A little book that’s blue and velvet. Not a book. A journal. There’s handwriting scrawled across the lines—large, loopy, definitely feminine handwriting. I should put this back in the box. Or show it to Beau. Let him decide what to do with it.

Instead I find myself opening to the first page. The wedding was yesterday. B didn’t come. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am.

Is this the private journal of Paige’s mother? Is B Beau Rochester? It seems likely after what I heard yesterday. I should definitely not be reading this, but I can’t seem to stop. I flip a few pages. A few months pass. She does not write every day.

R got an invitation to the charity dinner next month. I will have to sit next to the mayor’s wife and smile and pretend like I don’t know she fucked my husband.

My cheeks heat. I toss the diary back into the box. I shouldn’t be reading that. Whether it’s written by Paige’s mother or not, it’s clearly very private.

No wonder Mr. Rochester didn’t want me looking up here.

I wonder if he’s read the diary. I wonder if he’s the B who didn’t attend her wedding. It takes an embarrassingly high amount of discipline to close the diary and set it back down in the box. Then I go back downstairs. I have no idea what Zoey was doing up here. Nothing good. That’s what my gut tells me.

I wander downstairs, but I’m too restless to sit down, even though Paige is engrossed in an animated movie I’ve watched with her a thousand times already.

The kitchen is usually tidy to the point of being sterile. Mrs. Fairfax is very good about cleaning as she works. There’s usually only one pot on the stove at any given time. Everything ends up wrapped neatly in the fridge.

It’s like a bomb went off in the kitchen right now. A food bomb. There’s chopped vegetables in an unruly pile and meat resting on a slab and water boiling over on the stove.

“Mrs. Fairfax!”

She turns and grabs the plastic handles with her bare hands. Boiling water sloshes over her skin. She screeches, and I run over to her, guiding her hands beneath a stream of cold water from the tap. “It’s too much,” she mutters to herself. “I can’t do it. I should quit.”

“Shhh,” I say, making soothing sounds. Maybe it would help me to have Zoey’s dinner party become a disaster, but it wouldn’t help Paige if we lost our cook. The only things I know how to make are Pop-Tarts and boxed mac and cheese. “I’ll help you. I can’t cook, but I can cut things up and follow directions. I’m yours to order around.”

She looks suspicious.