That second part was untrue, though I wasn’t quite sure why. Juniper Shores seemed like an idyllic place to live. It was obvious that this was a beautiful Southern coastal town with a charming beachfront village and white sandy beaches, great restaurants, historic churches, and stunning houses. But what I hadn’t quite understood was that Juniper Shores was a town caught in the in-between, old versus new, the families whose cottages had dotted the oceanfront for a hundred years who wanted nothing to change and the people like Bill and me, the newcomers, who wanted to build their dream home and stay forever. Development was everywhere you looked; that wasn’t our fault. But some of the women who felt like natural friends for me saw us as part of the problem.

I didn’t let it bother me that much, though. Overall, people were friendly. We were regulars most places. Everyone knew our names. I got all the cozy small-town feels I was looking for. I just hadn’t quite found my best friends yet.

Bill was my only true confidant, the only person I trusted. And now I had to face the fact that maybe even he had betrayed me. Maybe. I felt the tug around my heart that I felt every few minutes lately. I closed my eyes and pretended, as was my habit now, that he was wrapping his arms around me. Could the man who’d always made me feel so safe really have done this?

I opened my eyes and looked out the window, at the charming Juniper Shores Village, the downtown area, which was filled with work-and-live spaces with shops on the bottom and condos on the top, the old-timey light-blue lifeguard station, the beach volleyball court, and the Airstream Park that held food trucks and pop-up shops and won this town more awards than I could count.

I didn’t know quite how to explain my complicated feelings about my place here to Alice. So I said, “We’ve been here three years, but two of those were in the midst of Covid. We moved to Bill’s stepmom’s house as a respite from our New York apartment once everything went virtual. It was supposed to be temporary, but we fell in love with it.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Alice asked.

I smiled. “Iris wasn’t in school here, so I wasn’t meeting school moms at first. I quit my job when Iris was born, so I don’t have a job to help me meet people—or, as I’m now seeing, to get me out of scrapes. I certainly have acquaintances. I’m in a book club, a mah-jongg group. But I don’t have anyone I can call to say, ‘Help! Can I come live with you?’ ” I paused. “But does anyone have a friend that good?”