She hadn’t cried so much since she was a baby, but back then someone would stick a pacifier in her mouth and rock her. Now there was no one around to touch her at all. This is why, she thought, she took all those pills. To suppress the river of tears that was always pushing at the dam within her.

She reached out to the People magazine in front of her. Her hands shook as she picked it up. They had found a particularly dashing picture of James, a particularly pathetic picture of Amy and a particularly sexy picture of Cassandra. Even that name was sexy. It was like Egyptian-Sex-Priestess  ...

She didn’t know much about intimacy, but she thought it had something to do with telling the person you loved the truth, despite the consequences. Somehow though, she understood why he did it, why he could tell a sea of strangers who lapped us his every word like gold, because that was safe.  ...

When James was leaving her so easily, like a shirt he had grown tired of, an old friend from her early days at Rolling Stone had said, “I think, to be the kind of woman someone fights for, you have to be the kind of woman who fights for herself.”