Just before the turn off 75, Marianne lost her nerve. Her hair was greasy, her clothes rumpled, her fingers orange with Doritos dust. She’d been listening, with morbid curiosity, to a program on the radio: Talking to Tad, a call-in show whose host, Tad Tucker, was a state representative with a penchant for baseball metaphors, alliteration, and defense of the unborn, which for him stretched all the way back to conception. “Our president recently gave a speech in which he said that the lives of people in the poorest countries on God’s Earth are no less valuable than those of Americans. Even all the people in countries at war with us since 9/11, every one of them. Wonderful sentiment. Right? Wonderful words. How wonderful would it be if the president would someday say those wonderful words in reference to the lives of unborn children?”

Marianne had found herself starting to argue aloud with Tad—it’s a fetus, you asshole …—but Tad’s argument was already pivoting beyond her grasp.

“How wonderful would it be if our president said those wonderful words in reference to the elderly advancing in their sunset years?” he intoned. “Do you believe the most proabortion president in U.S. history thinks everyone in our land of liberty has—even the most elderly and fragile and vulnerable and small—has an equal right to life? I sure haven’t heard him say so recently, have you? Caller, you’re talking to Tad.”

“Cluster of cells, you racist asshole, not a child,” Marianne muttered, unprepared to argue that the president could in fact be trusted not to euthanize the citizenry.

Clearly Ruth’s godliness hadn’t rubbed off on her. She’d barely seen her sister, and hadn’t had a chance to ask her about what she liked to read, what her congregation liked to read. She was certain that she would not appear credible as the director of an inspirational writing program.

But the Ranch looked better than when she left, and she was heartened, and a little surprised, to find that turning into the drive felt like coming home. Landscapers had worked through the holidays, widening the path to the beach and taming the overgrown mangroves. The interiors of all the rooms had been aired out, the worst of the furniture (broken lamps, humidity-swollen dressers) carted away. The common spaces had been painted a tasteful pale blue, the walls lined with new bookshelves, the catering kitchen scrubbed. The classrooms were next.

“It’s not bad,” Sophie said, when Marianne invited her for a tour. “I’d say you could get one-fifty a night in peak season, one-sixty with breakfast.”

“How about if I add in top-quality inspirational writing instructors, flown in from across the country?”

“Probably need to do something about your sculpture garden,” Sophie said, nudging a naked nymph with her foot.