He held his palms up in protest. “Wait a second. You’ve got this all wrong.” He looked at her intently and sighed, as if coming to terms with some internal debate. “Fine. Have a seat and let me explain.”

“I’d rather stand, if that’s okay with you.” The front of the office space was glass, so she was in plain view of passersby outside. If the situation became dangerous, she could dart out to the parking lot.

“Look, you’re right. It wasn’t only because of my schedule that I didn’t call you back. I could tell from your message that you’re genuinely concerned about your friend, and I was trying to figure out how to respond. I guess what I’m trying to say is . . . your friend suckered me. The last time she was in the office, she talked me into advancing her two thousand dollars. Then, what do you know: she no-shows all this week and seems to have turned off her phone.”

Lindsay shook her head. “I’ve known Hope for fifteen years. She wouldn’t do that. She was really excited to have this job. When did you supposedly give her this money?”

“Supposedly? Jeez, you’re not going to believe anything I say, are you? So if you’ve known her fifteen years, that means you must know the abusive husband she’s supposedly hiding out from under a fake name. Is that story even true?”

That was the part of Miriam’s backstory that Hope had borrowed for her new life in East Hampton. Before Miriam moved to Hopewell, where she eventually married Lindsay’s father, she was Karen Henderson in Fresno, California, living with a very different kind of man. She had tried leaving before, only to have him find her, drag her home, and beat her even harder to teach her a lesson. The last time she “set him off,” in his words, she ended up in the emergency room with a fractured skull and a ruptured spleen. As Miriam explained it, she decided that she’d try one last time to leave, and if he ever did find her, at least one of them might just have to die. Through a contact at an underground network of resources for battered women, she was able to change her name and move to a small town where the local police chief, Lindsay’s father, would keep an eye out on the newest citizen of Hopewell.

Lindsay was realizing how bad this was going to look to people who didn’t understand Hope’s situation. “The situation’s complicated,” she finally said.