"This is not really happening," Miranda said.

And she, too, decided to see Josie.

"I am entitled to live my life," Joseph told them when they appeared together at his office. But there were tears in his eyes. "I am entitled to my life."

Both women were moved by the tears. And both agreed that he was entitled to his life, but with these provisos: Annie explained that the life Josie was entitled to was the life he had always lived, the one with their mother; Miranda, a more romantic soul, pointed out that while life must be lived to the fullest, Josie was no longer young, and his present life was surely full enough for someone his age.

"This is difficult for me, too," Joseph said. He squeezed his fists into his eyes like a child. The two women put their arms around him.

"Josie, Josie," they said softly, soothing the distinguished man in his pinstriped suit. They had never seen their stepfather cry.

He stood back and looked down at his two daughters, his "girls," and he saw that his girls were no longer girls. Miranda was as lovely in her skittish, eye-flashing way as ever, her light brown hair shining, grazing her shoulders, the style not much different from what she wore as a teenager. But now in her still-youthful beauty there was something willed and hard. As for Annie, she had never looked youthful, always so serious, her dark eyes taking everything in and giving nothing back. He could see a faint line of gray where her hair parted. She watched him anxiously. What could he do for her, his sad little girl? Decades ago, in his youth, a man in his position might have handed her some bills and told her to buy herself a hat to cheer herself up. He imagined her in a little velvet cocktail hat, inclined rakishly to one side. The incongruity of it made him want to shake her.

"I will be very generous to your mother," he said. "You can count on me for that."

And the daughters left the office, angry, disappointed, but hopeful for their mother's material comfort, at least.

"Hi, Felicity," they said with forced cheerfulness to the pretty VP who had initiated the increasingly successful online side of the business. There was no point in letting their misery show. Perhaps the whole thing could be patched up before Felicity and the others in the office knew anything about it.

"Well, at least they're not getting lawyers," Miranda said. "Lawyers are parasitic vultures."

"You're mixing unpleasant species characteristics."

"Vermin," Miranda said defiantly. Miranda was a literary agent and resented the legal profession on principle for interfering in matters that ought not to concern them, like her clients' contracts, but her experiences with lawyers had been particularly painful in the last six months. "They should mind their own business."

"Unfortunately, divorce sort of is their business. Some of them anyway."

Miranda had never been divorced herself. This, she knew, was only because she had never been married. She fell in love too easily, too frequently, too hard, to get married. Miranda loved to be in love. It was a pleasure she was willing to suffer for, but not give up. Right now she was in love with a ne'er-do-well day trader. She thought of him and felt a flutter of giddy admiration: his bare back bent over her computer in her dark bedroom late at night, the pained expression on his face illuminated by the big, bright monitor.

Love was one of the reasons she gave for never getting married, the primary one. But there was another. She had always been too busy, constantly on the phone, barking out orders to her harassed assistant, flirting with a publisher on the hook, raising the spirits of a disappointed author. She specialized in the genre of what Annie dubbed the Lite Victory memoir. Her clients, the Awful Authors, as even Miranda called them, had always overcome something ghastly and lurid, something so ghastly and so lurid they had to write a ghastly and lurid book recounting every detail of their mortification and misery. At the end of the book, there was a nice epiphany, and since no one could really object to an epiphany, not even Annie, the books were very popular and Miranda had built a thriving agency that required her constant attention.

Until the lawyers got to it, she thought. "Vermin," she said again. "Ha! No divorce lawyer will ever dine on my flesh."

Annie said nothing. Miranda's antipathy to marriage was a point of contention between them. Annie had always maintained that Miranda simply lacked the imagination to get married.

"Marriage is too much like fiction for you," she once told Miranda. "Too unpredictable, too influenced by idiosyncratic characters."

Miranda, who considered herself a hopeless romantic, had replied, "Fiction has a plot, the same old plot. In what way is that unpredictable?"

"Because it all hangs on temperament, on personality, on serendipity and happenstance. On chance. Your books, and all your love affairs, are about control, losing it and then reasserting it."

