She grabbed him by the collar and yanked him close. "So help me God, if you mention breathing again I'm going to take you down. I want drugs --"

Just knock me out. I mean it. If they won't give me drugs, get a baseball bat and hit me. This breathing is bullsh -- aagh!" Kate felt the pain twist through her insides and tear her apart.

By hour seventeen she was a flat-out, cast-iron bitch. Even the nurse came and went like Speed Racer.

And it was back, wrenching, cutting, twisting through her until she cried out. For the first six hours she'd been pretty good. She'd focused and breathed and kissed her husband when he leaned down to her and thanked him when he pressed a cool wet rag to her forehead. In the second six hours she lost her natural sense of optimism. The relentless, gnawing pain was like some horrible creature biting away at her, leaving less and less.

Beside her Johnny was saying "Come on… ha ha ha… you can do it. Breathe ha… ha… like this. Remember our class? Focus. Visualize. D'you want that statue we --"

She noticed that even as he tried to soothe her, Johnny didn't get too close. He was like some terrorized soldier in a minefield who'd just seen his best friend blown up. He was afraid to move at all.

"Come on, baby, breathe. It's too late for drugs. You heard the doctor. It won't be much longer."

"Scream," Tully said, stroking her forehead.

The pain hit again.

"I think she went down to call Tully again."

The door to her private room banged open. "I hear someone is being a total bitch-o-rama in here."

"Changed your mind? Good timing." Tully moved to the side of the bed.

Kate tried to smile, but another contraction was starting. "I don't… want… to… do this anymore."

Kate tried to concentrate on her breathing, but it didn't help. The pain was rising again, cresting. She clung to the bedrails with sweaty hands. "Get… me… ice… chips!" She screamed the last word. It would have been funny, watching Johnny bolt for the door, if she hadn't felt like that girl swimming alone in Jaws.

"Where's Mom?"

"I'm… supposed to… breathe through it."

She did scream then, and it felt good. When the pain subsided again, she laughed weakly. "I take it you're against Lamaze."

"What's his name?"

"I wouldn't call myself a natural childbirth kind of gal." She looked at Kate's swollen belly and pale, sweaty face. "Of course, this is the best birth control commercial I've ever seen. From now on I'm using three condoms every time." Tully smiled, but her eyes were worried. "Are you okay, really? Should I get the doctor?"

"Fuck that. Scream."

"That would be your first question. Grant. And before you barrel through some idiotic Cosmo girl list of how-well-do-you-know-your-man questions, let me say that I don't know squat about him except that he kisses like a god and screws like a devil."

Kate shook her head weakly. "Just talk to me. Distract me."

"I met a guy last month."

Another contraction hit. Kate arched up and screamed again. As if from a distance she could hear Tully's voice, feel her stroking her forehead, but the pain was so overwhelming she couldn't do anything except gasp. "Shit," she said when it was over. "The next time Johnny comes near me I'm going to smack him."

"Why?" Kate said, panting.

"I'm getting a new best friend. I need someone with a shorter memory."

"I have a short memory. Did I tell you I'm seeing someone? He's perfect for me."

"You were the one who wanted a baby."

"He lives in London. We only see each other on the weekends. For totally rocking sex, I might add."

"Is that why you didn't answer when Mom called?"

"We were in the middle of it, but as soon as we finished, I started packing."

"Push," the doctor said in an entirely reasonable, pain-free voice that made Kate want to scratch his eyes out.

"I'm glad to see you have -- oh, shit -- priorities." Kate was in the middle of another contraction when the door to her room opened again. The nurse was first, followed by her mother and Johnny. Tully stood back, let everyone get in closer. At some point the nurse checked Kate's cervix and called the doctor in. He bustled into the room, smiling as if he'd run into her at the grocery store, and put on some gloves. Then the stirrups came out and it was time.

Kate tried to lift herself up, but she was too weak. A few moments later, Johnny was beside her, offering her a tiny pink-wrapped bundle. She took her new daughter in her arms and stared down into her heart-shaped face. She had a wild shock of damp black curls and her mother's pale, pale skin, and the most perfect little lips and mouth Kate had ever seen. The love that burst open inside her was too big to describe. "Hey, Marah Rose," she whispered, taking hold of her daughter's grape-sized fist. "Welcome home, baby girl."

