“I resent the insinuation,” Dolly said. “I am a married woman.” She picked up her sewing basket, shoved her needle into her pin cushion, threw her spool of thread in, and shut the lid, trying to hide her shaking hands, hoping her performance would hide the truth of her disastrous life.

“Oh, Dolly,” said Corinne. “Judy doesn’t mean anything.”

“Look what you’ve done, Judy,” scolded Jeannette.

Dolly pushed back her chair and stood. “Excuse me, Mrs. Fryt. I have to be going.”

Mrs. Fryt raised her eyebrows, but said nothing.

Dolly walked home to the bungalow, but once she was there she thought she’d go crazy. She did the only thing she could think to do: sat on the back stoop and smoked one cigarette after another. She wished she could cry, but she was too miserable even for that. Was it true that, like the ladies had said about Wilma and John, Dolly had simply been too much for Byron to put up with? Was that why he’d sought out another woman?

Did Dolly want to be in the bungalow and her marriage merely on sufferance?

Or would people start to believe the things that Judy had insinuated about Dolly and JJ? And if they did, would she be exiled from this town, and from Byron, in disgrace?

Unable to bear the thought of starting supper, finishing the ironing, or even facing Byron when he got home from work, Dolly remembered that JJ had asked her to look in on the Mickelson house. Even though he was gone, the house could still be a refuge of sorts. Perhaps there she would be able to think straight, and decide what to do. She waited until she thought the quilting ladies would all have left Mrs. Fryt’s, then set out.

When she walked into the house, its cool beauty immediately soothed her. Certainly this house could not be to blame for everything that had happened to the Mickelsons—or to Dolly herself! She wandered through the rooms and finally upstairs. Snooping more than she’d ever allowed herself to before, she ventured into Wilma and John’s bedroom. On the far wall, a bay window draped in lace looked out on the line of fir trees at the edge of the property; on the near wall, there was a fireplace, just like in the dining room below it. The bed, made up in white, was an elegant four-poster of a lustrous dark wood, and there were two matching dressers, and a vanity, too.

An oval-framed sepia portrait on the wall caught her eye—she could see from where she stood that it was a wedding picture, a woman in a white dress standing behind a seated man in a dark suit. She went over to look.