As promised, Anna’s aunt Jules had called her father while Anna was flying home. Jules told her older brother what had happened, leaving out the bad acid trip, and finally ending with the X-rated sex tape of his daughter that had now been seen by pretty much every teenager on the East Coast. Edward listened to his sister relay his daughter’s story as he stared at the Atlantic Ocean from the porch of the Portland, Maine, house he and his wife had rented for the weekend.

“She called you?” Edward asked Jules, who he hadn’t spoken to since Christmas, and then only briefly. “Why wouldn’t she come to me?”

“You’re missing the point, Eddie. Get over your stupid pride! If you were Anna and just found out someone released a tape of you having sex, would you tell you? Be happy Anna knew she needed help and called an adult.”

“Oh, is that what you are now?” Edward said, pissed that none of their supposed friends, who had doubtless heard the news by now, had bothered to reach out.

“I saw the tape. It’s bad. You know, if she wants to come to LA and finish high school she’s always welcome.”

“I’d send her to Mars before I sent her to the land of fruits and nuts.”

“God, you’re still an asshole. It’s a miracle you managed to raise a good daughter. Look, she asked me to call. I did. But now I gotta go see my fridge about a sandwich. Later, Eddie.”

It didn’t take long for Edward to locate the video of his daughter entangled with some boy in the throes of ectasy. He hit pause on a frame of the girl’s face. It was unmistakably Anna. The grainy close-up sickened him, but that feeling was soon washed away by the sea change of his fury.

If this were Steven, he wouldn’t be surprised. But Anna? She was only seventeen. Given his recent weekend with his wife, who’d confessed to her betrayal, Edward was already in a foul mood. Back home in his study, Anna’s father stared at the Jay Strongwater picture frame, a jeweled heart in red and purple, which he kept on his desk. Two years ago, Anna had given it to him for Father’s Day. It contained a picture of the four of them sitting on the porch of their house in Maui, a rare photo where the entire family looked happy to be together. He stared down at the picture, at this seemingly perfect family. Good-looking, wealthy, a family that seemed to have everything going for it. He hurled the frame across the room, and watched it smash into an antique Korean vase that had been in his family for two hundred years, the very one he had planned to give to Anna one day.