Emily had picked up her glass and just taken another sip of prosecco herself when something about the matter-of-fact way that Quinn said chuck him off the roof struck her as hilarious. She laughed so hard, wine came fizzing out her nose. She clapped her hand over her face and doubled over.

“Or slip poison mushrooms into his lasagna,” Quinn went on. “Or accidentally back over him.” She held up her hands as if she were holding on to a steering wheel and looked over her shoulder. “Rrrmm. Oops! My bad.”

Emily imagined the piano frame falling from their bedroom window onto Frank’s head as he dragged a church pew in through their bulkhead door. She laughed and raised her glass. “To ’til death do us part.”

“To accidents waiting to happen.” Quinn raised the bottle. Then slowly lowered it. Her look turned somber. “Or maybe it’s safer to hire a hit man, a complete stranger, and be done with it?” She gave Emily an appraising look. “So, could you?”

“Could I what?” Emily said, though she knew exactly what Quinn was asking. Of course, she could never kill anyone, and certainly not Frank. So maybe it was the wine, or the boyfriend’s T-shirt, or the vision of that piano frame dropping from a second-story window that kept her from saying so.

“I’ll bet you would. In a heartbeat.” Quinn winked. “If you thought you could get away with it.”

9

EMILY SPENT THE next hour in a wine-infused haze. She took more photographs of the piles in the garage and scribbled some nearly indecipherable notes, including a list of the few items in the garage that Quinn wanted to keep and her preferences about how to dispose of the rest.

Finally, Emily quoted Quinn a fee for their organizing services, inflating her guesstimate by 50 percent. To double it felt like price gouging. She gave Quinn a PayPal account to which she could transfer a $500 deposit. “If you decide to move forward.”

“Well, of course I’m going to move forward,” Quinn said. She gave Emily an awkward hug. “I feel really good about this. I just know I can trust you completely. Ryan was right.” Her smile seemed utterly genuine.

Emily was jotting down the best times for Emily or Becca to return—when Quinn’s husband wouldn’t be there, of course—when Quinn slipped her cell phone from her pocket and looked at the readout. “Not mine. That must have been yours.”

Emily got out her phone. Sure enough, she’d missed a text from Frank.

Em, could you stop at JC & bring me coffee? :-x

“Your partner?” Quinn asked.

“My husband.”

“The prince?”

Emily laughed. “Did I call him that?”

“Reading between the lines.”

“He wants me to pick him up a coffee on the way home. I’ve got just enough time to stop in the Square.”

“They say jump, we say how high,” Quinn said.