To which assessment of the genre of memoir and the miracles of the heart Miranda would shake her head, smile pityingly at her benighted older sister, contemplate her puzzling insistence on always wearing such drab colors, and say gently, "I want to be free, Annie. And I am."

Then, invariably, the sisters would quote Louisa May Alcott at each other — "She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain" — and move on to other things.

Now, as Miranda walked beside her sister, she wondered if Josie wanted to be free, free of Annie and herself. As well as their mother, of course.

"It's so sad," she said. "Lawyers would make it ugly, too."

She felt her phone vibrating. When she saw who it was, she didn't answer.

"Christ," she muttered, but Annie didn't hear her.

"And expensive," Annie was saying. "They make it so expensive." That had certainly been her experience. She had been married, many years ago. She had two grown children to prove it. But her husband, such an intense, driven young man, had turned out to be a gambler. Annie hadn't seen him after the divorce, eighteen years ago, nor had he kept in touch with his children. She had been informed of his death, of leukemia, two years ago. "Nothing lasts," she said now, thinking of the waste that was love.

Miranda said, "You're so literal minded."

And the two sisters continued down the street, arm in arm, affectionate and indulgent, each smiling a small, comfortable smile at her superiority to the other.

On leaving her stepfather's office, Annie had given Felicity Barrow a brave, friendly hello, yet she had never liked Felicity. Felicity had round, oversized eyes, bright blue eyes, like a child actor who knows how to act like a child. Annie respected her stepfather's colleague. She knew how hard Felicity worked and how much she had contributed to the company, but she knew of Felicity's accomplishments by way of Felicity. It was not that the woman boasted. Quite the opposite. She was modest to a fault, the fault being that she insinuated her modesty, deftly, into almost any conversation, proclaiming her insignificance and ignorance, thereby assuring a correction.

Even so, under other circumstances, Annie would have stopped for a more extended greeting, for Felicity's older brother was the distinguished novelist Frederick Barrow, and through Felicity's generous intervention he had been induced to speak at the library where Annie worked. It was a small, private, subscription library started in the nineteenth century by wealthy furriers hoping to help promote literacy and thus good citizenship among aspiring young men entering the trade. It was endowed with funds not quite sufficient to keep it going, and among her other duties as deputy director, Annie arranged readings there. They had become something of an event in the Upper West Side neighborhood where the library was located. The tickets were sold for twenty-five dollars apiece, and after a rocky start, they had gotten audiences of over two hundred people for three years running.

One of Annie's talents was convincing writers to participate. At first she had simply kept abreast of who had a book coming out and might therefore be eager to promote it. But after a few years, she began giving the authors a percentage of the take, something she had observed at readings she'd attended in Germany. It seemed to excite the writers when she handed them a wad of smooth, worn bills, far more than an honorarium check would have done. They were like children receiving shiny coins. Annie had no illusions about authors. On the one hand, she admired them, for they created the books she admired. But, too, she felt most of them were rather sad, desperate people who couldn't hold down a job, and she counted out the money into their open palms with the same expression she wore when tipping the doorman.

But even with the inducement of a pile of twenty-dollar bills, it was unusual for her to get a writer like Frederick Barrow to read at her library. He was not only revered and rich, he was also reserved, and he rarely appeared in public. Felicity's offer had been a welcome one.

Annie had first met Felicity one evening a year ago when Annie went to the suite of offices to surprise her stepfather and join him on his walk home. Joseph walked home every day, rain or shine, and Annie liked to join him sometimes. It was not far from his office to the apartment, eighteen blocks, it was on her way home, and that night had been a lovely, cool spring evening, the sunlight lingering and the finches warbling gloriously from the light poles.

The receptionist was not there when Annie stepped out of the elevator. Felicity, who was just leaving Joseph's office, appeared to be the only other person around, and Joseph introduced the two women. It was then that Felicity had offered up her brother. Annie, though excited at the prospect, did not take her seriously and forgot all about it. But a month later, an e-mail appeared in her inbox from Felicity with Frederick Barrow's phone number, e-mail address, and pledge that he would participate.