But.

I actually managed to doze for a few minutes before the captain came on the loudspeaker and announced our descent into Atlanta. An hour layover in an airport, then the flight to Savannah, then… what? I couldn’t bear to think about it.

The Atlanta airport was alive with a wide, varied stream of people. Harried business types in gray suits and power ties, college-age men and women traveling in sweats and sneakers, a tour group at least two dozen strong speaking something that sounded like German but might have been anything. It took me a few minutes to realize we were traveling on a Friday. After the first few months of bopping around the world, setting my own schedule, I’d started to lose track of things like days of the week. We navigated through the concourse to a Houlihan’s bar, the four of us crowding around a small table made of something equal parts wood and plastic. A television overhead blared about a particularly god-awful earthquake someplace in China, bright images of dust and violence fighting with the bar’s dark, fake comfort. When the drinks came, my beer was warm and tasted weirdly like cut grass. I put it down after two sips.

“Okay,” Ex said sharply. “Postmortem.”

“Ex,” Aubrey said, shaking his head, “I think maybe we’d better-”

“Postmortem,” Ex said again. “We just had something go off the rails, right? So before we start forgetting things or romanticizing or justifying ourselves or whatever, why don’t we get this out of the way.”

Ex’s pale eyes were hard. From his breath, I had the suspicion that he’d started on the drinks while we were still in the air. A man at the next table started talking into his cell phone loud enough to compete with the dying Chinese above us. It hadn’t occurred to me until just then that by getting us fired, I’d also screwed up Ex’s love life. He must have spent the whole flight to Atlanta stewing. I didn’t want to talk about it, but I owed it to Ex to at least let him vent a little.

I reached for my lousy beer, thought better, and grabbed Aubrey’s rum-and-coke instead. Chogyi Jake put his hands flat on the small table.

“Ex. I think this would be a mistake,” Chogyi Jake said, his voice low and penetrating.

“No,” I said. “It’s okay. He’s right. We screwed up, and we ought to face that straight on.”

“It seems to me that we had a real failure of leadership,” Ex said, “and that seems to underlie a lot of the trouble we’ve been having up to now too.”

A failure of leadership. The phrase was like a gutpunch.

“We’ve been having trouble?” I said, trying to make it a joke.

“We have,” Ex said. “For instance, let’s look at the division of labor. Jake and I are setting up a secret hideout to hold off the bad guys, and you’re… what? Clubbing? Maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t seem like a very good use of time.”

“Hey!” Aubrey said, frowning.

“That wasn’t my idea,” I said. My voice was higher and tighter than I’d expected it to be. “Karen suggested it.”

“And there’s another example,” Ex said. “Karen. Was she the boss back there? Or were you? Or was Aubrey?”

“I think we should-” Chogyi Jake said, but Ex barreled over him.

“Everything fell apart because no one was in charge. Myself, I thought that since Karen was the one that called us in, she would at least be consulted before we went in and screwed everything up.”

“What is your problem, Ex?” Aubrey said. “You’re talking like everything that’s gone wrong here is Jayné’s fault.”

“Well, there’s a hypothesis,” Ex said, his lip rising in a sneer. “Why don’t we explore that.”

Something in my brain hit overload, and the pain and shame and sorrow all shifted into rage. Ex was attacking me, kicking me when I was down. I was betrayed.

“Why don’t we not,” I said. “This was a bad idea. The postmortem can wait.”

“And now, just like that,” Ex said and snapped his fingers, “you’re the boss again.”

At the bar behind Chogyi Jake, an older man turned to look at us. The volume of our conversation was starting to rival the television. My hands were on my knees, fingers digging into my legs.

“Why are you doing this?” I said, keeping my voice down.

“I understand that you wanted to be like Karen,” Ex said. “Karen’s a very accomplished, experienced, wise woman. She’s in control of her own sexuality in a way that nobody who’s barely out of high school could be.”

“My sexuality? How the fuck did my sexuality get into this?” I said, my voice buzzing with anger. “Jesus! Who’s feeding you these lines? Is this Karen, because I’m pretty sure she already chewed me out.”

“Just let me finish,” Ex said. “I think you owe me that much. Karen is powerful, and she’s sure of herself. It’s perfectly understandable that someone who wasn’t would overcompensate.”

My rage topped out. It felt like calm. The exhaustion of travel, the humiliation of failure, the hurt of Ex’s ambush-all of it fell away like shrugging off a jacket. The sound of the bar and television faded. I think I laughed.

“Walk away from this table,” I said.

“No. You owe me at least-”

“Ex, you’re fired. Now walk away,” I said. All of us were silent for a heartbeat. “That powerful enough for you?”

Ex went pale, then flushed red, then pushed back from the table and stalked out into the terminal, his black shirt and pale ponytail vanishing into the river of humanity. None of us spoke. I finished Aubrey’s rum-and-coke, walked to the nearest restroom, and sat in the stall with my head in my hands until it was time to board the plane.

Ex didn’t make the flight.

I WOKE up in an unfamiliar room. The bed smelled like dust. The ceiling was canted oddly, like the dormer of an old house. Cream-colored paint took on the orange of the soft, translucent curtains. I didn’t know who or where I was, and I had the sense that I didn’t want to. I lay on my pillow, savoring the moment of sleep-induced amnesia. Something on my arm itched-a wide, ugly cut. And then like a lead weight pressed on my sternum, it all came back.

We’d reached the Savannah house after midnight. An envelope with the keys had been waiting for us under the front mat. We hadn’t spoken on the flight. We barely talked on the way in. I’d walked through the house once to quell my only semirational fear that something or someone might be hiding in it, then found a bedroom, stripped down to T-shirt and underwear, curled up, and collapsed. My clothes were still in the pile by the door, and I pulled on my jeans before venturing out.

The bathroom was just down the hall, and someone had laid out my travel pack and robe. I showered, brushed my hair, brushed my teeth. All the little rituals that reminded me I was human. Wrapped in the soft terry cloth of my bathrobe, I made my way down a flight of white-painted stairs and into the scent of bacon and coffee and the sound of ecstatic voices raised in song and filtered through a cheap radio.

The kitchen was all done in yellow tile and oiled hardwood. A slight haze of smoke hung in the air, a remnant of the pan-fried bacon still draining grease onto folded paper towels. The radio on the sideboard shone silver and sang gospel. My stomach woke with a physical lurch.

“Hello?” I said. “Anyone here?”

“Jayné!” Aubrey’s voice called from the back hall. Two sets of footsteps came toward me; Aubrey and Chogyi Jake. Reflexively, I wondered where Ex was, then remembered. I plucked a strip of bacon off the pile just as they came in.

“She wakes,” Aubrey said, moving in for a brief hug that was only made awkward by the bacon in my fingers and the brief but intense pain of my broken ribs. Chogyi Jake opened the refrigerator and took out a couple of eggs. In the moment before the door closed, I caught a glimpse of orange juice and bread.

“Someone’s been shopping,” I said. “What time is it?”

Aubrey shut off the radio and sat up on the counter.