“Oooh,” said Holly uneasily.

“I’m not worried about some macaron truck, Holly. I think it’s a crazy idea. Nobody wants to buy macarons from a truck. They’ll be gone before the Fourth of July.” Sometimes it worked out for the food trucks, sometimes it didn’t. This time it probably wouldn’t. Block Islanders weren’t, as a rule, seeking French food, and she doubted the tourists were either.

“Definitely,” said Holly, although still her face wore a funny, inscrutable expression.

“And even if they’re not, this island is big enough for both of us. Right?” She hefted one of the flour bags up and wondered if she could handle two at a time.

Joy was in a hurry; the flour was awkward; Holly was rushing off to work—it wasn’t until (much) later that Joy realized Holly never answered.

Chapter 3

LU

JEREMY APPEARED LIKE a ghost, startling Lu. She closed her laptop furtively, feeling as though she’d been committing a crime.

She was, in a way, wasn’t she? Deception was a crime, of sorts. A marital crime, anyway.

Lu looked around the kitchen of the rented house. She was unfamiliar with this particular kitchen, its foibles, the dent in the handle of its metal spatula, its lack of a proper Dutch oven, but she was learning.

“Hey, babe,” Jeremy said. “Is there coffee?” He was catching the ferry for a few long shifts in a row—probably they wouldn’t see him again until the end of the week.

Is there coffee? was code for, Are you holding up your end of the bargain? although neither of them ever said that, because the bargain itself was unspoken. “Let me make you one,” said Lu, rising. “Cinnamon?”

“Oh, man, yes!” said Jeremy. “Please.” He looked at Lu fondly, the way you’d look at a child who picked up a guitar for the first time and tried to strum a few notes. Lu tried to look fondly back, but sometimes when she saw Jeremy dressed for work, cleanly shaven, trailing the scent of a fresh, masculine shower, she wanted to put her fist in her mouth and bite down hard, to disguise her silent, guttural scream.

She was thirty-four years old, and she might be losing her mind.

In fact there was mental illness somewhere in their family, long buried like a dog’s old bone. Aunt Vivian, a great-aunt, or possibly even a great-great. Sometimes Lu’s mother referenced her—Oh, dear, I just had an Aunt Vivian moment—but when Lu probed for the details she got very little information.

When Lu delivered the coffee—she would have poured one for herself, but that would have brought her to a total of three, and more than two made her shaky—Jeremy asked, “What’re you up to?” He nodded toward the closed computer. She wondered if he was worried that she might be looking for a job that she could start come fall. Jeremy had grown up in Simsbury and his mother hadn’t worked “outside the home,” as she put it. They’d had a battalion of household help and as far as Lu could tell she hadn’t worked inside the home either. But try saying that to her.