She screamed and pushed and cried until as quickly as it had begun, the agony was over.

When she looked up at Johnny, he was crying. Leaning down, he kissed her with a butterfly softness. "I love you, Katie."

"A perfect little girl," the doctor said. "Dad, do you want to cut the cord?"

Never in her life had everything been so right in her world, and she knew that, whatever happened, whatever life had in store for her, she would always remember this single, shining moment as her touch of Heaven.

Tully begged for an additional two days off of work so that she could help Kate get settled in at home. When she'd made the call, it had seemed vital, unquestionably the thing to do.

Kate stroked her daughter's tiny cheek, smiling down at her. "You should go home, Tully. Really. Come back when I'm up and around."

But now, only a few hours after Kate and Marah had been discharged from the hospital, Tully saw the truth. She was about as useful as a dead microphone. Mrs. Mularkey was like a machine. She fed Kate before she even mentioned she was hungry; she changed the baby's handkerchief-sized diapers like a magician; and taught Kate how to breast-feed her daughter. Apparently it was not as instinctual a thing as Tully would have thought.

Tully gazed down at the tiny, pink-swaddled bundle. "She sure is."

And what was her contribution? When she was lucky, she made Kate laugh. More often than not, though, her best friend just sighed, looking both remarkably in love with her baby and profoundly worn out. Now Kate lay in bed, holding her baby in her arms. "Isn't she beautiful?"

"Really?"

Tully tried not to let her relief show. "They do need me at the studio. Things are probably a real mess without me."

Kate smiled knowingly. "I couldn't have done it without you, you know."

"I'll be back for her baptism." Tully leaned down and kissed Marah's velvety cheek, and then Kate's forehead. By the time she whispered goodbye and made it to the door, Kate seemed to have forgotten all about her.

"Really. Now kiss your goddaughter and get back to work."

Downstairs she found Johnny slumped in a chair by the fireplace. His hair was a shaggy, tangled mess, his shirt was on backward, and his socks didn't match. He was drinking a beer at eleven o'clock in the morning.

"Gorgeous."

"You look like hell," she said, sitting down beside him.

"She woke up every hour last night. I slept better in El Salvador." He took a sip. "But she's beautiful, isn't she?"

"Katie wants to move to the suburbs now. She's just realized this house is surrounded by water, so it's off to some cul-de-sac where they have bake sales and play dates." He made a face. "Can you imagine me in Bellevue or Kirkland with all those yuppies?"

She couldn't help noticing that he'd said going to. "But you love gonzo journalism. Battlefields and mortar rounds and people shooting at you. We both know you can't give it up forever."

She remembered suddenly, sharply, what she was supposed to forget. "You tried."

"That doesn't sound like you."

"I mean when you fall in love. It changes you."

"Katie would want you to be happy. You'd kick ass at CNN."

"I tried," he agreed.

"Like it's changed you? Someday I'll have a kid and want to write for the Queen Anne Bee again, is that it?"

"You mean when I'm married, with kids?"

"I'm going back to work at KILO. Producing political and international segments."

"In Atlanta?" He laughed. "Someday you'll understand."

The funny thing was, she could. "What about work?"

"You only think you know me, Tully. It isn't like we traded secrets."

He seemed surprised by that. When he looked at her, she saw a flash of remembrance; she'd reminded him of their past. "I'm thirty-five years old, Tul. With a wife and daughter. Different things are going to have to make me happy now."

"You'd have to fall in love first, wouldn't you?" The look Johnny gave her then was so understanding, so knowing, she felt skewered by it. She wasn't the only one who was remembering the past.

Johnny put down his beer and got to his feet, moving toward her. "You do it for me, Tully. Cover the world."

She got to her feet. "I gotta get back to Manhattan. You know the news. It never sleeps."

She forced herself to smile. "I will."

It sounded sad, the way he said it; she didn't know if what she heard was regret for himself or sadness for her.

Still Tully made it to work at four A. M. In her freezing walk-up apartment, with the radiator rattling and ice collecting on her paper-thin antique windows, she dressed in tights, black velour stirrup pants, snow boots, and two sweaters. Covering it all with a navy-blue wool coat and gray mittens, she braved the elements, angling her body against the wind as she made her way up the street. Snow obscured her vision and stung her cheeks. She didn't care; she loved her job so much she'd do anything to get there early.

