Taylor followed Annie into the corridor.

“I’m glad I caught you,” Taylor said as the pair walked down the hall. “Kevin said you were here. I need to talk to you, Annie. I need a woman’s perspective, so it’s either you or Claire. I picked you.”

Annie winced, but hoped it didn’t show. She didn’t want to have to deal with Taylor or with whatever was going on with her now—she needed to make sure the cottage was ready for Donna’s homecoming. But for Kevin’s sake . . . Annie blinked. “Shall we have coffee at Linda Jean’s?”

“That would be good.”

* * *

“I thought Jonas left the island because he hated me,” Taylor told Annie after they’d both ordered coffee and Annie a tuna on rye because she realized it was almost one o’clock and all she’d eaten that day were three small bites of a muffin. “For all I know, he does,” Taylor went on. “But I had a very brief, very tense phone call from him. He said he had a message from a woman in Boston who saw that stupid video. He didn’t go to New York like I thought he might. He went to Boston to meet that woman—who claims she knew me when I was pregnant. And says she knows details about his father’s accident.”

Annie felt disinterested and detached; she wanted to tell Taylor that she was sorry but she couldn’t help, that she had enough problems of her own right then. But Annie was still Annie, so instead, she said, “Oh, Taylor, I’m so sorry.”

“I need you to try to get him to listen to reason. He’s all I have, but even if he never comes back to the Vineyard, I can’t let him ruin his life.” Taylor looked drawn, her skin blotchy, almost gray. As if she should be in a hospital room near Donna’s.

“Jonas seems like a nice young man, Taylor, but I hardly know him. . . .”

Her eyes penetrated Annie’s. “It’s Lucy’s fault,” she said.

Annie flinched.

Taylor waved her hand, dismissing contradiction. “He didn’t come right out and say it, but I think Lucy put ideas into his head. She shouldn’t have gotten involved. She egged him on in the beginning, posting the pictures, getting him to do that video. And trying to get him to do that ridiculous thing with DNA . . .”

Apparently Taylor either didn’t know or didn’t believe that the video had been Jonas’s idea. As much as Annie wanted to set the record straight, she could tell that Taylor was a woman on a mission, and was not going to back down. Besides, Annie only wanted to go to the pharmacy and pick up a few things that Georgia had suggested, then go home and get busy rearranging the cottage for Donna. Again.