She wasn’t the way the media portrayed her. On TV she rarely spoke, which made her seem like a doormat, but Ashley knew now that she wasn’t a doormat. Joanna Whitman wasn’t weak, she was private. She was strong and in control, but she did it in a quiet way so that no one really noticed. Take now, for example.

“You beat them.” Ashley watched as a tiny bird swooped down and skimmed the surface of the pool. “All those photographers. Reporters. People asking questions. You beat them.”

“I’ve had experience.”

It was sobering to think that this thing that was happening to her, this interest in her life, had been happening to Joanna for decades.

“They write stuff that isn’t even true. Stuff about you. I don’t know how you stand it.”

“It was hard, particularly at the beginning.” Joanna picked up a tube of sunscreen and squeezed some into her palm. “I was about your age. I’d grown up here, in a small town among people I’d known all my life. Funnily enough I thought I was used to gossip, but it turned out I hadn’t even dipped my toe in the water. I suppose the difference was that here people actually knew me, whereas most people just know what they’ve read online.”

Ashley hadn’t expected her to be so honest. She felt a little uncomfortable, because it wasn’t as if they knew each other. Still, she was too fascinated not to probe for more. Maybe if she knew more, she might understand why Joanna had brought her here.

“Did you like it at the beginning? I mean, fame and everything. Some people want that, don’t they? Celebrity?” She’d seen pictures on the internet. Studied them. Cliff and Joanna. It was always Cliff and Joanna, never Joanna and Cliff, as if she was second in a hierarchy.

Joanna hesitated. “I hated it.” Something about the way she said the words made Ashley think she’d never spoken them aloud before.

“Because you’re a private person?”

“Yes. I wanted to live my life in private, make my mistakes in private.”

Did she consider Cliff to be a mistake?

Ashley tried to imagine him with Joanna. She wouldn’t have put the two of them together, but what did she know? On the other hand Joanna had divorced him, so maybe she knew more than she thought.

“Whenever I saw him on TV he seemed like someone who liked the attention.”

“You watched his shows?” Joanna glanced at her and Ashley felt her heart beat faster.

Were they approaching confession time?

“Sometimes.” She’d watched every single one. She’d studied him. Paused the recording. “He had this way of drawing people in.”

“Yes.” Joanna gave her a long look, as if she was figuring something out.