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beautiful, impossibly well-groomed woman sat in hushed discussion with an impossibly well-groomed, gray-haired man. The actors’ pink-and-tan skin tones glowed against gray walls.
    Ten seconds of rat-a-tat dialogue established that the woman was a top corporate lawyer; the man was a client who had just walked in off the street. They were already falling in love.
    If only life were like that , Anne thought.
    She replayed the scene. She listened with her mind, trying to pick up the hidden vibration. Gone were the days when love at first sight got swooning strings for background music. Her inner ear told her the right accompaniment would be an oboe—moody, faintly Byzantine, plangent, with a puckish sting of klezmer.
    The phone rang. “Hello?”
    “Something awful has happened.” It was her sister, Kyra.
    “Sweetie—what on earth’s the matter?”
    According to family legend, Anne had been born twelve minutes before her sister. Which made Anne the older sister. The take-charge sister. The here-let-me-bandage-your-broken-doll sister. They had identical genes and they’d had identical nurture, and they were identical in every way except outlook, temperament, taste, lifestyle, and just about every other human variable you could name.
    “I’m on jury duty,” Kyra groaned. She had a gift for overdramatizing.
    “Is that all? For a moment I thought someone had died. What trial?”
    “Corey Lyle. The cult leader.” Stress had pushed Kyra’s voice high and tight in her throat. “They say he blew up that post office in White Plains and murdered that ex-secretary of the Treasury.”
    Anne shuddered. “Horrible business.” No more horrible, actually, than half the TV movies she earned her bread and butter scoring. But TV movies at least were make-believe.
    “Please please please—I’ve got to talk to you. But not on the phone. Could you possibly come down and we’ll have something to eat, nothing fancy, just some deli from Balducci’s?”
    Anne surveyed a worktable laden with problems. Cue sheets of scenes still to be scored. Bills. A dunning demand from the New York City Department of Finance for twenty-six thousand dollars commercial rent tax, payable immediately. She knew the notice was a mistake, another case where some fumbling bureaucrat had asserted control over a perfectly able and customarily well-mannered computer. But it was more money than she had in the bank. It was probably more money than New York City had in the bank.
    “Annie,” the voice in the receiver begged. “Are you there?”
    Anne sighed. “I’m here. It’ll have to be late-ish.”
    “It was the stupidest thing,” Kyra Talbot was saying.
    “They sent me a jury summons a month ago, and I forgot to write in for an exemption. So when I went down last week to get excused—they told me it was too late. And now they want me for the Corey Lyle jury!”
    Anne still hadn’t the faintest idea how she was expected to help Kyra out of this fix. They were sitting at the circular oak table in Kyra’s kitchen, finishing a late, light dinner of cold stuffed veal from Balducci’s. They were five: besides Anne and her sister, there was Toby, Kyra’s eleven-year-old son; Juliana, her au pair; and Mark Wells—her lawyer.
    “That’s the trial of the year—most jurors would kill to get on it.” Mark jabbed his fork into the last stalk of asparagus on the serving plate. “Anyone else want it?”
    The others shook their heads. He lifted the asparagus from fork to fingers and downed it in two hungry chomps.
    “I know it’s my responsibility as a citizen. But I’m swamped with work.” Kyra gathered the plates and took them to the sink. They were hand-painted Provençal birds and flowers, glowing and cheerful. “It’s not as though they needed me personally . And now is the worst possible time—with Norton Stanley Publications reorganizing, and Toby’s c-u-s-t-o-d-y hearing next week. …”
    “I like it when Toby’s dad has