She wrote in her attic when she was a girl. She wrote for the Crimson when she went to Harvard. She wrote her way through Columbia School of Journalism after her first breakup with Peter. And after her first marriage fell apart, she wrote about the places she went to escape.

She had built a nice career, but every year, there were fewer travel magazines and fewer travel sections in fewer newspapers. So it was time for the next step. She’d thought about a blog. But Peter urged her to think big: television.

And she had an idea for a show, but not for the Travel Channel or PBS. No, when she thought television, she thought History Network.

Her idea: a photogenic journalist takes you to fun places. Sure, it had been done before. But Evangeline was planning to explore the best sites, restaurants, and hotels for the history-oriented traveler, and each bundle of shows would have a theme: Revolutionary New England, the Oregon Trail, New York in the Ragtime era.…

The network fell in love … with her, with her pitch, and with her plan for the first bundle: Travels in Civil War Country, yet another angle for their wall-to-wall Civil War sesquicentennial programming.

So Evangeline was off to D.C. to shoot locations, and Peter would join her Sunday afternoon for a driving tour to Manassas, Antietam, and Gettysburg.

She got out of the cab at the Eighth Avenue entrance to Penn Station, rolled her suitcase onto the escalator, and rode down to the miserable waiting area. Hundreds of people were always standing there, watching the giant message board, waiting for a track announcement so they could stampede to the gate and stumble down the stairs to the platform, because no one wanted to be the last aboard a crowded train and end up standing all the way to Providence or Trenton.

There was an article in all that, she thought, a nuts-and-bolts piece about riding Amtrak. She’d be sure to mention the separate Acela waiting area. She showed her ticket at the Acela gate and rolled her bag to a seat as far as possible from all the cell-phoners.

No greater convenience than the cell phone, but one of the miseries of modern life was hearing other people’s phone conversations in restaurants, movie theaters, and Acela waiting areas. If you were on your way to D.C., did you care if some stockbroker wanted to move his clients out of Microsoft at the opening bell on Monday? Or that a handsome young man was going home to Allentown because he hadn’t even had a callback in six months? Or that a business-traveling mom wanted her stay-at-home hubby to stop serving Pop-Tarts to the kids for breakfast? No, no, and no.

Evangeline found a quiet spot, took out her iPad, and checked her e-mail. First she dumped the spam. Then she glanced at several notes from her producer. Then she read the messages from Peter.

She had answered his midnight e-mail when she got up:

Leaving on Acela. We’ll have fun when you get to DC. And this was the right move.

He had written back around seven:

Can’t wait. All those battlefields. Better to be traveling to battlefields than turning our lives into one.

A wise response, she thought, though they seldom argued. Sure, they disagreed plenty and wisecracked all the time. But they never had one of those long-running, scorched-earth kinds of fights that had turned her marriage into its own private Gettysburg.

Then she noticed a new e-mail from Peter. It had come in at seven thirty. The subject line read:

HACKED/Call me

She pulled out her cell, pressed his number, and heard him say, “Where are you?”

“Peter, it’s customary to say good morning in the morning.”

“Okay. Good morning. Where are you?”

Evangeline noticed the business-traveling mom give her a look, so she lowered her voice. “I’m at Penn Station. What’s going on?”

“I got an e-mail last night.