Two weeks after Tully got home from Seattle, a storm dumped snow on Manhattan, stopping the vibrant city in its tracks. For a few hours, at least. The ever-present traffic vanished almost immediately; pristine white snow blanketed the streets and sidewalks, turned Central Park into a winter wonderland.

At her desk, she immediately went to work on the story she'd been assigned yesterday. She was doing research on the spotted owl controversy in the Northwest. Determined to put a local's "spin' on the story, she was busily reading everything she could find -- Senate subcommittee reports, environmental findings, economic statistics on logging, the fecundity of old growth forests.

Tully looked up sharply. She'd been so lost in her reading that she hadn't heard anyone approach her desk.

Inside the lobby, she stamped the snow off her boots, signed in, and went upstairs. Almost instantly she could tell that much of the staff had called in sick. Only a skeleton crew remained.

"You're working hard."

Edna Guber, dressed in her signature black gabardine pantsuit, stood there, one hip pushed slightly out, smoking a cigarette. Sharp gray eyes stared out from beneath an Anna Wintour razor cut of blue-black bangs. Edna was famous in the news business, one of those women who'd clawed her way to the top in a time when others of her sex hadn't been able to come in the front door unless they had secretarial skills. Edna -- only the single name was ever used or needed -- reportedly had a Rolodex filled with the home numbers of everyone from Fidel Castro to Clint Eastwood. There was no interview she couldn't get and nowhere on earth she wouldn't go to find what she wanted.

And this wasn't just anyone.

"No, m --"

"I walked."

"Cat got your tongue?" she said, exhaling smoke.

"Good. How did you get here? The cabs and buses are for shit today."

"I hate it when people call me ma'am. It makes me feel old. Do you think I'm old?"

Tully's heart was pounding. She'd never been invited into this office, never even met Maury Stein, the big kahuna on the morning show.

Edna left the office.

Edna's gaze narrowed. She looked Tully up and down steadily. "Follow me." She spun on her black boot heel and marched down the hallway, toward the office in the corner of the building.

Holy cow.

Tully jumped to her feet. "I'm sorry, Edna. Ms. Guber. Ma'am."

"Name?"

The office was huge, with two walls of windows. Falling snow turned everything outside gray and white and eerie. From this vantage point, it felt vaguely like standing inside a snow globe, looking out.

Maury looked up from his work. He barely glanced at Tully, then nodded. "Fine."

"This one will do," Edna said, cocking her head toward Tully.

"Tully Hart. Tallulah."

"Yes."

"I don't need an answer, just do as I ask and do it quickly."

"Why the hell do you think I'm talking to you? Do you have a problem with this?"

"No. No problem. Thank you. I really --"

Tully fumbled into her pocket for a pen and found some paper on a nearby desk. "I'm ready."

Tully stood there, confused. Then she heard Edna say, "Are you epileptic? Comatose?"

"Certainly," she lied.

Tully followed her out into the hallway.

"First off, I want a detailed report on the upcoming election in Nicaragua. You do know what's going on there?"

"Yes --" She stopped herself from saying ma'am just in time.

Edna came to a stop at Tully's desk. "You've got a passport?"

"I want to know everything about the Sandinistas, Bush's Nicaraguan policy, the blockade, the people who live there. I want to know when Violeta Chamorro lost her virginity. And you've got twelve days to get it done."

"Yes. They made me apply for one when they hired me."

"We?"

"Do you have a pen and paper?"

"Of course. We'll be leaving on the sixteenth. Before we go --"

"Don't thank me, Hart. Just do your job -- and do it better than anyone else could."

"We'll need immunizations; get a doctor here to take care of us and the crew. Then you can start setting up advance interview meetings. Got it?" She looked down at her watch. "It's one o'clock. Brief me on Friday morning at, say, five A. M.?"

"I'm on it." Tully went to her desk and picked up the phone. Before she'd even finished punching in the number, Edna was gone.

"Johnny?" In the silence that preceded the question, Tully heard a baby start to cry.

"Actually, I'm calling to talk to Johnny."

"Hello?" Kate said groggily.

