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tried to keep a low profile the rest of the time.
    Diana found the remote on the break room table and pointed it at the set. CNN came on the screen, and there was their father, Senator Richard Woodruff, D-NY, with his arm around the waist of a woman who was not their mom.
    “Oh.” Lizzie stared at the screen. A sick feeling rose in her throat as she caught the words extramarital affair . She knew this feeling, that nausea, the clamminess in her armpits and the small of her back. At twenty-four, Lizzie Woodruff was well acquainted with shame. She’d just never had the occasion to feel it on behalf of another family member—not impeccable, brilliant, successful Diana; not her gracious, elegant, eternally appropriate mother; and certainly not her father, a man everyone looked up to, a man everyone respected. She swallowed hard, wiping sweat from her upper lip.
    “Oh,” she said. “Oh, jeez.”
    “Yeah,” said Diana, lips curled. “Oh, jeez.” Lizzie was still staring up at the screen, which showed a picture—a photograph pulled from a computer, Lizzie thought—of the same woman, now dressed in a bikini, sitting cross-legged and laughing on the bow of a sailboat.
    “Christ,” Diana muttered. “You’d think one of these bimbos would own a one-piece.”
    “Did you talk to Mom? Is she okay?” Lizzie whispered. She twisted her hair in a knot and secured it with her elastic band, then started pacing.
    Diana pulled her phone out of her pocket, hit a button, listened, then said, “Mom? Hang on. I’m going to conference in Lizzie.”
    Lizzie’s telephone trilled its ringtone, the bouncy melody of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance,” from the depths of the embroidered, sequined purse that she’d bought for ten dollars on Canal Street. Diana made a face—at the purse, or the ring tone, or Lizzie’s inability to locate her phone, Lizzie wasn’t sure. She rooted around, fingers brushing against lipstick and crumpled bills and Kleenexes and the cartridges for Milo’s Leapster, feeling dizzy and desperate to find someplace dim and fragrant with the smell of old beer and cigarettes and drink white wine, chilled so cold that the first glass would give her a headache, which the second glass would instantly cure, or maybe rum and Cokes, her old favorite, syrupy-sweet, so easy going down, making the world pleasantly blurry.
    Finally, she found her phone at the bottom of her purse. “Hello? Mom?”
    “Girls?” Sylvie’s voice was pinched and small.
    “What’s going on?” Diana demanded.
    “I don’t know,” said Sylvie. “I’m in a car, on my way back up to New York. I’ve spoken to Ceil, but other than that, I don’t know what’s happening.”
    “I talked to Dad.” Diana’s words were clipped. “He says he was having an affair, and he got her a job. And he’s sorry. Which of course he’d say.”
    “Oh, God.” Sylvie’s voice was a croak. “As soon as I speak to your father I’ll call you back. Until then, just wait. And be careful. I’m sure reporters will call you, and you shouldn’t say anything.”
    Diana barked laughter. “Oh, really? You don’t think I should go down and make a statement?”
    “Diana,” said Sylvie. Diana rolled her eyes. Her mother could be terrifying, and never more so than when she was angry.
    “Maybe it was innocent. Maybe that woman just needed, you know, a father figure. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe they’re just friends.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Diana. The scorn in her voice could have been bottled and sold as a chemical weapon. “Fifty-seven-year-old senators are not friends with their twentysomething aides.” She exhaled noisily. “I bet there’s e-mails. Or more pictures. Or something. There’s always something. Not to mention,” Diana continued, looking pointedly at her sister, “the press is probably going to write about all of us.”
    Lizzie wondered when the details would come out and marveled at her sister’s ability to always see the worst