
    "Business?" Annie said when she hung up.
    "What's left of it." Miranda took a deep breath. Failure: it was like having a fatal disease. People pretended it didn't exist, turned away quickly with an embarrassed look of pity, stopped talking when you came up to them unexpectedly. People pretended it didn't exist, and so did she; yet it was always there, the air she breathed.
    Annie, apparently sensing some of this, said, "Sorry," looking embarrassed in a way that proved Miranda's point.
    "Not your fault."
    "Still, sorry."
    Miranda took her sister's arm, walked a few steps that way; then, hoping that was enough reassurance for Annie, dropped it.
    In the contested apartment, Betty Weissmann took some satisfaction in finishing a bottle of Joseph's favorite single malt. Some satisfaction, though not much, for Betty did not like single malt whiskey.
    And where was Joseph now? Off with some woman, no doubt. Some other woman. She had his horrid whiskey that tasted like damp and dirt. This other woman, whoever she was, had him. It was enough to make you cry. Betty did not have the energy to cry. She had already cried far too much. She would tie up her belongings in a handkerchief, hang it from a stick, put the stick over her shoulder like one of the three little pigs, and go on the train to the cottage in Westport to seek her fortune. Her fortune did not include a wolf to blow her house down, for that had already been done. But she knew the fortune of an