"Your goddaughter doesn't sleep. She's a freak of nature. Can I call you back in a few hours?"

"Just a second." Kate handed the phone off; there was a sound like wax paper being balled up and a flurry of whispers, then Johnny came on the line.

"I'll get started right now. And thank you, Edna."

"Edna Guber is sending me to Nicaragua. I want to ask him some background questions."

Tully looked at the clock. It was nine. That meant it was six in Seattle. "Oops. I did it again. Sorry."

Tully wrote as fast as she could.

"Hey, Tully, good for you. Edna's a legend."

"You sound worried about me."

"I haven't slept in a month, so I don't know how much good I'll be, but I'll do what I can." He paused. "You know it's dangerous down there. A real powder keg. People are dying."

For just under two weeks Tully worked her ass off. Eighteen, twenty hours a day she was reading, writing, making phone calls, setting up meetings. In the few rare hours when she wasn't working or trying to sleep, she went to the kind of stores she'd never frequented before -- camping stores, military supply outlets, and the like. She bought pocketknives and netted safari hats and hiking boots. Everything and anything she could think of. If they were in the jungle and Edna wanted a damn fly swatter, Tully was going to produce it.

"Of course I am. Now, let's start with the relevant history. In 1960 or '61, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, or FSLN, was founded…"

"This is my big break, Johnny, and I don't want to screw up. I thought I'd start by picking your brain."

Edna was a mover.

For the endless hours of their flights, through Dallas and Mexico City and finally onto a small plane in Managua, Edna fired questions at Tully.

By the time they actually left, she was nervous. At the airport, Edna, wearing a pair of razor-pressed linen pants and a white cotton blouse, took one look at Tully's multipocketed khaki jungle attire and burst out laughing.

The plane landed in what looked to Tully like a backyard. Men -- boys, really -- in camouflaged clothing stood on the perimeter, holding rifles. Children came out of the jungle to play in the air kicked up by the propellers. The dichotomy of the image was something Tully knew she'd always remember, but from the moment she got out of the plane until she reboarded the flight for home five days later, she had precious little time to think about imagery.

They hiked through guerrilla-infested jungles, listening to the shrieking of howler monkeys, swatting mosquitoes, and floating up alligator-lined rivers. Sometimes they were blindfolded, sometimes they could see. Deep in the jungle, while Edna taped her interview with el jefe, the general in charge, Tully talked to the troops.

The trip opened her eyes to a world she'd never seen before; more than that, it showed her who she was. The fear, the adrenaline rush, the story; it turned her on like nothing ever had before.

Edna took another straight shot and leaned back in her chair. The night was quiet. It was the first time they hadn't heard gunfire in days.

"You did well, kid."

"Anywhere, anytime."

Tully's pride welled to almost painful proportions. "Thank you. I learned more from you in the past few weeks than I learned in four years of college."

"Count me in."

Later, when the story was done and she and Edna were back in their hotel in Mexico City sitting on the balcony outside Edna's room, having straight shots of tequila, Tully said, "I can't thank you enough, Edna."

"So, maybe you want to go on my next assignment."

Edna turned to her. The sticky-looking orange glow from the bare outdoor bulb highlighted her wrinkles, caused bags under her eyes. In this light she looked ten years older than usual, and tired; maybe a little drunk. "Have you got a boyfriend?"

"I'm interviewing Nelson Mandela."

"There's a price, that's for sure. For my generation, at least, you couldn't do this job and be married. You could get married -- I did; three times -- but you couldn't stay married. And forget about kids. When a story broke, I needed to be there, period. It could have been my kid's wedding day and I'd have left. So I've lived by myself." She looked at Tully. "And I've loved it. Every damn second. If I end up dying in a nursing home alone, who gives a shit? I was where I wanted to be every second of my life, and I did something that mattered."

"With my work schedule?" Tully laughed and poured herself another shot. "Hardly."

"Yeah," Edna said. "The story of my life."

"Do you regret it?" Tully asked. If they hadn't been drinking she never would have asked such a personal question, but tequila had blurred the lines between them for just this moment in time. Tully could pretend they were colleagues instead of icon/newbie. "Making this your life, I mean?"

"So, what do you know about South Africa?"

Tully felt as if she were being baptized into the religion she'd always believed in. "Amen to that."