Lu and Jeremy had borrowed a stupid amount of money from Jeremy’s parents for the down payment on their home in Connecticut. They’d borrowed, in fact, eighteen of the necessary twenty percent. It made Lu sick to think about. The piddling efforts they made to pay the elder Trusdales back, a couple hundred dollars every month, were never going to be enough. They’d never get that boulder all the way to the top of the hill. Not without Lu.

“Let’s talk about it,” said Lu, which was code for, There is nothing I would rather do less.

Jeremy looked at his phone again, scrolled through his emails, sipped his coffee, until Lu said, “You’d better go! If you don’t want to be late.” She stood, to encourage Jeremy’s exit. Sometimes the boys slept late in the summer; it was six o’clock now, and on a good day they’d sleep at least until seven. “Look at the time.” She held out her hand for the empty coffee cup and said wife-ily, “Here, sweetie. You have a long day ahead of you. Let me take that for you.”

Lu had worked as a trial attorney before Chase was born and even after—up until she’d been very pregnant with Sebastian. They’d had a top-notch El Salvadoran nanny who took the bus in from the city every morning. By the end of Lu’s second pregnancy there’d been complications requiring four weeks of bed rest. Sometimes during those four weeks, Chase would come into her bed, lay his perfect little-boy head on the pillow next to hers, point at her belly, and say, “Baby in dere?” and in those moments Lu’s attorney fire felt dampened down, like the oxygen that was keeping it alive was increasingly far away. Then Sebastian had arrived, the nanny had found a job closer to home, and Lu had looked at her husband and said, “I’ll stay home with them.”

Jeremy, bless his heart, curse his heart, hadn’t tried to hide his pleasure—relief came off his skin like heat off an August sidewalk. He had never liked having a nanny. They’d have to borrow more money from his parents while he finished up his surgical oncology residency, and then his fellowship, but his parents would give it to them gladly so that Lu could stay home, because no matter what anyone said about feminism or the new equality in today’s marriages or any of that other bullcrap, Jeremy now had what all of them really wanted deep down: a housewife. Lu could hardly blame him. Who didn’t want a housewife? She’d goddamn kill for one.

She walked out onto the cottage’s back deck, from which she could just see Scotch Beach. There was a solitary man walking close to the water’s edge, his head tucked, his hands in his pockets. That man, thought Lu, looks like the loneliest man in the universe.

Chapter 4

ANTHONY

THE CLOSEST BEACH to Fitzy’s uncle’s cottage was Scotch Beach, and Anthony could get there in under thirty seconds, but it still took him four days to complete the journey.