What do they say about the mind-body connection? It’s the link between a person’s thoughts and emotions, on the one hand, and their behaviors and physical condition, on the other. She usually believed it was a big load of mumbo-jumbo bullshit. Her lower back pain, for example, had nothing to do with negative thoughts and everything to do with ten hours a day on her feet, cutting, dyeing, processing, blowing, and curling other women’s hair. But today? Yes, there was a connection. Her face looked like a lumpy autumn gourd because she had been crying all night.

Crying about Alex.

Knowing it was futile, she tried his cell phone again. Straight to voice mail. As she disconnected, her phone buzzed with an incoming call. She didn’t recognize the number, but it was a 631 area code. She answered, just in case. Just in case it was him, despite the truth she was still trying to process.

“Is this Jocelyn Hodges?” the man asked. It definitely wasn’t Alex. Alex had an accent. Not the one everyone expected him to have. It wasn’t identifiable, or even really an accent, as he had noted repeatedly. Jocelyn thought of it as an accent because she was so used to hearing actual accents—Long Island (Nassau and Suffolk Counties, slightly different), Staten Island, Brooklyn, Jersey, Boston, and of course the accents of those who, unlike Alex, spoke English as a second language. Alex’s accent sounded like an accent—at least to her, born and bred on the East End—because it was utterly neutral. Like he was a TV anchor or something.

“This is she,” Jocelyn said. She had dated a writer two summers back, one who wrote one huge best seller that got adapted into a movie, and three other books that maybe no one read. He was the one who told Jocelyn that it was incorrect to say “This is her.” He then took another seven minutes to explain why that was the rule, given the difference between subjects and objects and whatever. She had pretended to be interested and then stopped answering his phone calls. “But it’s Hodge,” she now corrected her current caller. “Not Hodges.”

The caller identified himself as Carter Decker from the East Hampton Police Department. “We spoke Saturday about Alex’s missing person report.”

This motherfucker. Like she needed a reminder. Since then, she had heard about the unidentified man pulled from the water off Star Island. On the East End, in the circles that really truly mattered, year-round at least, Jocelyn was an insider. She was one of the original families, the fishers and the farmers. This cop didn’t think she already knew after an entire day? Please. Jocelyn had been crying since she got the call in the middle of the Brazilian blowout she was processing the previous afternoon.