"Oh, he’s running a little late?" She said, making a face as she drew up alongside him. "Yeah, he got stuck in traffic. He called me on his cellphone; there’s a pile-up or something."

"On the bridge?" Tim asked, slipping his sunglasses into the breast pocket of his shirt as he led the two of them through the complicated network of bland white walls. It was easy for someone who’d never been there before to get lost.

"Um, I think so? I don’t — I don’t really know the area very well, really," Jenny confessed, letting out a soft, embarrassed laugh as she ducked her head.

"It’s okay," Tim said with a chuckle, reaching out to pat her shoulder. "You’ve never been to New York?"

"No," Jenny said, shaking her head. "This is my first out of town assignment for the magazine. I was really excited when I found out I got it."

"Yeah?" Tim asked, glancing sidelong at her, with a faintly anxious look on his face. "Have you — have you ever heard her? Do you know her work?"

"Oh, yes," she replied emphatically, nodding. "I listened to her albums last weekend when my editor told me the assignment was mine. Her work is fucking… amazing."

"Uh-huh," he said, not exactly looking reassured by that. He’d seen journalists who’d been enamoured of Shane’s music come tumbling out of Shane’s hotel room at ungodly hours of the morning, their clothes rumpled and buttoned wrong. He wasn’t liking the direction this was going, already. "You… you like her stuff?"

"Yeah! I do; I love it. It’s… so intense and emotional," Jenny said, reaching up to place her free hand over her heart, clutching there for a moment. "Really, it’s so incredible. I’ve never heard anything like it before. It just sort of… cuts through all the fucking bullshit and really gets to what people are really about. I was — it was really surprising, to me, because I didn’t expect it to be as deep as it is. It’s fucking spiritual stuff, man."