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policy of Don’t ask, Don’t tell.
    Marcy dropped a manila folder onto the countertop in front of Blue. “This has your itinerary and Peter’s final notes for next week. With spring break in progress, we’re sure to have some great crowds. Oh, thefirst scuba class is set for Sunday at nine. I know you said you’re not planning to dive, but I think you should. Key West has some of the best reefs in the northern hemisphere and you can’t see them if you don’t do the course.”
    Blue removed her makeup with pre-soaked pads—the sort of single-use product her mother hated—while skimming the itinerary. They’d leave Chicago early tomorrow, arriving in Key West at about ten. The whole crew would stay at the Ocean Key Resort, where, for her, a spacious oceanfront suite would make a nice home-away-from-home for the week.
    She said, “I’m afraid I’ll get the bends,” a cover for the truth, that she was a lousy swimmer.
    “Do you even know what the bends is?”
    “Hey,” Blue said, still reading, “now that my mom has bailed, why don’t you bunk with me in my suite? It’s two bedrooms. We can stay up late watching Owen Wilson DVDs. I was so embarrassed when we had him on last time and I had to admit I hadn’t seen
Shanghai Noon.”
    “I would … but I invited Stephen along, and …”
    “Say no more,” Blue said, closing the folder.
    “Besides, you should really get out some, while we’re there. I hear the nightlife is crazy good.”
    “Sure. I’ll just hang out in bars and, I don’t know, take home whoever’s willing.”
    “If you did a little more of that, then—”
    “Then what?” Her own answers: Then she might have had
multiple
fatherless children, as her mother did. A career of cleaning motel rooms and checking groceries and up-selling fruit baskets at a phone bank for catalog retailers every holiday season.
    Then she wouldn’t be cloistered in this building, in this life.
    Marcy said, “Nothing, forget it. You should just have more fun, that’s all. Life is short, and you’ve paid your dues.”
    Blue leaned over and took longer than she needed to tie her sneakers. “So, I’m off to the gym. Guess I’ll see you—and Stephen—at Midway, six-forty-five am sharp.”
    “Blue?”
    She sat up. “Yeah?”
    “What were you doing out there, on the fire escape?”
    “The fire escape?” She looked out the window. The snow was still falling with vigor.
    “Yeah,” Marcy said, “you know, that steel thing, used for egress in the event of an emergency. Was there some emergency I should know about?”
    “Branford called.” The private detective she’d had on retainer for almost four years now.
    “And?”
    “And he has a lead. I don’t have any details yet.” She looked at Marcy and saw her at nineteen, saw her as Bat, heard her saying even back then, days and weeks afterward, that it wasn’t too late to find the child. She could change her mind, she could track him down.
    Now Marcy said, “Ah.” That was all there was
to
say, so many fruitless years into the search.
    “So, see you at sunrise.”

2
    nside Blue’s apartment was the life she’d been living for ten years, or seasons, as she’d learned to call them. Ten seasons of ratings pressures and growing competition, the challenge of keeping a laser-sharp focus on
what daytime audiences want
, but trying to do it on her terms. “Style and Substance,” was the headline of her recent
Elle
interview. That was the goal. Sometimes they achieved it.
    Ten seasons of expanding success. The apartment’s structural remodel had come after season two, and the color scheme back then … what had it been? Pale blue and lavender with light woods? Or was that the following incarnation? She could no longer recall. Only that the décor had been updated four times—every two years, the way some people traded up vehicles. The apartment needed to be current, Marcy said, because Blue sometimes entertained there. Marcy handled it all just the