The Evil Twins—obsessional snooping and insane jealousy— reared their ugly heads like rabid gophers. They whispered bad thoughts, barked orders in my head: find those photographs. I tried to ignore them, but the possibilities—the compulsion to find out as much as I could about Adrienne and about her past with Donald; the dread and misery attached to the finding out; the fear of what I would learn—made me shaky.

After a few more minutes of small talk in the foyer, during which time some part of Adrienne’s body never left some part of Donald’s, she looked at him with great excitement and grabbed his arm again.

“So where is she?”

Donald looked confused. “She’s here,” he said, turning her around to see me. “Right here.”

Adrienne’s face fell. “No,” she said, looking back up at Donald with her big brown eyes. “I meant Lucy. Where’s Lucy?”

Donald tried to engage me in the contagion of his nervous laughing fit, but I would have none of it. “Of course!” he continued, too loudly and clearly rattled, his hands flying around and gesticulating wildly.

I smiled sharply, falsely. So did Adrienne.

“You mean Lucy!” he said. “The dog!”

More smiling.

More wincing.

I kicked Donald.

Where the fuck was the dog already?

“Well, actually,” he said, “she’s outside. Elise gets kind of annoyed when the dog is in the kitchen and we’re cooking.”

Here we go again.

“I do not.”

I did.

“Yes you do.”

“I do not.”

“Yes you do. And I don’t blame you.” Again, he turned toward Adrienne. “I mean, of course I don’t blame her. Lucy is terrible. She’s always begging for food and manipulating her way into a meal.” He started to laugh again. “I mean, she’s just terrible, isn’t she? You remember, right?”

Adrienne laughed too. “Remember when she started eating so much that we thought there might be something physically wrong with her? Like maybe she had a tapeworm?”

“No. You thought she had something psychologically wrong with her.” He turned to me for the punch line. “Adrienne thought Lucy had an eating disorder!”

“I did not.”

He continued to make his case to me. “Oh, I quite assure you. Adrienne thought Lucy had an eating disorder. A new form of bulimia! Binging without the purging.”

These two really were crazy.

“Maybe she was pregnant,” I threw in, just as a lark.

They both turned to me, as if I were clairvoyant. “How did you know?” they said in unison.

Lucky thing I’d edited Improving Your Pet’s Sex Life and The High-Protein Low-Fat No-Carb Pet Diet the previous year.

“She had six puppies,” Adrienne said. “Six incredibly big, healthy, strong puppies. Which the vet was convinced was because of the prenatal vitamins Donald made sure she took.”

“There are prenatal vitamins for dogs?” I asked, incredulous, not really wanting to know the answer.

“No, actually. I just made them myself. I’d grind up a whole bunch of different vitamins in the Cuisinart. That way she didn’t have to swallow a mouthful of giant horse pills.”