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her life for freedom, who had taught her that any goal was attainable with enough creativity and discipline. There was no way Isabel could walk away from her predicament, especially not after what had happened with her father.
    But how could she come up with three hundred grand right away? Her mom took a salary of $50,000 a year from the bookstore if she was lucky. Isabel was getting paid a flat fee of $120,000 from the network, and the show wasn’t going to air for months, so any royalties or commercial offers would be too little, too late. The network itself was struggling in the ratings, so they weren’t willing to advance her any cash. Her father’s death benefits from the army had gone toward paying off her college loans. Their outdated two-bedroom house wasn’t worth that much. Isabel even contemplated selling the family bookstore, The Thumbed Page, but who in their right mind would buy it? It would be like asking for bids on a mule in the era of the steam engine.
    She shielded her mother and Andy from the impossibility of the situation. Her mom’s job was to recover from her mastectomy; his was to be a kid; hers was to raise the money. But when she confessed her hopelessness to the chief oncologist, his stern eyes narrowed over the bridge of his spectacles, and she could tell he was a man not often denied.
    â€œShe needs this drug,” he said. They were standing in the hallway outside the hospital room, where her mother’s groans were softly audible. “And she needs it now. It’s the only way. I don’t care if you have to sell your soul to get it.”
    Neither of them knew then how prescient his words would be.

CHAPTER 2
    The Diary of Richard Barnett
    5 months, 2 weeks before, Key West
    Â 
    T hursday, May 18. I’ll never forget the date we met. Oh, Isabel . I know how jaded I must have seemed to you that day. After all, I sell death for a living. When I said it with a dry chuckle, you eyed me like I was the Grim Reaper himself. Most people do. I don’t take it personally.
    â€œI promise not to bite,” I said, waving you past the doorway into my office. Your sweeping glance took in my drab carpet, the coffee stains on my desk, the window behind me overlooking the parking lot. Then you plopped into the tired old chair where my desperate clients laid out their need for instant cash. I’d heard it all. Nothing affected me much at that point except for people who wasted my time—the too young and too healthy. You were both.
    When you first walked in, with your slender, athletic body and your silky dark hair, I groaned to myself. I had become inured to beauty. You looked more like a pro fitness model than a normal woman, let alone a sick one. Unlike most other clients, you radiated liveliness. If you had just come from running a marathon, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
    I thought you might be one of the hypochondriacs who sometimes come to my brokerage. Convinced of their approaching deaths, they want to sell their existing life insurance policies for a quick buck. What an annoying bunch. Don’t they realize that their medical records speak for themselves? I can never haggle a good deal when my buyers see perfect blood counts and hormone levels and not a single diseased cell, not even a rash. Go home, I tell them. Get a life. Like the one you already have.
    But you didn’t have a bone of self-pity and that’s how I knew you were something else entirely. You told me about your mother’s illness and why you needed serious cash now. I tried not to let on that I admired the way you looked me in the eye without flinching. Most women I see break down in tears by the second sentence.
    â€œHow much is her policy worth?” I asked, lighting a cigarette. By force of habit, I was already running calculations in my head. Typically I could negotiate around 12 percent to 25 percent of the death benefits for an instant cash settlement, and