Only after three nights of avoiding the subject did Hope finally tell her that the problem was sex. Carl needed it. Hope hated it. He’d been patient, and she had tried, but frustration had evolved into resentment and, at least in Carl’s case, sufficient blame and rationalization that he had started up with the garage office manager. There was no going back.

Lindsay’s immediate response came in the form of twenty ways Carl could fuck himself, but then the conversation took a turn. She and Hope never spent much time talking about sex or men, whether there were boyfriends in the picture or not. “Was he just bad at it or something?” Lindsay had asked. “Like a jackrabbit on meth? Because I could totally picture that.”

Instead of eliciting the expected laugh, the question made Hope break out in tears. She explained that she was utterly incapable of enjoying sex. She thought of it as a chore. She’d try to feign pleasure, but she must have been a bad faker, because with time, men always realized she wasn’t into it. She had no problem experiencing pleasure on her own, but simply shut down when she was with another person.

“Hope, I don’t want to upset you, but that’s similar to what I’ve heard from clients who were abused as children. Do you think that’s possible?”

“Of course. I’ve talked about it with Rebecca over the years, but I just don’t remember, because—well, obviously. And then it becomes this chicken/egg question. Is my amnesia from abuse? Or do I not remember the abuse because I have amnesia? Either way, I have no way to know for certain. Maybe I’m just a bad lay.”

Lindsay didn’t know how to respond to Hope’s self-deprecating laugh. Instead, they drank another bottle of outrageously expensive cabernet.

What if Hope was abused at the summer camp in Wichita? The blood at Janice Beale’s house could have belonged to the abuser. If the abuser now lived on Long Island, he might have spotted Hope when she moved to East Hampton and recognized her as his former victim. Had Hope started to remember? Had she confronted him? Or maybe she hadn’t recognized him at all. Perhaps the abuser, with no knowledge of Hope’s amnesia, had become convinced that she was going to expose him. Either way, Lindsay imagined a faceless man following Hope to the Stansfield house, pushing her inside as she opened the door to leave.