She loved the panda the most, and smiled and beat her heels on the floor whenever she managed to knock it over. There were other toys, too—the big plastic car keys and the weird snake whose segments were different textures, each making a different sound—and she seemed content to play on her own, at least for the moment. Cait sat tucked in a corner of her sofa, legs folded beneath her, and sipped at a glass of iced tea to which she had added too much lemon and not enough sugar. The modest flat-screen on the wall revealed CNN talking heads and scrolling headlines that crawled along the bottom of the screen like ants marching to a picnic. The phone remained silent—both a taunt and a temptation. She had come home to more than twenty messages, some from friends teasing her about A-Train and others from newspapers and TV news producers trying to interview her about the incident. Cait had erased them all to free up space on the machine, but hadn’t called anyone back. Now the news had moved on.
