The woman turned her head so she no longer faced him but was looking straight at Annie. Her thin, over-arched eyebrows shot up, as if she’d only noticed then that John wasn’t alone. “She said something about learning how to make a movie. Something for YouTube. For all I know, your daughter talked Maggie into doing something horrific. Like filming porn.”

Annie suspected that John would be reacting differently if he were talking to Maggie’s father not her mother. “Well, Bernice, if that’s what they’re doing, you can damn well be sure the idea would not have been Lucy’s.”

The woman slammed the inner door; a sharp click of the deadbolt pierced the air.

“Well,” Annie said, once they were back in John’s pickup, “I don’t think Bernice likes you very much.”

He grunted. “I lost my virginity to her when I was sixteen. She dared me. She’s been embarrassed around me since then.”

Annie blinked a couple of times. She was reminded once again that growing up on an island was not always idyllic, that there truly was nowhere to run to if you made a mistake, nowhere to be anonymous. Then her thoughts wandered to Earl and Marilyn Sunderland, the sixth-grade-teacher-turned–journalist—Stop! she shouted to herself before Murphy did. Still, though Annie knew that, sooner or later, almost everyone lost his or her virginity to someone, it was hard to imagine John with Bernice, even though it had been decades ago and had nothing to do with what was happening now. She closed her eyes and tried to think. And then the answer came to her. She almost felt ridiculous that she hadn’t realized it sooner.

“I know where they are,” she said as John backed out of the driveway, “and what they’ve been doing. And it is not making porn.” She told him about the visit from the new tenants and the video they’d seen that apparently was of Jonas pleading for information about his long-dead father.

They reached the Chappy ferry in record time.

* * *

“Take it down. Now.” John’s eyes drilled into his daughter’s. He didn’t even seem to notice Restless, who was dancing around his feet. “Why did you do such a stupid thing, Lucy? Didn’t you learn anything after you posted the pictures? Now you made a movie?”