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the newsroom—but no one ever did that. His beat was technology, science. Half the Tribune staff held he was a virgin; the rest, that he visited a Korean whorehouse on 38th Street twice a week.
    Laura, who never gazed long upon Georgie, looked angrily past him now, through the blue sky's reflection in the conference room glass, into the newsroom.
    It was chaos there, the regular thing. The attacks had not forced the Tribune 's offices closed, but the rhythm, the urgent fast and steady beat of newsgathering, had been smashed and jangled. Throw a rock in water, orderly rings pulse in all directions; throw many, and the world is anarchy, confusion. It took time for the Tribune 's tempo to reassert, but finally it had. Keyboards clicked. Men with their polished shoes on their desks leaned dangerously back in chairs asking pointed questions into phones. Women with sharp elbows leaned forward over theirs, desks and phones, listening darkly. Someone came, someone went.
    Laura turned to Georgie. “They don't know yet.” It was an accusation.
    “Leo's about to call us together. I asked him if I could tell you first.” It was an admission of guilt.
    “First? So you could—? I have to—?”
    On top of her words: “Laura, you know—”
    But Laura was refusing to know. A wave of fury threw her out of her chair, fury at Georgie for the news he'd brought and the way he'd brought it, at the river for flowing and the sun for shining and the leaves for falling from the trees.
    Before she could scream and tear Georgie apart—he would have permitted this—a change in the tenor of the newsroom froze her. A ripple in the force field: Leo was stepping from his office. He planted himself just over his threshold, and when he stood there and roared, “People!” everything stopped.
    Square-headed, white-haired, rough-faced, and bulky, Leo waited for phone calls to end and documents to be saved-as. Laura and Georgie, after a motionless moment, stumbled unthinking through the conference room door: rage, shock, and sorrow could not, even combined, begin to overcome the autoresponse triggered in a reporter by Leo's bellow from the doorway.
    So Leo delivered the news, and Laura had to hear it again.
    This time it was ornamented with details. If she'd been listening as a reporter, these would have been important to her. Fascinating even, as they clearly were to the colleagues around her. Unable any longer to be impressed by death, they could still be surprised by the personal nature of one like this; but not enough to keep them from scribbling notes on pads, in case Leo assigned them the story, or from stealing glances away from Leo to send them Laura's way when they thought she wasn't looking.
    But she was looking, though she was determined to have nothing but scorn for their glances, and she didn't hear the news as a reporter, though she was one. She heard it as a student, as an acolyte, apologist, and lover, and the word Georgie hadn't used but Leo did, the dam-break that swept her into stunned disbelief and powerless fury, was suicide.

M ARIAN ' S S TORY
    Chapter 1

    The Man Who Sat by the Door
    October 30, 2001
    The catastrophic force of the earthquake that would be summoned up by Harry Randall's death was not at first apparent to Marian Gallagher. All the news brought her was a disquietude such as she might have felt at faint tremblings of the ground: vibrations so weak they could be dismissed as the inventions of an anxious imagination, except by those who had passed through such times before.
    The breathless last to join a cheery group of friends around a bistro table—Marian had many groups of friends—she was kissed and greeted, her wine was poured, the olives and the bread were passed her way. How are you, honey, Clark asked, and Sue, always knowing what meant the most, asked how that young firefighter was, her godson, the one who was hurt, the one the story in the paper was about? Kevin, replied Marian; he's doing very well, we're